Originally published as Cent ans de modernisme: Généalogie du concile Vatican II by Abbé

Dominique Bourmaud. © 2003 Clovis

Translated from the French by Mr. Brian Sudlow and Miss Ann Marie Temple.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bourmaud, Dominic, 1958-
[Cent ans de modernisme. English.]
One Hundred Years of Modernism : a genealogy of the principles of the second vatican council /
Dominic Bourmaud ; translated from the French by Ann Marie Temple.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Modernism (Christian theology)–Catholic Church–History. 2. Catholic Church–Doctrines--
History. I. Title. BX1396.B6813 2006
273’.9--dc22
2006033449
©2006 by Angelus Press
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photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
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 INTRODUCTION
At the time of this first edition being published, Modernism is one
hundred years old. Larousse describes the heresy as the religious crisis
marking the pontificate of Pius X (1903-1914). The same dictionary also
highlights the crux of the crisis, namely, the effort of its proponents to
harmonize traditional Catholic doctrine with the new philosophy and
modern biblical criticism. In short, it was a struggle of generations within
the very bosom of the eternal Church, a struggle ultimately resolved by
compelling the new to fall into line with the old. Innovations have always
appeared suspect to the Apostolic Church. Taken in the context of two
thousand years of Christianity, modernism would seem negligible compared
to the sum of storms the old Rock has weathered. With St. Pius X, the case
seemed closed. So, why pore over dusty old documents to revive a dead
issue of scant interest even to the most ardent amateur of Church history?
But, to quote G. K. Chesterton, “the corpse has apparently revived”
and today reigns triumphant in that very same bosom of the Church, lustier
and more vigorous than ever. We maintain that this movement remains
fundamentally unchanged, and we propose to show in this introduction why
such an inquiry is justified and even necessary. For all but those “who will
not see” there is manifestly a grave internal crisis currently afflicting the
Catholic Church. The reader conscious of this will find the present inquiry
to be of the greatest interest, aware that it concerns the very survival of the
Church.
The Church was struck by the current crisis during the sixties and
seventies. She clamored for a face-lift, for aggiornamento; with Pope Paul
VI in the lead, all eagerly anticipated a bright new dawn and the Church’s
Second Spring. But their new dawn broke on bitter disappointment. Doubt,
instability, and self-recrimination began to suck the barque of Peter into a
maelstrom of imminent shipwreck. In these crucial years, nation after
nation shook off the yoke both of the Commandments and of Jesus Christ.
Religious and priestly vocations plunged below survival levels and the
shell-shocked faithful abandoned their parishes in favor of the most bizarre
sects or simply to adore the god of their belly. Priests and religious
abandoned their calling at a rate never seen hitherto. Bishops, the very
guardians of the deposit of faith and of the Church’s patrimony, began
preaching in place of the Gospel of Christ crucified a saccharine pseudo-
doctrine of brotherly love and ersatz social justice, while proposing to open
a new dialogue with the Protestants. Rome became an impotent bystander,
seemingly unable or unwilling to reprimand or recall those gone astray.
“The Church has weathered many such storms, and this, too, shall
pass”–so we were told. With the advent of John Paul II, the Polish Pope, the
media has fallen silent about any religious crisis. Rather, it trumpets the
Church’s new springtime, and her renewed life and health. True, the flood
of defections from the religious life has abated; the most rebellious bishops
seem to have stepped back into line; and we cross the threshold of the third
millennium with renewed optimism.
But it is a false optimism, encouraged by the media, and poorly
masking the present misery of the Church. Authentic indicators of the
Church’s spiritual vitality remain weak indeed. For journalists, religious
renewal consists in the charismatic movement and World Youth Days, mere
copycats of errant Pentecostalism. These are but straw fires fueled by vapid
sentimentalism. Of what splendid vocations does John Paul II tell us, if not
of those of the Eastern bloc countries and of the Third World, spiritually
strong from their struggle against atheistic materialism but on the point of
tumbling into Western license? In reality, vocations from countries with
Christian roots are approaching absolute zero. It may be true that we are no
longer dealing with the scandals that were the daily bread and butter of the
Enquirer, but is this really due to a universal advance in virtue, or rather to
the fact that consecrated souls are fewer in number and greater in age? The
apparent stability and peace in the Church of Rome is mere whitewash on a
crumbling wall. Eloquence is empty in an erstwhile Christian world whose
faith is moribund, with seemingly little hope of revival. No, the crisis of the
1970’s is far from over. It is not the Church that flourishes but the crisis.
The crisis thrives while the Church is in her death throes.
That this crisis is an ongoing reality is the thesis which the present
work takes as its starting point. We shall furnish clear proofs of this thesis
later in our work when speaking of triumphant modernism, but for now we
must assay its true extent. This current tempest is like no other. It has a
universal quality since its watchword aggiornamento–“updating”–comes
right from Rome, the very heart of Christendom. Everyone has by now been
“updated,” from bishops to laymen, from clerics to religious. Religious
congregations have had to destroy the most venerable aspects of their
constitutions. Every lay organization has been morphed and denatured. The
principles of the universal renewal have been ease and democracy; it is now
forbidden to forbid! Freedom for one and all! The reform has decreed an
end to authority, duties, and commandments. Yet, is this reformation or
deformation? Can there be a more telling symptom of a society’s decadence
than the slackening of its elite?
The tempest has been as sudden as it is universal. Whence did it come?
Chronologically, it originates in the 1960’s and 1970’s. For such
universality, it had to begin in Rome. For such intensity, some extraordinary
event must have spawned it. All indications point to Vatican II as the source
of this groundswell swamping the Church. Theologians, cardinals, and even
popes confirm this hypothesis when they term the Council Rome’s
“October Revolution” or another 1789 in the Church, and cite the time after
the Council as the period of the “auto-demolition” of the Church. They
themselves bear witness that Rome has let fall the past to run blindly toward
a shining future foretold by the prophets of the new El Dorado. The Second
Vatican Council has in effect become year zero for the “New Catholic
Church.” Indeed, post-conciliar popes seldom if ever cite pontifical texts
written before the Council, basing all of their teaching and reforms on the
new doctrine of Vatican II. Yet Vatican II, mainspring of aggiornamento
and of the crisis, has proved itself revolutionary on many points. Innovative
councils are not the novelty. The Church also suffered the “robber council”
of Ephesus and the “conciliabulum” of Pistoia. The notable difference
between then and now is that such meetings, never favored by the lawful
popes, were finally rejected by the universal Church. In this case, however,
we have a fundamentally revolutionary council confirmed by papal support
and approval. Moreover, even in the face of decades of catastrophic decline,
Church leaders proclaim they have found a remedy in the very council
which marked its origin.
There is, however, still greater cause for alarm. The primary victim of
the conciliar crisis is authority itself: not merely the individual authority of
any one pope, but that of the papacy as such and all authority in general.
Legitimate authority at all levels within the Church is attacked and
enfeebled by the principle of episcopal collegiality. This democratization
within the Church causes total paralysis, to the point that authority finds
itself powerless to define dogma or morals, to punish, to heal, or to save.
Any lone bishop, even if he still has a Catholic sense, cannot resist the
anonymous and irresponsible juggernaut of an episcopal conference
manipulated by avant-garde theologians. The pope, effectively co-opted by
the all-powerful bishops’ conferences since 1970, is no longer obeyed, nor
acts in his own right as pope. The Church, held in thrall by a spirit of liberal
democracy, has thereby surrendered both her liberty of action and her
executive power.
This crisis strikes the Church in what is most precious to her: her faith
in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Trinity, and in the Church herself as the sole
means of salvation. For the sake of ecumenism, Vatican II has hidden the
light of the Faith under a bushel basket, and “what we seek is not
conversion but convergence.”[1] In other words, the Church seeks to
supplant what is truly Catholic with what is merely global. Indeed, if
“brotherly love,” as the world understands it, is what unites men, the Credo
can only divide. Truth has that seemingly perverse quality of exclusivity: if
a wall is black, then it excludes red, white, or any other color than black. If
truth be told, the only real obstacle to inter-religious dialogue is Jesus
Christ. We must choose: the pre-conciliar Church had Jesus Christ as her
point of origin, her substance (“I am the Vine, you are the branches”), and
her end; but with Vatican II, no more! No small innovation! Who could ever
have imagined the pope, constituted by God Himself the sole guardian and
defender of His Commandments, repudiating the very first of them: “Thou
shalt not have strange gods before Me.” When before has a pope ever
invited heretics and pagans of every ilk to present their lies and devilry in
St. Peter’s Square itself? It is unprecedented to see the pope praising
heresiarchs like Luther, or proclaiming in the synagogue of Rome that our
God is the same as that of the Jews, or including heretics in an ecumenical
martyrology for the veneration of the faithful. Certainly the Church’s
history documents the errors of popes in their private teaching but never to
this extent. In our day, the gravity of the sin is found not only in the
persistence of these idolatrous papal initiatives but above all in the fact that,
with few exceptions, the only reply of churchmen to the public scandals of
their head is a resounding “Amen.”
The sheer novelty of the crisis also affects the life of grace and the
sacraments. The conciliar revolution has assumed a peculiarly barbaric and
iconoclastic twist in ravaging even our most venerable rites: Holy Mass has
been pulverized and reduced to a mere ecumenical prayer with Calvinist
overtones; plain chant has been relegated to the dust bin of history;
communions have become as frequent as confessions are rare; the inversion
of the ends of marriage has likewise proliferated annulments to the point of
their being derisively labeled “Catholic divorce.” The life of grace
purchased by the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ has been so denatured
as to be touted now by Rome as almost natural to man. Likewise, salvation
is considered to be more or less guaranteed to all by virtue of Christ’s union
with all men through the Incarnation. With such disdain for the gifts of God
and a theory of universal salvation so clearly smacking of Protestantism, are
we surprised to see Christians fall into laxity and the most unbridled
license? How is it not the sin against the Holy Ghost to despise the royal
means of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ through His Church? But
this is precisely what Rome seems to be implicitly suggesting.
In a word, the present crisis is utterly unique. If, previously, the
Church had always been able to keep an even keel in the midst of frightful
storms, it was because she always had the pope as her helmsman who, with
eyes guided by the compass of faith, kept her on a steady course, her
hatches battened to protect her cargo, the treasures of grace and the
sacraments. In the present crisis, the crew seems to have mutinied, binding
the helmsman so that the Barque of Peter no longer has a pope who governs
but one who merely oversees. They have jettisoned both the compass of
faith and the cargo of grace and the sacraments, leaving the Church to
founder in the tempest, her hold filling with the storm-tossed seas of sin and
heresy. Humanly speaking, the Church seems moribund, as if stricken with
a spiritual AIDS sapping her immune system and leaving her helpless in the
face of enemies both within and without. The temptation is strong to believe
that the gates of hell have actually prevailed against the immaculate Spouse
of Christ.
To compound the problem further, it seems that good Christian people
have been lulled into an intellectual coma over the last two generations so
that they no longer distinguish truth from falsehood in issues of faith. The
intellectual license born of the Voltairian Enlightenment has finally
penetrated St. Peter’s and infected even the most zealous. Who of us are
still outraged upon hearing the mindless canards of the media: “all religions
are equally good”; “to each his own truth”; “when it comes to religion, each
has a right to his own opinion”; “one must respect all religions, lest one
become a fanatic, which only leads to medieval crusades, inquisitions, and
the senseless killings of religious wars. Thank God we’re beyond all that!”
 Yet, does anyone weigh the logical consequences of such folly? Does
anyone investigate the logical origin of this cultural and religious pluralism
in which all live in apparent peace and freedom of conscience? Is it not
simply, “Death to Jesus Christ, Son of God made flesh, the sole Savior”?
The working principle here is that Jesus Christ never existed, or if He did
exist, He worked no miracles that might prove His divine mission, and so
we may doubt His Revelation. It is quite enough for God to stay in heaven
without becoming man and disturbing other men who have lived
contentedly without Him.
Where does such religious liberalism lead, if not to total skepticism?
To say that all religions are equally good is to say that they are all equally
true or equally false since they contradict one another. Do they truly mean
to insinuate that truth and error, good and evil, are matters of mere opinion?
This mindset can only lead to the death of reason, which is the only faculty
distinguishing man from the beasts, to whose level man quickly descends
when he abandons his reason. The skeptic does not think; he eats, he
digests, he vegetates. Is this the human dignity so vigorously proclaimed, or
is it not rather man’s ultimate debasement? As Solzhenitsyn said so well,
“Do away with truth and man necessarily becomes the prey of the first
totalitarianism to pass by.”
Clearly, the most visible symptoms of the crisis in the Church are but
the tip of the iceberg. The outward symptoms are relatively innocuous
compared to the imposing mass of glacier hidden beneath, all crevasses and
fissures–so many heresies and philosophical errors–all the more dangerous
for being less apparent and all the more grave for undermining the very
foundations of human thought.
The theology of the Church rests upon the historical revelation of God
and of Jesus Christ. Revelation in turn rests upon the evidence and
principles of sound common sense, that is, on the eternal philosophy of
being. Thus based upon a twofold foundation, dogma can be undermined at
three levels: directly, by denying a particular dogma (e.g. the Holy Trinity);
indirectly, by categorically denying the historical fact of divine Revelation,
which attacks the basis not of any dogma in particular but of dogma as
such; or, more radically still, by denying the principles of common sense
and refusing factual evidence. Until the nineteenth century, heresies within
the Church were content to attack particular dogmas. Only with the
appearance of modernism under Leo XIII and St. Pius X do we see a
progressive clergy intent on attacking Revelation itself and the
philosophical foundations of reason.
Such a heresy is not merely a caricature emphasizing one aspect of
dogma in order to deny another, as when Jansenism emphasized divine
justice to the detriment of divine mercy. Modernism is a formless mass, an
amorphous monster deforming everything in Christian doctrine. As a
studied attack on reason and religion, modernist criticism was rightly
termed “the synthesis of all heresies” by St. Pius X since it subverted the
very foundations of Catholic dogma in philosophy and biblical studies.
Such a system ultimately annihilates every principle. Finally, denying even
the ability of man’s intellect to apprehend objective reality, it ends by
destroying his capacity to know and understand. Such is modernism’s
primary characteristic and its true face: a monster advocating a religion
without reason, Revelation, or God. Modernism is based on a philosophy
without being, believes in a revelation without Jesus Christ, and concludes
in a theology without God.
This heresy claims to be modern, but it is as old as the hills. Though
ostensibly it entered the Church in the twentieth century, it has in fact
plagued Creation from the beginning. The first modernist was Lucifer, who,
in refusing to adore his Creator ended by adoring himself. And since love
goes hand in hand with knowledge, in perverting his love, Lucifer
necessarily blinded his intelligence. He covered his eyes rather than submit
to God thrice Holy.
The Asian religions, to maintain their absurd beliefs, necessarily
commit mental suicide. Every sect that compels man to deny Jesus Christ as
his sole Savior ultimately commits intellectual suicide. This is especially
true for modernism. When modernism denies the first principles of reason it
necessarily concludes in a plethora of absurdities: black does not really
oppose white, man is God, and Lucifer is not such a bad guy after all. When
the foundations of reason are attacked, all is turned upside down: all
coherent thought, all science, all philosophy, every historical fact, and all
faith.
This brief overview of the historical sources of the modernist
movement must not make us forget the end of our inquiry, namely, to
demonstrate that if there is in the Church today a religious crisis of
unprecedented proportions, it is because the modernist heresy triumphed
over eternal Rome at Vatican II. Our principal task will be to establish the
lineage between the recent pontificates and the original heresy. This work
will therefore strive to accomplish two things: to describe modernism and to
show that it is still very much alive in the “conciliar Church.” The
modernist heresy will be defined historically and theologically from Luther
to the beginning of the third millennium, which will allow us to see the
unity and variety of the modernist theses through the ages. That done, we
shall then be in a better position to judge its relationship and ties with the
conciliar Church.
We might have been content merely to observe the penetration of these
ideas into the heart of the Church purely as an historical phenomenon, that
is, tracking a conspiracy that pits enemy powers against the established
order. Remarkable books have revealed Judeo-Masonic infiltrations intent
on casting down altar and throne. Without denying these hidden activities of
the enemies of the Church, which will be evoked here from time to time in
their proper context, in the main, we will limit ourselves to tracing the
deeper interaction of ideas and principles which have given shape to this
heresy, at once unique and multiform. Although not so tied to deeds and
plots, it should be no less fruitful in revelations.
Aristotle, observant biologist that he was, discovered that what is born
of a duck and waddles and quacks like a duck is indeed a duck. In so doing
he determined two ways of ascertaining the specific identity of animals:
from their origin and from their activity. By the same method we can easily
prove the specific identity of the modernist heresy, that is, by its
protagonists’ ideological parentage and community of thought.
To proceed with scientific rigor, we would have to follow the inductive
method, and, starting from the present, trace back through time the links
between groups and ideas so as to prove their substantial identity. Such a
study would show that the triumph of the modernists in the post-conciliar
Church is the victory of the same neo-modernism pummeled by Pius XII;
which is itself heir to the modernists and modernism condemned by St. Pius
X, the French variety of a Protestant modernism sown by Luther and
nurtured by Kant, the great subverter of Christian thinking. However, for
reasons of clarity and simplicity, we shall proceed in chronological order,
going from causes to effects, from masters to disciples. This method has the
advantage of leading us from the simpler to the more complex, and from
guiding principles to historical developments. The book is divided into five
distinct historical periods: Christian truth (a rapid overview of the
intellectual life of the Church), Protestant critical modernism in Germany,
modernism in France, neo-modernism in Europe, and triumphant
modernism in Rome.
One may object that the chapters on Christian truth are out of place in
a study dealing exclusively with the modernist movement. Hardly so. If a
movement is determined by its end, it is of capital importance to know the
point from which it starts. Sickness can be determined only in relation to
health; non-being can be defined only with respect to being. Likewise, the
extent of the modernist heresy can be properly appreciated only in light of
the truth which it negates. We must scrutinize our past, our Greco-Roman
heritage, our Christian culture and its truth, in all their splendor and
richness. We have said that modernism consists in a triple denial: a
philosophy devoid of being, a revelation with no historical foundation, and
finally, a theology in denial of God. Christian faith, on the contrary, rests
upon a triple evidence, three foundation stones: our reason does know
being; Revelation given to the prophets and the Apostles is an historical
fact; reason and Revelation are in perfect harmony.
Christian truth is steeped in reason. The Faith, while supernatural and
mysterious, is no less suffused with rational light. Pure reason leads us to
the threshold of faith. It is reason which allows us to grasp the historical
fact of divine Revelation. Reason lets us see that we must believe in the God
of all truth. Once across the threshold of faith, our steps are further steadied
and guided by reason’s light. It is reason itself which has driven theological
progress through the centuries, and which can be clearly seen in the rational
systematization of our Faith. Rational Christian truth therefore, far from
being outside the scope of our inquiry, is the most definitive refutation of
modernism. For not only does modernism not endeavor to prove rationally
the soundness of its teaching, it shamelessly proclaims its abhorrence of all
reason and logic. For the modernist, faith is but blind sentiment, dogma an
absurd notion, and reason a series of endless contradictions. To provide
therefore an antidote to the modernist poison which is killing our beloved
Church by degrees, we must first appreciate her native intellectual vigor.
As for the three negative sections which precede our exposition of
modernism’s triumph, we shall see that each takes its form around one or
another of the principles of modern philosophy denounced by St. Pius X:
agnostic criticism, immanence, and the evolution of ideas. We shall also
note with interest that Protestant modernism, in the wake of Kantian
criticism, essentially denies knowledge of the outside world: first that of
being in general, then of Jesus Christ, and ultimately of God. It should then
be easy to show that so-called “Catholic” modernism revolves around the
notion of evolution, so dear to Bergson and Loisy. Coming at last to the
neo-modernists, we shall examine the notions they all have in common in
virtue of their shared philosophical existentialism, namely, that knowledge
is immanent to each individual consciousness, making the intellect
powerless to grasp an outside reality.
In the final section, having minutely studied the underlying principles
of Vatican II, we shall see that the flagship of triumphant modernism is
ecumenism, understood in the sense of an indiscriminate union of all
religions in denial of the principle of non-contradiction.
This work will be an historical study of the ideas and principles
underlying modernism in the realm of philosophy, Holy Scripture, and
theology. For reasons of clarity and ease, and given that these disciplines
are as it were embodied in particular individuals within well-determined
periods of time, we will present them broadly through the main protagonists
of the period in question. Our study will be a veritable rogues’ gallery of the
issues. We confess, the choice of whom to include in the collection was not
always easy. Why present Strauss rather than Renan, who is perhaps the
more famous? Why is Bergson more noteworthy than Blondel or Le Roy?
Moreover, some individuals have been included not because they are
representative of a particular discipline, but because their mention is
inevitable, as is the case with Luther and Teilhard de Chardin. Finally,
understanding the modernist question demands a clear summary of Rome’s
positions: first, the condemnations of St. Pius X, reiterated by Pius XII; then
the contradictory position of the conciliar popes fostering and enabling the
triumph of heresy.
This book may resemble a shish kebab, with a wide variety of meats
regularly spaced. It can be read in different ways. Each chapter has a
specific character and may be read separately. There is an advantage,
though, to reading together chapters of the same historical period, since
related disciplines clarify one another, composing a coherent whole and
bringing a deeper understanding of the subject matter. On the other hand,
should one wish to study a specific issue, one may go straight to the
relevant chapters. However, allow us a gastronomical remark for the
philosophical connoisseur: metaphysics is rich fare indeed and not always
easily digested. Furthermore, an overview gained by reading the book in its
entirety is preferable to whatever may be gained by an eclectic perusal. In
this fashion, the reader will be able to appreciate more clearly that the
choice between Christianity and modernism is a choice between God and
Satan; indeed, a choice between God and absurdity. He will conclude that in
order for the Roman Church, the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth, to
survive, she must officially repudiate the poison which is slowly killing her.
Before plunging into the heart of the matter, a final caveat concerning
the work and its author: he does not pretend to be an eminent intellectual,
nor is he a specialist on any particular period or individual. He is simply a
man enamored of Christian truth, which he has taught in the four corners of
the earth for over twenty years as a seminary professor of philosophy and
theology.[2] He is a man charged with passing down and defending the
Christian faith and who has stretched himself to the limit to perform a task
which seemed to him most pressing, namely, to expose the error of our time
and unmask the modern enemy. He has had neither the leisure nor the
formation of a university professor specializing in a particular field. His
action has been more “in the trenches” in order that he might respond to the
urgent need of the souls for whom he is and remains pastor and guide.
A panoramic study of a subject as broad as the history of modernist
principles is a titanic undertaking, as many of its proponents have not been
sufficiently exposed. All of these contingencies explain this work’s
limitations, of which the author is well aware. Yet he will be well satisfied
if he has been able to establish certain points of reference regarding a
question hotly debated and regarding those who dominate modern theology
but whose thought is poorly understood. This “Summa of Modernism”
hardly pretends to be the final word on the question, but hopes to establish
landmarks and open avenues of thought for future studies perhaps more
precise and benefiting from greater resources.
May God grant that there be competent professionals finally able to
take in hand the study of the conciliar revolutionaries and of the arch-
modernist Karl Rahner in particular, in order that their thought and their
influence within the modernist triumph be definitively and fully exposed.
 PART I: THE CHRISTIAN HERITAGE
As stated in the introduction, the first part of this work is dedicated to
the Catholic position against which modernism rebels. Sickness is only
defined in relation to health, and it is because God seizes all the richness of
truth that He alone can fully comprehend the gravity of the modernist
cancer. Lamentably, we shall never perfectly fathom this evil, enemy of all
true civilization.
Christian civilization is true only because it is founded on the nature of
things in themselves. It is in the nature of man to love the beautiful, the
good, and especially the true. If there is a love surpassing all others, it is the
love of truth. Only truth reveals to us goodness and beauty. It is truth that
sets man free from his passions and from the slavery of falsehood and
wickedness. It is the daily bread of the reason. Our life on earth has no other
purpose than to discover the truth and conform ourselves to reality.
The philosopher Maritain gives masterful expression to this reality:
Unless one loves the truth, one is not a man, and to love the truth is to love it above
everything, because we know that Truth is God Himself. Christ said to Pilate that He came
into the world to bear witness to the Truth. It is by faith that we hold the supreme Truth. Yet
faith itself presupposes rational preliminaries, such as the natural certitude of the existence of
God.…It demands to be completed by a certain intellectual grasp of the unfathomable mystery
of God and divine things. Credo ut intelligam–I believe so as to understand. This is called
theology. And theology cannot take shape in us without the help of that natural wisdom of
which human reason is capable, whose name is philosophy.[3]
In this passage, with his wonted pith and eloquence, Maritain presents
the whole effort of Greco-Roman civilization, which is to take hold of all
truth: to know being and, above all, to know Him who is Being itself. This
knowledge is acquired in three movements: philosophy attains natural
knowledge of what exists; faith receives supernatural truths about God by
means of divine Revelation; finally, theology makes a synthesis from these
two sources of knowledge so as to ensure their greater union and
interpenetration. Each discipline is based upon something self-evident: the
nature of things can indeed be known; divine Revelation is directly evident
for the eyewitnesses, indirectly for others; reason and faith are in perfect
harmony. The aim of these first three chapters is to demonstrate this three-
fold evidence and simultaneously give us an opportunity to refute the
precursors of today’s modernists.
Modernism denies these evident propositions with full knowledge and
consent, in order, it vaunts, to be truly free. By acting in a manner so
contrary to the nature of human understanding, modernism seeks not to
nourish the mind with truth but to feed the imagination with dreams. It
seeks not to admit the historical reality of Jesus Christ, Son of God and our
Savior, but to find salvation in man alone. It refuses to believe in a divine
and personal God, adoring instead a God made in the image of man. What
modernism presents as a liberation is in fact the worst slavery which could
ever befall mankind. No man is more to be pitied than he who covers his
eyes to shut out reality, the better to bask in his chimerical dreams. No man
is more miserable than he who closes his door to Christ, the only source of
salvation. No soul is more foolish than one refusing to adore its Creator,
who is everything, preferring to adore itself, drawn out of nothing. Yet that
is the ideal which the modernists propose to us and which has already
drawn so many souls in its pursuit: souls ignorant of the precipice towards
which the Father of Lies is leading them. All of this comes, as Dante says,
from the refusal of the truth, the good of the intelligence.
CHAPTER 1: ARISTOTLE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING
All truth whatsoever is from the Holy Ghost, according to St.
Ambrose. From the outset, Christian truth presents eminently humble and
human traits, for it is founded upon the patrimony of all mankind,
composed of the simplest and most obvious truths. Mankind’s knowledge
exists on two levels: truths of common sense, culled in our daily existence,
and truths of philosophy, acquired by scientific inquiry. Moreover, the
history of philosophy bears witness that philosophy itself has its origin and
foundation in truths of common sense which provoked surprise and wonder
in the minds of men seeking wisdom. Always and everywhere, natural
knowledge starts, progresses, and terminates in concrete reality. To think of
nothing is not to think, for ultimately every judgment is a judgment about
being.
Such a natural and realistic point of view was disdained by the
Sophists of Aristotle’s age. The sophist position, along with that adopted by
the evolutionist Heraclitus, will already allow us to expose the
philosophical notions typical to modernism, to each of which we have
assigned an evocative epithet: an agnosticism which we label ignorantist,
egological immanence, and revolutionist evolution.

1. The Beginnings of Philosophy

Philosophy as such–the inquiry into things and their causes–dawned
with the efforts of the Greeks in the sixth century B.C. It was the Greeks
alone of all the ancient cultures who taught us to think. Other civilizations
were founded upon religious beliefs and considered reason as an intruder.
Yet when we consider Greek philosophy as a whole, we are struck by the
darkness surrounding the rare geniuses which illuminate their culture. It is
in fact an arduous task for wounded human nature to reflect upon the nature
of things, and the attempt to acquire truth in the light of human experience
alone required all the calm and mental balance of the ancient Greeks. Their
first philosophical efforts were like groping in the dark. For a long time, the
Greeks sought the cause of all things in matter alone. Heraclitus was part of
this school of thought; in his blind, fumbling philosophy he theorized more
like a drunkard who sees the world spinning around him: everything
changes, nothing stays the same; there is no stable being. When Parmenides
clung rigidly to being as opposed to perpetual change, Greece began its
battle of the Titans, which would sink at last into the quagmire of skeptical
sophism. Nevertheless, we see that from its inception philosophy concerns
itself with the existence of matter and of movement, on the grounds of
concrete experience. This preoccupation with existence is pivotal for all
human thought and remains a central characteristic of the Hellenic
philosophical endeavor.
In these dark heavens will appear successively the three greatest stars
of Greek wisdom: Socrates, with his search for the essence of things; Plato,
who contemplates perfections only in their highest causes; and, finally,
Aristotle, who remains to this day the Polar Star in the philosophical
firmament. If it is true that the genius of a nation sometimes finds itself
embodied in one man, whose strong and comprehensive mind is, as it were,
the actualization and the perfection in which a whole world of potentialities
finds its completion and its term, Aristotle above all others was such a man.
The philosophical genius of the Greeks found in him its zenith and
perfection.[4]
Born in Stagira, in Thrace, Aristotle (384-322) came to Athens at the
age of seventeen where he remained the humble disciple of Plato for no less
than twenty years. The master appreciated the mental keenness of his pupil,
whom he dubbed “the Intelligence.” Aristotle did not hesitate to show a
certain independence of thought: “I love Plato, but I love truth more.” For
three years he was the tutor of the son of the King of Macedonia, the future
Alexander the Great. One may well speculate on the influence of such a
tutor’s farsighted vision in Alexander’s ideal of conquest toward a universal
civilization. Upon his return to Athens, Aristotle established his own school
at the Lyceum, which quickly eclipsed the Academy founded by Plato. He
died in Chalcis at the age of sixty-two.
The Aristotelian patrimony came to Europe by winding ways, with the
Arabs of southern Spain, before making a triumphal entry into the
universities of the thirteenth century and giving a powerful impetus to
Christian intellectual culture. May we not discern a providential design in
the extraordinary role of this pagan wisdom, which proved itself an
instrument so uncannily well suited to Catholic theology? What, then, is the
precise quality which makes the principles of Aristotelian thought so
adapted to theological reasoning, to the exclusion of all other systems? The
answer is simple: Aristotle managed to lay the foundations of veritable
philosophy. He alone directed the human understanding along the lines of
veritable wisdom. His wisdom is the “perennial philosophy,” valid for all
times and all places because it was established upon the fundamental
philosophical intuition that is at the root of all knowledge, natural or
supernatural. Aristotle, unlike the other wisdom-seekers of his time,
recognized that human reason knows reality and can affirm what is true.
His principles are profoundly realist at every stage of philosophical
investigation, from its origin to its conclusion. This realism renders his
principles unassailable, even if some of their concrete applications have
become obsolete due to the progress of science (for example, his Ptolemaic
astronomy).

2. Philosophy Is Knowledge of Being

To those who would hesitate on the threshold of thought, Aristotle
replies: “Whether you want to philosophize or not, you have to
philosophize.” You could not abstain from philosophy even if you wanted
to. To affirm that philosophy is worthless is already to take a philosophical
position. Is not young childhood an indicator of man’s most natural powers,
as his understanding opens upon reality? At that age the child asks his
parents ad nauseam the what, why, and how of everything he encounters. A
man does nothing else when he seeks the essences, causes, and principles of
things. Moreover, the adult like the child begins to philosophize the day
when, confronted with something surprising, he investigates its
fundamental cause. At first marveling and astonished at the simplest of
things, little by little this wonderment draws him toward higher realities,
such as the changes in the moon or sun, until he finally seeks to penetrate
the origins of the universe itself. They say that a man is but a grown-up
child. The proverb is true in that philosophy comes to man as naturally as
breathing, just as it does to a child.
If philosophy is essentially an investigation, it is above all an
investigation of things that really exist. To the Hamlets of every age who
ask: “To be or not to be? That is the question,” Aristotle answers resolutely:
“To be!” Behold the object of all truth. Just as no man questions his own
existence or the gift of life, so the wise man does not question evident facts,
like the nature of things or man’s power to know them. The Stagirite
founded all of his philosophy on experience: “Experientia, magistra
philosophiæ.” His every study rests upon sense experience and an intuition
of things concrete. How could Aristotle have founded the science of
biology if he had never dissected Guinea pigs, that is, if he had never
attained experimental knowledge of living beings? It is because he was so
attached to facts and always ready to learn from things that this doctor’s
son, constantly inquiring into the riches of nature, was the initiator of a
whole array of scientific disciplines. Indeed, experience and factual
observation determine the subsequent development of any science. Only
upon such a foundation of realism can the work of mental maturation
proceed, a work whose goal is the discovery of scientific laws which reflect
the concrete facts ever more faithfully. On the other hand, whoever doubts
the value of direct contact with things risks undermining any true science.
Such a caveat is more valid for the science of philosophy than for the
physical sciences. Philosophy owes more to the real than any other science
precisely because its object is being insofar as it exists. A philosopher does
not study being insofar as it is living, as would a biologist, or inanimate
being, as would a physicist, or being insofar as it has quantity, as would a
mathematician. He studies what is at the heart of being and the very fact of
its existence. A philosopher is thus obliged to go to the core of being–to the
concrete reality–under pain of losing his identity as a philosopher. If he gets
that wrong, he gets everything wrong. It would be like a logician denying
reasoning, a mathematician denying unity and duality, or a biologist
denying that there is life. He would be committing the suicide of
philosophy; and not only of philosophy but also of all science. For every
science that would be scientific must be based on a sound philosophy, as
Einstein bears witness: “No matter how much purely ‘positivist’ it looks,
every theoretical truth is a kind of occult metaphysics.”[5] Any scientist
worthy of the name presupposes certain philosophical truths: there exists a
universe that is real; man is able to know truth; every effect has a cause.
Such truths, obvious and commonplace though they be, are no less the
absolute condition of all human truth; to deny them is to turn man into a
walking vegetable.
If it is obvious that reason depends on the real, it is likewise easy to
explain why this must be so. “Understanding” something means “being
informed” about it and so receiving a form from without. Man’s intellect is
nourished and lives insofar as it is open to the outside world, for by itself it
is empty: a blank sheet on which nothing is written. Man’s intelligence is
like a plant which survives by drawing nourishment from the things about
it. Conversely, thought will atrophy when it closes itself off from the world,
egoistically immured within itself. Such thought will never flourish, for
knowing nothing is simply not knowing.
Aristotle, like his royal pupil, dreamed of conquering the world.
Alexander the Great hoped to change the world by submitting it to the
culture of Greece. Aristotle set out on another kind of world-conquest,
hoping to submit his understanding to all of reality. This submission is the
only way to philosophize and conquer the universe. Far be it from us to
maintain that our ideas govern things; we well know that things command
and govern our ideas. The human intellect is a faculty asking only to be
informed by the real in order to affirm that it exists–the sky is blue, man is
rational. Our language about “knowing” perfectly translates this submission
to reality: thought, impregnated by being, gives birth to the concept; this
concept of being is called the idea, from the Greek word for vision, and is
naturally the vision of something. Finally, the intellect “intus-legit–reads
within” the open book of Creation the intelligible message of divine
wisdom.
The attitude of the human mind towards the world around him is not
that of an artisan, a homo faber, setting out to shape the world but that of a
contemplative, a homo sapiens. Knowledge is “ecstatic,” for it draws us
literally out of ourselves and renders us capable of embracing what is other
and becoming in some way identical to it, while yet remaining ourselves.
Philosophy, that contemplative science whose object is the created world,
reaches its apogee in the contemplation of the Uncreated, the object of
natural theology. Holy Scripture contains the same lesson: “For the invisible
things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made.”[6] “The heavens shew forth the
glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands.”[7]
Aristotle proves the existence of God through the study of movement
and from the order of nature.[8] He calls God a being who is living, eternal,
and perfect, because He possesses eternal life. God is pure Act, pure
Intelligence contemplating itself. The Philosopher concludes his
Metaphysics by affirming that God is one, for a multitude of heads is good
for nothing: one alone must govern! Aristotle argued that the human
intellect is logically reduced to choosing between God and absurdity. Thus,
all the endeavors of sophists and modernists to deny a world beyond our
own only succeed in confirming Aristotle’s thesis, for they consistently fall
into the most lamentable contradictions.
3. The Detractors of Being and Truth
In the fifth century B.C., Athens was the intellectual capital for the
various schools of philosophy, but their confrontations bitterly revealed
their different shortcomings and contradictions as each vied for supremacy
over the Athenian mind. In the midst of the mêlée appeared the breed of
would-be philosophers–as scandalous as they were useless–known as
sophists, though perhaps they would be better called sophicides, the killers
of wisdom. These were itinerant professors, more eager to profit from their
knowledge than to reach the truth, which, moreover, they declared
unattainable. They were masters of intellectual sleight of hand. Incapable of
constructing any philosophical edifice, they undertook to criticize
everything which had already been established, since men, like children,
have always found destruction to be the easiest way of proving their
strength. Two aspects of the sophist school of thought merit our
consideration: a negative aspect, namely their agnosticism, and a positive
one, their immanentism. Only afterwards shall we study the system of
Heraclitus, although he is prior to the sophists chronologically.
Gorgias is the best representative of that ignorantist side of sophistry,
the refusal of truth. He is famous for his threefold statement: “Nothing is
real. If anything is, it cannot be known. If anything is known, it cannot be
expressed in speech….Words are fugitive and are perceptible to the ear,
whereas an object of thought may be something stable….”[9] To this mental
suicide, Socrates replied with intellectual optimism, and in so doing,
became a sort of spokesman for common sense, spontaneous and identical
in all men. Deny that light exists and prepare to be mocked! It is this
common sense which cries out against the sophists that human knowledge
is indeed knowledge of the real.
Protagoras represents the subjective or egological current in sophism:
“‘Truth is what appears to each one,’ so that the same object may be white
for one and black for another….‘About any one thing two contradictory
statements may be made.’…‘Man is the measure of all things; of what is,
that it is; of what is not, that it is not.’”[10] Aristotle had already refuted
him indirectly when he answered the Pythagorists, and not without humor:
“When things did not harmonize with their numbers, they corrected the
things, helping God to build the world.”[11]
Every one of these thinkers began with thought alone, and there they
stayed. From the outset, they combated concrete facts, which give thinking
its solidity and soundness and keep it from slipping into the realm of the
fantasy. These subjectivists, or idealists, or immanentists–call them what
you will–all denied the essential foundation of knowledge. They refused the
reality which was before them to be seen, touched, and possessed by the
senses, presented to a human intellect and not to an angelic one. What are
such as they but seekers in search of nothing? Prey to marvelous
hallucinations, their philosophical imaginings were but a wild and vain
pursuit of their own dreams. They were not philosophers but pure
ideologists, scholars of ideas, of thought alone; they were not men
hungering to know what is.
Perhaps there is none among all Aristotle’s predecessors who received
more of his attacks than Heraclitus (540-475). This is because his system is
diametrically opposed to Aristotelian realism. Aristotle presumed he knew a
thing when he could affirm that it is and that it is of a certain nature. Things
can be known by the mind because they are. Heraclitus, on the contrary,
denied all being and therefore denied the very faculty of which being is the
object: the human intellect. In his debate with Parmenides on the subject of
change, he made his choice between being and becoming. According to
Heraclitus, to admit being is to render change impossible, yet change is
undeniable: “All things pass, everything flows on and nothing remains. The
universe is like a river, and no man bathes twice in the same river.” Fire is
the all-present element and cause of all change. It is contradiction itself, for
what is, to the extent that it is, is not. “In the world it is the supreme but
impersonal and indwelling principle; the ever-flowing fountain of life. And
everything that we see is a particle of this fire, everything is divine.” Fire is
something “living and godlike. The human soul, itself a spark from the all-
animating flame, has but an impersonal immortality; it emerges from the
vast whole and will be absorbed into it again.” He has yet another
comparison to explain the nature of change. War is the cause of all things:
“We go down, and we do not go down, into the same river; we are, and we
are not; sea water is at once the purest and the most tainted; good and evil
are the same thing.” Everything separates and everything unites; reality is
an “unceasing oscillation…an unlimited succession of deaths resulting in as
many births, of related movements upward and downward.”[12] These
words have more than a martial ring–one might even call them Marxist–and
they are most certainly “modernist” in their destruction of intellect and
being. This Heraclitean war, the source of contradiction and universal chaos
in perpetual evolution, gives rise only to destruction.
In his defense of the principle of non-contradiction, Aristotle did not
mince words. “No one can possibly conceive the same thing as existing and
not existing. Heraclitus, according to some, thought otherwise. But a man
does not necessarily think as he speaks.”[13] Aristotle explained that
Heraclitus’s mistake was to ignore essences, which are the obligatory
subjects underlying change. He refused essences because he confused sense
and reason, seeing and knowing, for his sight could only perceive objects
forever changing, as if the data of the senses were sufficient to know objects
truly. Senses perceive the trajectory of a balloon thrown upwards but not the
identity of the balloon with itself. A finger dipped into water as it is heated
feels coldness and then heat but does not perceive that it is the same water
which is becoming hot. The world of Heraclitus is a pure becoming, a
swallow’s flight without a swallow, a race without runners, growth, yet with
nothing that grows! Did he realize that his system of pure becoming
concludes in the abolition of movement itself? By reducing the human
intellect to a brute knowledge of sensible objects, Heraclitus reduced the
visible world to movement alone, that is, to nothing at all.
✜✜✜
From the very inception of the philosophical endeavor, minds went
astray, entranced by things ephemeral and by the dense fumes of the world
of the senses enveloping the world of the intellect. The thinker Marcel De
Corte does not mince words in characterizing the modern version of the
Greek intellecticides:
Most of our contemporaries who have deliberately broken with the real and with their own
reality are die-hard adolescents who have not quite passed through their puberty crisis. These
permanent juveniles then have to build up a dream world.…In the moral and intellectual order,
they cannot bear reality, whose hard and tough rind their feeble minds cannot penetrate. They
deny that it exists. They would do away with it, for its very presence condemns their
weakness. An act of humility before it, an avowal of its mystery, would at least recognize its
existence. The permanent juvenile refuses to do so: whatever his age, he is no longer capable
of going out of the “self” in which his on-going crisis has imprisoned him. His fundamental
narcissism forces him once more to content himself with the mental fabrications which he has
drawn from his own substance and which he imposes as a model for everything, in order to
make a world which will be accessible to him, who attains and will ever attain nothing but
himself! He builds this new world, this new man and this new society, because he adores
himself.[14]
In his severe diagnosis of the modern mind in danger of death, De
Corte gives us the key to the modernist tragedy. It is the refusal of being, of
what is outside ourselves, and therefore the refusal of the One outside of
ourselves who is Being itself and who alone can give us life, for He is the
Life. When man builds a wall around himself through self-love, he
condemns himself to death, for, a mere and miserable creature, by himself
he is nothing. In his prideful isolation, he starves and poisons himself. He
smothers the seed of moral and intellectual life which can sprout only by
opening itself to being and the source of life. The same reality, albeit in a
far higher order, is reflected in the words of the Gospel: “He who loves his
life, will lose it; he who loses his life for My sake, will save it.”
 CHAPTER 2: ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE REVELATION OF
THE SON OF GOD
By following common sense and logic, Aristotle became the first to
express clearly the definitive foundations of human reason. Things exist and
the intellect can most certainly know them. Whoever denies these truths of
common sense condemns himself to live like a vegetable, unable to know or
to express anything whatsoever. If such consequences are disastrous in the
purely natural order, imagine what becomes of our knowledge of God.
Could one who denies the most evident realities ever be able to accept the
absolute truth of divine Revelation? Before admitting that God’s word is
true, we need rational proof that God exists. We must also be able to know
with certitude that such a revelation occurred. We need to be certain that
God revealed Himself by miraculous signs, which in turn implies that we
understand nature and its laws. In addition, God must be able to
communicate truths about His mysterious nature through human language.
Finally, and more radically still, we must at least believe there is a truth.
Now we can understand why only the principles of a realist philosophy
admit the possibility of divine Revelation. Moreover, in order for
Revelation to be truly made manifest, divine Providence had to give all the
proofs necessary to oblige the assent of every reasonable man. In that case,
a realist will have no difficulty seeing what he must believe. On the
contrary, if an unbeliever refuses to convert, it is not so much because he
doubts Revelation as because he labors under a philosophical prejudice, in
this case, a skeptical prejudice.
The name of Augustine springs naturally to mind when there is
mention of a troubled skepticism in search of true wisdom, and won over
little by little to Catholic belief. The road he followed is typical of the
modern skeptic with his halting first steps, his initial refusal, and his
ultimate submission to God made flesh. Insofar as our acceptance of the
Faith came through an act of reason, Augustine’s history is our own as well.
He converted when he understood that Revelation is necessary for the
human race. Throughout his life, St. Augustine explained Scripture and
especially the Gospels as a fact, as real history, and not as something
legendary. To follow the stages of his conversion is to discover that
Revelation is reasonable; it is to understand the rational process which
renders evident this unique fact, astounding but real, from which emanates
all Christian culture.

1. The Necessity of Revelation and of the Church

After years of study and then teaching in North Africa, St. Augustine
(354-430) remained tormented by a thirst for truth. God’s grace pursued
him as much as did the tears of his holy mother, Monica. In 383, fleeing
them both, he embarked for Italy and gained a chair of rhetoric at Milan.
There conversion awaited him. Though a follower of the Manichaean
heresy, Augustine never forsook his yearning for truth. He finally
abandoned his errors when the heretical bishop Faustus, harried by
Augustine’s questioning, avowed his own ignorance. Augustine, though still
doubting the existence of any path to wisdom, turned his gaze toward the
faith of his childhood and attended a series of sermons preached by St.
Ambrose in 383. His intellectual conversion in 385 was based upon a
twofold necessity. He realized that, over and above reason alone, man needs
some authority to be certain of possessing the truth. He based such a
necessity on divine Providence, which would surely not deny man all
capacity to know the truths of salvation. Left to their wits alone, men cannot
attain these truths, as Augustine knew by experience. Yet why should this
authority be the Catholic Church? For a like reason: it would be denying
God and His Providence to affirm that a religious body could have
conquered the whole world while falsely proclaiming itself to be the
depositary of divine Revelation. Indeed, the Church does stand in serene
judgment over the entire planet.[15]
Thus, the proud rhetorician finally submitted to Revelation only by the
mediation of the Church. She is God’s spokesman; she is the Mother and
Mistress of truth; she bridges the gap between the present day and the
Revelation of Jesus Christ, already four centuries old when Augustine lived;
she allows us to pass from the effect to the cause, from the river to the
source. If the Church exists, it is because her Founder must truly have
existed. If the Church is a miraculous society, it is because of her
miraculous and divine foundation. The Church is indeed a visible and living
society, miraculously spread through the world, a world which she
conquered despite the most violent persecutions. The catechumen of Milan
was conscious of the Church’s claims:
 We did not see Christ, but we do see His Church; let us believe about Him. The Apostles,
on the contrary, saw Him; they believed concerning the Church. They saw one thing; in
addition, they believed another. On the other hand, we see one thing; let us also believe
another. They saw Christ and they believed in the Church which they did not see. We see the
Church; let us believe in Christ whom we do not see. Holding fast to what we see, we shall
come to Him whom we do not yet see.[16]
Most striking to the pagans who witnessed the life of the Church–and
to none more than Augustine–was her holiness, that divine seal which she
bears on her forehead and which spreads to everything she touches. Her
moral principles are pure and sanctifying, the cause of holiness in her
members and of the extraordinary moral revolution which purified and
elevated the corrupt Mediterranean society at the height of imperial
decadence. “See how they love one another,” said the Jews in admiration
before Christian charity. Wherever supernatural truth reigns, there
flourishes holiness, the heroism of martyrs, and, most striking of all,
consecrated virginity–all of this in an age and environment where it was
least to be expected. Thus St. Augustine could retort to his opponents that if
Plato and Socrates had seen such things, they themselves would have
believed! As time passed, the Church’s magisterium would only repeat St.
Augustine. Vatican I, for example, affirms that the Church herself, by
reason of her marvelous extension, her eminent holiness, and her
inexhaustible fruitfulness in every good thing, as well as by her Catholic
unity and invincible stability, is a great and perpetual motive of belief and
an irrefutable witness to her own divine mission.[17] In a word, the
Catholic Church has been endowed with all the marks necessary to allow
any man of good faith to adhere to her as the true Church.
2. The Church Was Founded by Jesus Christ
Thus, by his contact with the Catholic Church and her bishops, the
rhetorician was in a position to know Jesus, her Founder. Through the
Church, Augustine had access to another historical witness of divine
Revelation, preserved through four centuries: the written testimony of the
Messianic prophecies and of the life and teachings of Jesus. Even before
embracing the Faith, he had the opportunity to study the Old and New
Testaments as plain historical documents. The Old Testament founds the
New by preparing and foretelling it. That is why St. Augustine was able to
say that the Jews of the dispersion, fanatically opposed to Christianity, were
actually its best witnesses, guaranteeing the truth of the ancient prophecies.
A man of good faith, free from prejudices, need only compare the history of
Jesus with the Messianic prophecies to see that the faith of Christians is
well founded and to recognize in Jesus the awaited Messiah.
Now, the history of Jesus Christ is related in the Gospels, which do
present themselves as historical records of the manifestation of God to men.
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the word of life: for the life was manifested, and we have
seen….”[18] The Gospels refuse to be treated as mere products of the fertile
imagination of Semitic poets, as the modernists would have it, infected as
they are with the virus of idealism. St. Augustine had to contend with the
fabulous inventions of the Manichaeans: he surely knew how to distinguish
between a fairy tale and divine Revelation. As a man of vast learning, he
knew that the Gospels were the most faithfully preserved of all the writings
of antiquity. He understood quite naturally that these writings, which
presented themselves as historical records, were precisely that.
What, indeed, do the Gospels reveal? The Evangelists tell the story of
a man who had lived in their midst for three years, working countless
miracles and fulfilling all of the Messianic prophecies, and who died
crucified to rise again on the third day. These Evangelists were men of the
out-of-doors and hard workers, little inclined to hallucinations. Moreover, if
the miracles were mere legends, contemporary enemies would have
rigorously denounced them, which they were careful not to do. How can
one accuse these writers of knowingly deceiving their readers, when they
did not hesitate to seal their testimony in their own blood? If there be
witnesses worthy of belief, it is surely those who do not fear to die martyrs
for the historical truth which they proclaim.
Gradually, the young professor of rhetoric, still grappling with doubt,
was touched by a love for Jesus Christ and began to recognize in Him the
wonderworker who healed the sick and the great prophet of future events
which did indeed come to pass, such as the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D.
70. Above all, he saw in Him the Messiah announced for four thousand
years. Miracles and prophecies will always be the best and most objective
proof of divine approval. Augustine had found the way of salvation, but his
pride was still an obstacle to revealed truth. He saw that he must believe,
but he did not yet want to do so. He was not humble enough to conceive
that this humble Jesus was his God, nor had he understood the lesson of his
own human weakness.[19]
Only in September of the year 386 did he finally begin to pierce the
profound mystery of the Incarnation. He received the grace of conversion
when he understood that Jesus Christ, God incarnate, meek and humble of
heart, is the sole path of salvation. All of his struggles and indecision were
settled in an instant when a child’s voice suddenly inspired him to open the
Scriptures, and he read a passage of St. Paul on continence.[20] His love of
Jesus Christ and his humble submission to Him had broken his pride and his
passions. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Augustine was forever
converted to Jesus, his Savior. Like St. Paul, the catechumen became an
ardent preacher of Jesus Christ, glorying to know but Christ and Him
crucified. Like St. Paul, he ventured everything on our Lord: “If Christ be
not risen again, your faith is vain.”[21] For both of them, the foundation of
life was faith, and the foundation of all their faith was the historical
Revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Later, the itinerary of his own conversion would serve as a model for
his listeners. He led them by the same path which had brought him to the
historical Revelation of Jesus Christ. Unbelievers denied that God had
spoken; but their denial was irrational, for they could never explain the
existence of the Church or of those historical documents which are the Old
and New Testaments. The first lesson Augustine gave to catechumens was
based on the facts of the Gospel understood as a history of salvation and not
as an ideal or imaginary theory, as his former neo-Platonist friends would
have it. To neophytes–as he wrote to the deacon Deogratias–the real history
of the good news of Christ must be explained just as Philip did as he sat in
the chariot of Queen Candace’s eunuch, that is, by interpreting the
prophecies and showing how they were fulfilled. All things are centered on
Jesus Christ and the Church and find their consummation in them, from the
creation of the world even to the present day. In brief, therefore, both the
conversion of the Bishop of Hippo and all of his subsequent works are
based on the evident nature of Revelation, on the historical fact that God
has spoken to man.

3. Holy Writ Is Infallible

Having embraced the Faith and received baptism at the hands of St.
Ambrose, St. Augustine could devote his time to the study of his new
religion. Indeed, this pursuit became his life’s work. He took up and
pondered anew the very word of God. In his day, rare were those rebels who
denied that God could reveal Himself in human language, however
imperfect our language may be. Rare were those skeptics who took the
prophecies of Sacred Scripture for personal experiences, colored by the
prophet’s faith and feelings. The holy bishop could have replied to them
with St. Paul: “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare
himself to the battle?”[22] If God speaks, it is not in vain. Furthermore,
since public Revelation is of universal value–eternal salvation or damnation
depends on its acceptance or refusal–it must be protected from all error by
divine Providence.
If God has indeed spoken, is it not obvious that we must believe
wholeheartedly upon God’s authority? for He can neither deceive nor be
deceived. Our saint explains in his commentary on the Psalms:
What does the saying “the word of the Lord is just” mean? That He does not deceive you. And
you, do not deceive Him, or rather, do not deceive yourself. Can He deceive, He who knows
all?[23] It is no little wisdom to join oneself to the Wise. He has eyes to see; it is for you to
have those to believe. What God sees, you also, believe![24]
This is why, come hell or high water, the holy Bishop maintained the
doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or the absolute infallibility of Holy Writ. For
him, Sacred Scripture is not only the work of God; it is the Incarnate Word
Himself. Augustine often came back to this theme of scriptural authority:
From this City toward which we are marching we have received letters, which exhort us to live
well. Jesus spoke by the mouth of the prophets and directed the pen of the Apostles: the
writings of the Apostles are the writings of Jesus Christ Himself: “O man, what My Scriptures
declare, I Myself declare.” Faith would be unsure if the authority of Scripture were shaky.
Only infidels and the impious doubt the veracity of Scripture. If you think that you have found
an error in these writings, it is because your copy of the text is defective, or because the
interpreter has erred, or because you do not understand. In Scripture we learn who is Christ,
we learn what is the Church.[25]
For St. Augustine, Scripture speaks of Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ speaks in
the Scriptures; Scripture is Jesus Christ!
How are we to understand the relationship between Holy Scripture and
the Church? Their roles are complementary, for they each contribute to
bringing man the full Revelation of God. This divine Revelation, the
deposit of faith, contains all that was passed down by God orally or in
writing, until its culmination in Jesus Christ. It is double, comprising
apostolic Tradition and Holy Writ or, more simply, the catechism and the
Bible. These two sources are connected, but one is subordinate to the other.
Sacred Scripture holds the second rank, not only because it came into being
after the preaching of the Apostles, but also because it is incomplete: it is
far from relating all that Jesus said and did.[26] It is only after having
proved the divine origin of the Church that the catechumen delves into
Revelation itself. According to St. Augustine, if we isolate the Gospel from
the Church, it becomes a thing suspended in the air without support. The
Gospel cannot be a rule of faith except under the divinely established
authority of the Church.
It is from the Church that we receive the Scriptures. It is she that gives them authority and
assures their teaching. The Church is the guide we must follow in interpreting the Gospel and
Tradition. If you were to find someone who did not yet believe the Gospel, what would you
respond to his telling you, “I don’t believe”? For my part, I should not believe the Gospel
unless the authority of the Catholic Church should move me.[27]
This passage, penned by Luther’s favorite Doctor, is the condemnation
of the entire Protestant system based on sola Scriptura. St. Augustine had
too great a respect for the Gospel to leave it to the whimsical interpretation
of every man. He knew that men need a society which speaks with a gravity
and an authority altogether divine in order to communicate infallibly truth
and salvation. The world needs a Church to be the Mother and Mistress of
the divine Revelation passed on by Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man.
✜✜✜
The study of St. Augustine’s life and conversion sheds light on the
natural movement of the mind toward a proof of Revelation as a whole. We
pass from visible effects to their causes. If there exists today a religious
society which has miraculously overcome the world in spite of bloody
persecutions and which has miraculously sanctified a decadent society, then
it is marked with the seal of God, along with its Founder. Since it does
really exist, its Founder must also have really existed. If, moreover, we have
contemporaneous writings capturing the life, miracles, and words of this
Founder, then we have the greatest interest in verifying whether His life and
sublime teaching be worthy of God and fit to edify men. If the life of this
Founder bears comparison with the ancient Messianic prophecies which it
purportedly fulfilled, we have an additional motive for belief in this
religion. From such inquiry, it follows that God did reveal Himself to man
and that this Revelation is as real as the Catholic Church we see before us.
For St. Augustine, as for every Christian worthy of the name, the evident
historical fact of God’s Revelation is the foundation of all faith. The
stumbling block for modernists is precisely this historical character of
divine Revelation. They will find countless ways to dissociate the Gospel
and the Church from their Founder, the effects from their cause. Yet the
fabricated solutions of the rationalists only bear greater witness to their
philosophical bias and serve as a confirmation of our own faith in Jesus
Christ our Savior.
 CHAPTER 3: ST. THOMAS AND DOGMATIC THEOLOGY
After St. Augustine, the Church definitively assumed the teaching and
civilizing role left vacant by the disappearance of the Roman Empire. This
cultural and doctrinal movement, lasting through the thousand years of the
Middle Ages, bears the name of Scholasticism. As Christians but also men
of learning, the great thinkers made it a duty to reach a rational
understanding of their faith, insofar as such an understanding is possible.
Theirs was a faith seeking to understand the things of God, but it was also a
faith helping to understand the things of the natural order. From this labor to
penetrate the divine more deeply was born the theological and dogmatic age
in the Church, most brilliantly represented by St. Thomas Aquinas. By
describing the origin and the apogee of Scholasticism and by studying its
most bitter adversaries, we can shed the greatest possible light on another
fundamental intuition peculiar to Christian truth, that is, on the harmony
that exists between Revelation and reason.

1. Scholasticism and St. Thomas

From the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, philosophers and
theologians, despite their differences, bear the same title. They are
Scholastics–Schoolmen–so called because they are of the same school of
thought on all fundamental issues. Christendom at that time was politically
and religiously one; so, too, in thought. They had a common language,
ecclesiastical Latin, which allowed a concerted effort in search of the truth.
Uniform, too, was their methodology: rigorous rational demonstration,
whether in philosophy itself or in its application to Revelation in theology.
Their sources were also the same: the Faith coupled with Aristotle’s
philosophia perennis. For centuries, generations of learned men, whose
names history has not recorded, raised themselves on the shoulders of their
predecessors for the sole purpose of clarifying and ordering Christian
culture. The eminently broad and salutary boundaries of Scholasticism, far
from constituting an impediment to thought, could only result in a
prodigious achievement of intellectual culture.
The crown and culmination of all this Herculean effort of
Scholasticism was the thirteenth century, the greatest in the history of
Christianity–arguably, the greatest in the history of man. It was the century
of St. Louis and of Dante; the century that saw the raising of the cathedral
of Cologne and the construction of the Summa Theologica; the century of
the Poverello of Assisi and of St. Dominic. As during the apogee of the
pagan era, brilliant minds emerged to form a powerful synthesis. We would
note in particular Saints Albert and Bonaventure, but the greatest of them
all was St. Thomas Aquinas. Three concurrent factors brought
Scholasticism to this climax: the founding of the universities, crowned by
that of Paris; the establishment of the Dominican Order, which produced the
first monks dedicated to the universities; and, above all, the translation of
the works of Aristotle.
The entry of “the Philosopher” into the universities was the decisive
factor which made the thirteenth century unique. Pagan wisdom–expressed
in a broad scientific system with its particular moral philosophy and ideals–
came into sudden contact with the Christian wisdom of the Augustinian
tradition. This was the first confrontation between the lowly philosophy of
human realities and the lofty theology of things divine. The encounter was
not always peaceful. The chief difficulty came from the fact that Aristotle
entered the universities through the translations of the Jewish and Arab
commentators of southern Spain, who rather merit the name of traditores,
“corrupters,” than of traductores, “translators,” for they interpreted
Aristotle in light of their own strong pantheistic tendencies. This treasure of
human wisdom was likewise imbued with the poison of paganism. Were the
gods of antiquity to triumph over the Christian heart? The immense merit of
the thirteenth century was to have achieved a synthesis that later cultures
have never managed to repeat. The humanist Renaissance and the
subsequent revolutions of Protestantism and the Enlightenment made man
the center of the universe and only succeeded in destroying Medieval unity.
This unity, found in harmonizing two great branches of wisdom which until
then had followed entirely divergent paths, was indeed the work of the
Christian Middle Ages. The labor of integrating these two truths, divine and
human, required a providential genius. Such a man Providence would not
refuse to the century of faith.
His fellow students nicknamed him “the Dumb Ox” because of his
physical stature and his taciturnity; but the title was equally apt for his
character as a perpetual “ruminant.” Thomas Aquinas, a Neapolitan of
precocious wit, fixed his gaze on the highest things from the moment when,
scarcely five years old, he asked the monks of Monte Cassino, “What is
God?” The question pursued him to the grave. This humble mendicant
brother, who trembled in the face of the responsibilities of preaching and
who was generously to renounce all exterior dignities, had absorbed all that
the books of his day could offer. He knew the Holy Bible by heart, and he
had been exposed to the most authoritative texts of antiquity, whether in
Rome or at the universities. From his first days in Paris–the polar star and
the intellectual capital of the Christian world–St. Thomas Aquinas left his
contemporaries in awe, and soon they were flocking to hear the most
popular master in the University of Paris. His biographers are eloquent in
praise of his teaching: a new method, new arguments, new points of
doctrine, a new series of problems, a new light shed on all. He worked an
aggiornamento by the simple fact of seeking truth alone rather than novelty.
He believed in truth, and jealously retained truths drawn from experience to
build on them as his unchanging principles. He arranged and coordinated
them into a synthesis both rich and approachable. There can be no doubt
that he was supremely equipped to accomplish the task which fell to the
Scholasticism of his day: to bind together natural and supernatural truth in a
perfect synthesis.

2. Siger’s Sophism of a “Double Truth”

The integration of Aristotle into Christendom met with fierce
opposition. The Augustinians showered anathemas upon this intruder,
smacking of pantheism and paganism. They adhered to a poor imitation of
St. Augustine. Theirs was a theology eminently spiritual and sublime, lost
in God but divorced from any knowledge of earthly things. Their
philosophy, founded on ideas rather than visible reality, took its inspiration
from Plato and was more angelic than human. These Augustinians
established their theological edifice after the model of those over-bold
architects who raise pillars too high and narrow. They constructed a sublime
theology without assuring it a solid rational foundation. They held the
authority in Paris, but Aristotle’s writing, overflowing with the wisdom of
an immortal philosophy, could not be left under a bushel; sooner or later it
had to win over the Scholastics. The age and the intellectual curiosity of
medieval men would get the better of the Augustinians, among them the
Archbishop of Paris, who, in his overzealous attacks on Aristotelianism, let
fly a fair number of anathemas upon sound Thomistic theses.
Within the context of this labor to integrate the philosophy of Aristotle
falls the episode of that perpetual agitator, Siger of Brabant. Clinging to the
letter of Aristotle’s writings as received from the hands of his pantheistic
commentators, Siger began teaching grave dogmatic errors in his courses at
the University of Paris: Aristotle’s natural wisdom is indisputable; faith
unveils a supernatural truth just as indisputable. Both have a claim on man’s
allegiance. The proper balance is achieved by determining the limits of both
kinds of truth: faith and philosophy are each supreme in their own domain.
Thus, Siger divorced the two orders of knowledge, separating faith from
reason, the laboratory from the oratory. In his biography of the Dumb Ox,
Chesterton explains in his inimitable style what precisely was at stake in
this dramatic contest of the two doctrines.
The Devil is the ape of God. It is the fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is very
nearly true. It is when the stab comes near the nerve of truth that the Christian conscience cries
out in pain….And Siger of Brabant got up and said something so horribly like it, and so
horribly unlike, that (like Antichrist) he might have deceived the very elect. Siger of Brabant
said this: the Church must be right theologically; but she can be wrong scientifically. There are
two truths; the truth of the supernatural world, and the truth of the natural world, which
contradicts the supernatural world. While we are being naturalists, we can suppose that
Christianity is all nonsense; but then, when we remember that we are Christians, we must
admit that Christianity is true even if it is nonsense. In other words, Siger of Brabant split the
human head in two, like the blow in an old legend of battle; and declared that a man has two
minds, with one of which he must entirely believe and with the other may utterly disbelieve.
To many this would at least seem like a parody of Thomism. As a fact, it was the assassination
of Thomism. It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was an untruthful way of
pretending that there are two truths.…Those who complain that theologians draw fine
distinctions could hardly find a better example of their own folly. In fact, a fine distinction can
be a flat contradiction. It was notably so in this case.[28]
St. Thomas willingly admitted that truth could be reached by two
paths, precisely because he was certain that there was only one truth. Since
faith is the absolute truth, nothing in the natural order will ever be in
contradiction with it. His confidence in the reality of religion was truly
audacious. With his rigorous logic, the saint threw himself with all his
strength against Siger’s travesty:
There is something yet more grave, for he [Siger] then says, “By reason, I conclude
necessarily that there is one sole intellect [for all men], while, however, by faith I forcefully
assert the contrary.” And so he agrees that faith concerns things whose contrary can be
necessarily concluded. But since only necessary truth can be concluded necessarily, of which
the contrary is an impossible falsehood, it follows, according to his teaching, that faith
concerns impossible falsehood; which, however, God Himself cannot do. And this the ears of
the faithful cannot endure![29]
There is no better refutation of a “double truth” open to contradiction.
There is no better defense of the unity of truth; of the fact that the God of
Moses is at once the Creator of the heavens and the earth and that the Word
Incarnate who multiplies bread is also the One who makes the grain to
grow.
The contest between Siger of Brabant and St. Thomas Aquinas at the
University of Paris was not a mere intellectual joust. It went to the heart of
Christian truth. For a Christian, faith is utterly imbued with reason from
beginning to end. From the very first, the assent of faith, like every human
judgment, must be reasonably motivated, which is why the holy Doctor
says that one would not believe if he did not see that he had to believe. That
is the reason why our own, of all the religions, is the only one to address
man as man–man who thinks with his reason and refuses to adhere blindly
to that for which he has no evidence. Christianity raises its eyes to heaven
and keeps its feet on the ground. For Siger and his followers, on the
contrary, religion is a leap into the absurd, a shot fired haphazardly and
which has every chance of missing the target. Moreover, there can be no
dogmatic development unless the articles of faith be studied and explained
by the light of reason. The Catholic religion claims to know the one true
God, Author of nature and of grace, through human reason intimately
united to the faith. Our religion is always ready to be cross-examined by
rigorous philosophy and science, for it knows that God does not contradict
Himself. Thomistic theology is eminently scientific for it consists in a
rigorous demonstration by reason of all theological conclusions built upon
the revealed Faith. Conversely, Siger’s theology, which is not strictly
speaking a science, ultimately devolves into a discourse full of imagery and
sentiment, drawn from a charismatic “revelation” and based on feelings.
Siger’s divorce leads to an essentially irrational fideism, which would
re-emerge as the blind faith of Luther and the sentimental faith of Kant. All
modernists profess a form of fideism: Loisy opposes the Christ of history to
the Christ of faith; Tyrrell says that what is false speculatively (according to
reason) can be true in practice (according to faith). This same fideism is a
caricature of the truth because it refuses man the use of his reason. It claims
that faith in God can be absurd, under the pretext that God is mysterious; it
is nothing other than modernism, that ape of the Catholic Faith.

3. The Theologian’s Mission:

To Harmonize the Two Kinds of Wisdom
St. Thomas calmly set about the task of harmonization without
troubling himself over what his adversaries might say. Such a work,
however, necessarily encountered the difficulties inherent in bringing
together the milieus where the two wisdoms had developed. Greek wisdom
had matured after the realist and earthy Aristotelian model, Christian
wisdom after the Augustinian model, more theological and divine, far
removed from material considerations. The refined ear of St. Thomas
observed the similarities of these two melodies composed in two distant
periods of history, like a Bach fugue. Like a brilliant composer, he intended
to play them at the same time on their respective keyboards, in order to
obtain the same sounds while exploiting the richness of the harmonics and
the fullness of the chords. Such a composition demanded two things: each
of the melodies had to be purified of its discordant notes, still evident in
spite of a general accord. Then they had to be united in an organic synthesis
both superior and profound, whose tone would be all the more harmonious
and faithful for its newfound variety. Thus, just as Bach first had to temper
his keyboard before harmonizing his toccatas and fugues, so St. Thomas
had to begin by modifying his sources before uniting them in a higher
theological synthesis.
On account of his immense respect for the guiding lights of
Christendom, the holy Doctor always had a high regard for the genius of St.
Augustine. In reality, they had two very different perspectives. While the
Father of the Church presented a meditation on the things of God, the
medieval Doctor sought their rational foundations. Nevertheless, the
substance of Augustine’s teaching, with some unavoidable retouching,
passed whole and entire into the Summa Theologica.[30] In like manner, St.
Thomas, before all things a theologian, had to choose the most appropriate
philosophical instrument for his art. No philosophy but Aristotle’s could fit
the task. Why? His philosophy alone rightly merits the name of perennial
philosophy, by its realism, its logical precision, and its preoccupation with
the first principles of things. Aristotelianism is the glorification of common
sense, the philosophical systematization of down-to-earth wisdom. As the
history of ancient Greece bears witness, beyond Aristotelian philosophy the
intellect can but err. The conclusions of our pagan philosopher, however,
lacked a certain illumination, especially on questions approaching the
supernatural: creation, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of God.
For Aristotle’s wisdom was horizontal rather than vertical; realist rather
than sublime. Aristotle did not go beyond created substance; St. Thomas
had to push his philosophical analysis farther and higher.
 Once they had been properly attuned, the two wisdoms, human and
divine, had to be united in a harmonious theological synthesis. Here again,
as in his approach to philosophy and the faith, St. Thomas betrays a
profound insight regarding the origins of sacred doctrine. Indeed, the two
melodies sing the same Author, the same Creator, the same God. What,
then, will be the tonic in which they harmonize to perfection? What will be
the theological keystone where the two convergent lines of faith and reason
meet to reinforce each other? What is the common point, the universal
metaphysical notion corresponding to God’s most definitive Revelation of
Himself? St. Thomas was the first to discover something so naturally
evident that it might have been known from the dawn of mankind. He saw
that everything was related to being or, more precisely, to the act of being–
esse–which defines God perfectly. Revealing His own name to Moses, God
said: “I am who am.” Jesus used the same words: “Before Abraham was, I
am.” They are echoed in the language of the saints: God is all; man is
nothing. Every creature has existence, but of God alone can it be said that
He is. Only God is perfectly simple. The creature is a composite, a nature or
an essence which exists. St. Thomas drew the thinking of Aristotle to its
natural climax in the dichotomy “essence-existence,” which alone permits a
distinction between the created and the Uncreated; between finite,
composite beings and the infinitely simple Being. Professor Gilson, a
specialist in Medieval studies, comments on this primary intuition of
Aquinas:
To understand God as the act of being, pure and subsistent of itself, cause and end of all
other beings, is, by that very fact, to present a theology able to justify all that is true in other
theologies, just as the metaphysics of being (existence) has all it needs to justify all that is true
in other philosophies. Including them all, this theology of the uncreated act of being, or of
God, whose proper names is “I am,” is as true as all of them taken together and more true than
any of them taken separately. Herein lies, I should say, the real reason why the Church made
the choice of St. Thomas for her “Common Doctor.”…For those who live by it, the
metaphysics of the Common Doctor, adopted in its fullness, is the nec plus ultra of
understanding, by right unsurpassable, and unfathomable in its consequences.[31]
Thus the analogy of being, which is the keystone of Thomism, allowed
the holy Doctor’s eagle eye to lift its gaze directly to the highest wisdom.
Thus he reconciled the Gospel with pagan philosophy and harmonized the
Faith with the natural but inspired genius of Aristotle. Thus reconciled and
mutually reinforced, the two unite to construct a higher level of knowledge:
a theology which says as much about God as reason and faith are able.
Compared to the simple catechism, Thomistic teaching rises like an
immense Gothic cathedral next to a peasant’s cottage. That is because
natural and supernatural wisdom therein buttress each other to produce the
most audacious effort ever seen in intellectual architectonics: the Summa
Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Why does the Church, in the person of more than sixty popes,
recommend Thomism above all other theological schools? Why, for
example, could we not follow with equal confidence the synthesis produced
by a St. Augustine or a St. Bonaventure? The answer is twofold: As we
have already said, Thomism is the most universal theology that has best
proven its mettle. Just as those scientific hypotheses which account for the
greatest number of facts while adhering the most faithfully to superior
principles carry more weight than others, so a theological system will be the
surer for having proven its value in numerous domains.[32] This quality is
particular to Thomism. Any modern theologian who wants his discipline to
advance must stand on the shoulders of St. Thomas, in the same way that a
physicist takes all previous discoveries into account under pain of dragging
science back to the age of Archimedes.
The second reason for making Thomism the official theology of the
Church is that it is based upon eternal and unchangeable principles:
Revelation and the philosophy of realism. It is true that there is only one
Revelation; but it is also true that Revelation only becomes a scientific
theology when it is studied by the human reason according to the principles
of common sense codified by Aristotle. Since there is only one Revelation
and one perennial philosophy, there is at bottom only one theological
science which binds with irrefutable logic the truths of Faith to conclusions
of theology. If the Church adheres to Thomism, it is not by stubborn
fanaticism or even simple discipline but by logical necessity. In the same
way, architectural styles in building vary with the ages, but there are
identical and invariable laws to be observed in all construction, such as the
laws of gravity and resistance, without which there would not exist castle,
house, or cabin. So it is with St. Thomas. He is important not so much
because he built up an admirable theological synthesis, but rather because
he advanced farther than any other in his understanding of theology and his
scientific ordination of its fundamental principles, which remain the point
of reference for every aspiring theologian in the same way that the aspiring
architect must first go to architectural school.[33] Now, these laws and
essential principles of Thomism are what the Church demands that one
follow as sound guidelines when she enjoins adherence to St. Thomas.
✜✜✜
Let us conclude this study of St. Thomas by citing the praise lavished
on him by Pius XI. This will also serve as the best introduction to a study of
the modernist crisis:
If we are to avoid the errors which are the source and fountainhead of all the miseries of
our time, the teaching of Aquinas must be adhered to more religiously than ever. For Thomas
refutes the theories propounded by Modernists in every sphere: in philosophy, by protecting,
as We have reminded you, the force and power of the human mind and by demonstrating the
existence of God by the most cogent arguments; in dogmatic theology, by distinguishing the
supernatural from the natural order and explaining the reasons for belief and the dogmas
themselves; in theology, by showing that the articles of Faith are not based upon mere opinion
but upon truth and therefore cannot possibly change; in exegesis, by transmitting the true
conception of divine inspiration; in the science of morals, in sociology and law, by laying
down sound principles of legal and social, commutative and distributive justice, and
explaining the relations between justice and charity; in the theory of asceticism, by his
precepts concerning the perfection of the Christian life and his confutation of the enemies of
the religious orders in his own day. Lastly, against the much vaunted liberty of the human
reason and its independence in regard to God he asserts the rights of primary Truth and the
authority over us of the Supreme Master. It is therefore clear why Modernists are so amply
justified in fearing no Doctor of the Church so much as Thomas Aquinas. Accordingly, just as
it was said to the Egyptians of old, in time of famine: “Go to Joseph,” so that they should
receive a supply of corn from him to nourish their bodies, so We now say to all such as are
desirous of the truth: “Go to Thomas,” and ask him to give you from his ample store the food
of substantial doctrine wherewith to nourish your souls into eternal life.[34]
 CHAPTER 4: ASSESSMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN HERITAGE
After this brief consideration, we are in a position to draw together the
essential tenets upon which Christian culture was founded and so form an
appreciation of the movement as a whole. In order to do that, we shall begin
by summarizing the principles developed by each of the three men chosen
to illustrate the three disciplines involved in dogmatic theology. Then, by
extracting the principles which they have in common, we will more easily
see the conclusions about truth and unity which these principles impose.

1. A Brief Outline of the Authors

Aristotle personifies philosophy, that natural discipline which serves as
the most basic foundation for all of Christian culture. He is an ardent
defender of the common patrimony of mankind in all that concerns man’s
natural ability to know the world around him. His quarrel is with all those
who doubt the being and nature of things. Their position is properly
speaking suicidal. If there were neither being nor nature, then the law of life
would be the rule of evolution and contradiction, leading infallibly to the
destruction of everything, evolution included. Aristotle does not mince
words when dealing with these evolutionists and sophists who nourish
themselves with nothing but their own ideas. He calls them blind and dubs
them intellecticides. Through intellectual egocentrism, they close their
minds to things, refusing to admit the existence of what is outside
themselves, namely, being, and, with it, the supreme Being. Thus the
Philosopher defends what would seem evident: the human mind is made to
know truth. His job is to study the world as it is and not to shape it
according to the whims of his own mental categories. Man in face of the
universe is a homo sapiens and not a homo faber. He is in a permanent state
of docility toward reality, discerning the nature of things, their existence
and the laws governing the world, such as the principles of causality and
non-contradiction. He knows that it will be forever true that a cat is a cat,
that a dog is a dog, and that a dog is not a cat. In a word, Aristotle’s good
sense tells him that there are eternal truths founded in the concrete nature of
things, that truth is one and exclusive, and that what is absolutely true at
one moment can never be called false.
With St. Augustine, we suddenly enter the supernatural realm.
Reacting against the pessimistic theory that Creation is bad and the work of
a cruel god, he knows that God is good and desires that men be saved.
While yet a catechumen, he realized the importance and the role of
Providence. Providence must have granted man a supernatural Revelation,
for otherwise man could not know the means of salvation. It also must have
entrusted this Revelation to a supreme authority on earth, to a teaching
Church, for otherwise no teaching would be entirely free of error. It had to
protect this Church in her essential role of preserving the deposit of faith,
lest she fail in her primary duty. Finally, this same Providence could not
have allowed that a religious society such as the Catholic Church be false
and yet, in God’s name, have conquered the whole world by the sole
weapon of holiness. St. Augustine opens his eyes and looks around him and
sees those monuments of history that are the Old and New Testaments and
also the Catholic Church herself, very much alive in the fourth century
despite the Roman persecutions. He knows that there is no effect without a
cause and that, if the effects are real and divine, the causes must in like
manner be real and divine. The story of the holy Doctor’s conversion shows
us that his faith did not simply fall from the skies. Rather, it was firmly
anchored in a concrete fact: God had spoken to man both in the Old
Testament and, by His Son Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, and His
Revelation is a fact just as historical as the preaching of the Gospel and the
Church. Thus, the spiritual journey of St. Augustine shows us above all that
Christian truth is based upon something quite evident: the historical fact of
God’s Revelation.
St. Thomas, by relying upon natural philosophy and supernatural
Revelation, was able to undertake a theological synthesis which would use
the one system to explain the other. The two types of wisdom are obviously
distinct; could they ever be brought together to found a unique truth, or
would they always be at odds? Some spoke of two truths, not only disparate
but even contradictory, such that a man could be obliged to believe with
divine faith what was scientifically false and even impossible. They
professed a blind fideism which pretended that faith could not rest on
rational motives. God is absurd because He is mysterious and thus “credo
quia absurdum–I believe because it is absurd”! St. Thomas declares war
without pity on this fallacy of two contradictory truths, devoting all of his
labor to combating it with a new maxim of sound common sense: there is
harmony between Creation and Revelation, between the natural and
supernatural orders, because both come from the same God. The two
sciences, philosophy and Revelation, are to unite and form a new discipline,
the science of theology. Now, true Revelation can only be one. The same is
true of realist philosophy since it builds upon common sense. Therefore, it
follows that the combination of the two–which is Catholic theology–can
also only be one. The theological science which logically unites the truths
of faith with their theological conclusions by means of a realist philosophy
can only be one: and this science, in all its essential points, is Thomistic
theology. Accordingly, dogma enjoys the same infallibility that pertains to
revealed truth and to the truths of common sense. Thus, if there is to be
dogmatic progress, it must be sought in fidelity to all former understanding,
in perfect harmony with dogmas already defined. As a result, the official
expression of dogma can have been more or less precise over the course of
the ages, but it can never have been erroneous such that one might deny
today what yesterday one affirmed.

2. Harmonizing Principles
In spite of their differences, the various disciplines that have formed
dogma have points in common which must be highlighted. Underlying the
perennial philosophy, Christian Revelation, and–indirectly–Scholastic
theology, there is a fundamental realism which entails quite naturally a
spirit of all-conquering optimism. We must understand that a philosophy of
realism begins in the real and can never be separated from it. Such realism
perceives the essences of things; it sees that these real essences are the
object of thought and can inform the intellect. The same is true of
Revelation. It is based upon a concrete fact as real as the existence of
Napoleon: God has spoken by His prophets and by His Son Jesus Christ,
who truly became incarnate. Theology is founded upon the one true God,
the Author of nature and Revelation alike. Thus, in the final analysis, these
three disciplines originate in three different intuitions, that is, in beings and
in facts seen and known by men.
Such realism is the beginning of a radical optimism, for it affirms that
the intellect is able to understand and express the real and the true. Within
the framework of an optimistic realism, Revelation and religion are not a
leap into the void or into the absurd but, quite the contrary, a leap into
evidence and rationality. This is because everything in the Catholic Church
is rational, or at least reasonable. The divine mysteries surpass reason, but
they are grounded in reasonable motives of belief.
 We do not see God, says St. Thomas, but we do see in all certitude that
we have to believe in Him. In order to make an act of faith, the believer
judges that his religion is true, which judgment would be pure foolishness if
he had no evidence to support it. Otherwise, his faith in God, which is the
highest act of man’s highest faculty, would be the most inhuman act
possible. In a Catholic and realist venue, all study is carried out in broad
daylight in order to discern the motives for belief, that is, the irrefutable
signs of historical Revelation: miracles, the fulfillment of prophecies, and
the true sanctity of the members of the Church. Just as a bend in the road
necessarily causes a consequent judgment in the driver and just as the
principle of cause and effect forces a scientist to a necessary conclusion, so
these motives of credibility show a believer that he must indeed have faith.
What is true for philosophy and faith is true for theology as well. For
although modernists have often complained that Thomistic theology is dry,
no one has ever reasonably contested the solidity of its principles, the force
of its reasoning, or the scientific rigor of its method.

3. The Properties of Truth

These disciplines agree in their description of the properties of truth on
every level, natural or supernatural. These properties are threefold and they
reinforce one another: truth is always perfectly defined and concrete, it is
consequently exclusive, and therefore it is essentially immutable. These
properties are not born of fanciful theories but are self-evident and therefore
unassailable.
Firstly, truth is eminently concrete because it is the correspondence of
thought with something singular and well defined. Only real things are true,
beings of flesh and blood, while chimerical ideas and fantasies are false:
they lack being, life, and action. The present is true and, in a certain way,
the past, while the future is not true. The simple and the particular are true,
but not the universal. Peter and Paul exist, but no one has ever seen Mrs.
Humanity walking her poodle down the street.
Secondly, if truth is indeed concrete, then it is also scandalously
discriminatory. Even before opening one’s eyes, some judgments must be
excluded, such as the existence of a square circle, for what is true must at
least be possible. Yet a person becomes really discriminatory once he
begins to make judgments about things, for every judgment involves a
choice, and choice is exclusive. If I am correct in affirming that the wall is
white, then I am wrong in affirming that it is black or gray or, more simply,
not white. To express the truth is to take sides; it is to take a position which
implicitly rejects all contrary positions. Thus, in philosophy, Aristotle states
that being is and therefore distances himself from Heraclitus’ opposite
position. Thus, in matters of faith, the Apostles affirmed that Jesus Christ
existed and claimed to be God, and by that very affirmation they rejected as
false and unhistorical all statements to the effect that Jesus Christ never
existed or did not claim to be God. Thus also in dogma, to proclaim the
Incarnation of Jesus Christ is to reject as false and unhistorical the
proposition that Jesus Christ is not God incarnate.
The third property of truth is that it is immutable and absolute. Truth
receives this immutability both from the eternal nature of things and from
concrete facts. Essences as such endure forever, for once a particular
species exists, its essence remains even if the creature should become
extinct. It is obvious that cats having once been created on earth, the species
“cat”–felinity–remains forever, even if all cats were actually one day to die
out. Principles like those of cause and effect and of non-contradiction are
more enduring than the foundations of the world, for they hold sway in the
heavens as well. It is the same for concrete facts. To say that Charlemagne
was consecrated Emperor in the year 800 is to express a truth past but
forever true because what took place cannot have not taken place. Yet if
truth is immutable, it is also absolute and rejects all relativism. This means
that it admits neither of exceptions nor degrees. The principle of causality,
for example, is universally valid: where there is smoke, there is fire,
whether on earth or on the planet Mars. Truth is so absolute that it suffers
no degrees, meaning, for example, that one is either completely human or
not human at all. A human being is not more or less a monkey or a donkey.
Based on these properties of truth, philosophy can claim possession of
certain permanent and absolute truths. Based on these properties of truth,
the concrete and historical fact of God’s Revelation to man is an eternal and
absolute truth. Thus, it is eternally and absolutely true that God spoke in
such a place and revealed Himself to such a man and said such things and
that He established Peter as the guarantee that this Revelation took place.
The absolute nature of Revelation is the origin of the infallibility of dogma:
Dogma is the rigorous conclusion drawn from infallible truths of
philosophy and the faith, even if its elaboration employs the supple
language of analogy in order to pass from the created to the Uncreated,
from being to Being. These conclusions are analogical truths, stating truly,
immutably, and absolutely that God is true, good, merciful, and holy, but
also that He is much more than we can ever conclude.

4. The Principle of Unity

From a realist perspective, the question of unity follows necessarily
upon that of truth, in turn inseparable from the questions of reality, being,
and historical fact. The realist philosopher’s sole task is to make his
thinking correspond to reality, irrespective of his own feelings and interests.
This correspondence is the price that must be paid for peace of mind and
heart. The intellect is the faculty of the true; it becomes false as soon as it
no longer desires to harmonize its thinking with reality. Wanting to think
without concern for truth is self-delusion. Wanting to nourish one’s mind on
dreams is building castles in the air. For this reason, striving to unite the
minds of men around an idea one knows to be false is far from wisdom–it is
the height of philosophical blindness.
These remarks are equally valid for faith in the word of God and for
theology. These disciplines are meant to bring us to the knowledge of God,
not to more or less grave misconceptions about Him or, worse yet, to total
ignorance of Him. Ignorance of God is the first and greatest insult one can
offer to Him, as if God and His revelation were superfluities. Thus religion,
which joins man to God, depends first and foremost on true knowledge of
the true God. Moreover, any love which is not guided by true faith is more
than a misguided charity; it is quite simply false charity. The first love is the
love of truth, and to set out to love God without accepting His Revelation is
an offense against the truth of God.
From the realist perspective, then, the disciplines related to dogma and
religion cannot conceive of any alliance outside of truth, outside of the
being of things, outside of concrete facts and the being of God. Christian
truth can in no way admit of a union that would abstract from the true God
and definite Revelation. It does not admit of a fictitious reuniting of
different churches by means of a treaty of non-aggression that would leave
in the shadow all elements of discord. Such an attitude would be an insult to
infidels and non-Catholics, considering them as incapable of desiring the
true and the good. Such religious syncretism can only give rise to pure
skepticism, with no one believing anything at all. Syncretism of this kind
forgets that God is a jealous God who vomits from His mouth the lukewarm
and the indifferent (Apoc. 3:16). It forgets the First Commandment, which
enjoins us to hate all false gods in order to love the one true God with all
our heart, with all our mind, and with all our strength. There can therefore
be no greater offense than doctrinal relativism.
 PART II: PROTESTANT MODERNISM
To understand the link between Protestantism and modernism, we first
must study the movement’s founder and then its liberal branch. If radical
Protestantism is called “liberal,” it is not simply because it excludes the
kingship of Christ over modern pluralist societies as would a certain “liberal
Catholicism.” Liberal Protestantism actually goes much farther. It is in fact
the mirror image of “Catholic” modernism or, more accurately, its blue-
print. The following study of Protestantism should be extremely revelatory,
allowing us to fill in one generation of the modernist family tree–and even
two, for we shall see how Luther himself is firmly grafted onto modernism
by his principles.
He who sows the wind will reap a whirlwind.[35] Luther’s doctrine of
“private judgment” in the interpretation of the Bible was the key that
opened the Pandora’s box, loosing all manner of evil and scattering it
throughout the intellectual universe.
We are tempted to say that this revolt of Luther’s “is like another fall
of man.” The serpent promised our first parents that they would become
like unto gods, knowing good and evil. Yet their eyes were opened only to
see that they had miserably fallen by rejecting the order willed by God.
Disobeying the natural or supernatural order and refusing the testimony of
reason or faith are sins which bring their own punishment. The mind loses
its bearings. It becomes skeptical, doubting, and unstable, and finally
adheres to the vaguest of fantasies, for, as Chesterton put it, when a man no
longer believes the truth, he is prepared to believe anything.
Such is the spectacle presented by the following three chapters on
Protestantism, treating respectively of philosophy, theology, and biblical
Revelation. One word perfectly captures the nature of Protestant modernism
before it appeared in all its glory on the Catholic horizon: criticism or
critique. All subsequent forms of critique find their source in the principle
of private judgment invented by Luther. The doctrine of private judgment
brings nothing positive. It is a protestation of independence from all
authority outside of the sovereign self: behold the only point on which the
innumerable sects of Protestants can come to agreement, for in this they are
true to their name. Luther’s doctrine of private judgment has yielded poison
fruit in every domain. It gave rise to Kant’s philosophical critique of reason,
Strauss’s critique of the Gospels, and Schleiermacher’s critique of dogma.
Whatever the nature of the discipline to which it is applied, critique works
as a destructive element, targeting anything that is true like a corrosive acid
dissolving metal.
 CHAPTER 5: LUTHER: THE FATHER OF PROTESTANT
MODERNISM
If we were to study a map of Europe tracing religious belief from the
fourth century to the Reformation, we would discover a remarkable unity of
thought, faith, and morals grounded in the Catholic Church and spreading
over the civilized world. Obviously, these long centuries were not perfect
nor were they always sublime, because human nature was the same then as
now, with its accompanying vices. Yet, undeniably, the Christian world was
one. It was united by the same faith in a good God who desired the
salvation of His creatures; by the same moral code, which made men
consider unanimously one action to be good and another bad; and by the
same divinely founded authority, obeyed as God Himself. A hundred years
after Luther, a new edition of the same map would reveal a world
profoundly divided in its belief; what had been one suddenly resembled a
vase broken into a thousand pieces. A veritable revolution had taken place,
with ramifications in every domain, nationally and internationally, to say
nothing of its effect on the social and moral values of Europe. The heart of
the revolution which left Christian Europe forever divided was theology.
The epicenter of the disaster consisted in certain irreconcilable ideas about
God and His plan for the salvation of mankind.
Any discussion of Reformation theology immediately brings us to
Luther, the father of the Reform. Only by analyzing his thought can we
understand the basis of the revolution to which the Reformation gave rise;
we need to study him closely if we want to understand the nature of the
modernist movement, which is the natural fruit of Lutheranism. It has been
rightly said of Luther that to know the doctrine is to know the man. From
the origin of his ideas, we can easily deduce the consequences of his
principles for the various disciplines related to dogma: philosophy,
exegesis, and theology. We shall then be in a position to judge that such
principles are in glaring contradiction with Lutheranism itself in the form it
took over the centuries following the death of its founder.

1. The Doctrine Is the Man

We were able illustrate the teaching and life of St. Thomas Aquinas by
comparing him to classical composers; for Luther, the beginning of the
Romantic period corresponds perfectly. Romanticism is the ripening of
Beethoven’s grand symphonies, in which the passionate already dominates
the rational, and might over mind. Much like Beethoven, Luther was driven
by passion and acted under its empire.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was born of humble peasant stock. His
pious Christian mother tended to see the devil everywhere, while his father
was the epitome of the cruel judge; he never pardoned his son for
abandoning the family to become a monk. After completing his studies in
law, the twenty-one-year-old Martin Luther vowed to consecrate himself to
God after being caught in a storm and suddenly overcome with fear; he was
accepted a fortnight later by the Augustinians at Erfurt, a university town of
Saxony. Thereafter followed a lightning career as a monk and priest. He
made his perpetual vows the year following his entry and was ordained
priest a few months later; only then did he apply himself to some short but
serious theological studies. In 1508, he was transferred to his hometown
university to become a lecturer. Within a few years, he became sub-prior at
Wittenberg and doctor in theology, and finally went to Rome as the legal
representative for Augustinian convents in dispute. His monastic studies
brought him into contact with St. Augustine, which supposedly proved to
him the vanity of reason and will, as well as the mystics, from whose
writings he claimed to have drawn his rejection of exterior works. Luther
also came to be familiar with decadent Scholasticism, particularly that of
Ockham, the philosopher who taught that words are devoid of meaning and
that Christ and Scripture are the only sources of life. Already in 1515, in his
commentary on the Epistle to Romans, Brother Martin, only recently
“doctor,” exposed his new theory on justification–that theory which was to
become the foundation for all Lutheran theology. The Reformation was
born.
How did Luther reach this point? Many historians have side-stepped
the question and provided answers reflecting their own bias. Some say that
one fine day he came upon a newly printed Bible in the library of Erfurt.
Others see in Brother Martin a monk incapable of controlling his immoral
passions. Yet the only way to do justice to history is to try to look into the
soul of this monk and follow him through the drama of those crucial years.
What was the personality of this Augustinian brother? Whereas the
corpulence of St. Thomas hid a brilliant mind, Luther was a Hercules of the
will, full of passion and fire, with an intelligence rather limited and mostly
practical. Historians agree in painting him as the German par excellence;
Martin Luther was a Christian Odin, a latter-day Thor. He was endowed
with a nature at once realistic and poetical, courageous but impulsive,
sentimental and hypersensitive. He was a living volcano and vehement in
everything, including his generosity and kindness. Ardent and full of
nervous energy, he was prone to sudden breakdowns and moments of acute
sadness. His depression was as profound as his joy was exuberant. Was his
weakness the fruit of a poorly balanced education with too much emphasis
on fear? Was he tormented by scruples or haunted by the constant thought
of the mystery of predestination? In his moments of natural optimism, just
like his forefathers, his passions easily held sway over his reason. He had
the fighting spirit and threw himself headlong into quarrels, which he
relished. Contemporaries described him as bold and fiery in defending his
own cause, which is why he was sent to Rome as a young master to plead
the cause of his monastery. Practical and impatient, he was more anxious to
argue down an opponent than to listen to his views. Luther was a
remarkable preacher if only for his crude language. The power of his
imagery and eloquence establish him as one of the most influential forces in
the creation of modern German. His very words were battles. There was a
strength in his genius and a vehemence in his language, with a lively and
impetuous eloquence which enchanted the crowds and left them in
transports of admiration–a speech waxing to extraordinary boldness under
applause–all united to an air of authority such that his disciples trembled
before him and dared not contradict his slightest nuance. This ascendancy
over his followers was to be his strength and his downfall.
Entering religion in a transport of emotion rather than from true
devotion, as he would later avow, Brother Martin began as a conscientious
and dutiful monk, certainly eager to attain priestly perfection although
tending toward anxiety and scruples. He quickly noticed that all of his pious
actions, his “good works,” brought about no change in him, from which he
concluded that nothing of what he did made any difference to God; or, in
his own words:
When I was a monk, I used immediately to believe that it was all over with my salvation every
time I experienced the concupiscence of the flesh, that is to say an evil movement against one
of the brethren, of envy, of anger, of hatred, or of jealousy and so forth….I was everlastingly
tormented with the thought… “all your good works are just useless.”[36]
It would seem that at this stage our monk made two errors on the
principles of the spiritual life. Firstly, his sentimental temperament made
him too anxious to feel sensible consolations. He had to feel that he was in
the state of grace, as if grace were something to be felt! The doctrine that
grace is infused into the soul when sin is effaced made him almost despair
of God, for he had never tasted the perfect purity of grace. His second error
was his desire to attain virtue and perfection by his own efforts rather than
by the grace of God. This personal voluntarism was all the more dangerous
because his scrupulosity made him take the least involuntary sensations for
sins and made him want to attain a level of holiness that would betray no
sign of human weakness. For ten years his soul was consumed with fear of
eternal damnation. He was counseled to put all his trust in the Redeemer of
the human race, who had not died in vain.
To escape this state of interior torment in which his scruples and his
proud voluntarism held him captive, Luther threw himself into activism
with his preaching and instruction. Then came the temptation to despair: be
content to be what you are, a fallen angel, a deformed creature; your job is
to do evil, for your very being is evil. Luther’s torment was the echo of the
drama lived by St. Paul himself: “But I see another law in my members,
fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin,
that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from
the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord.”[37]
Jesus Christ! Behold the sole response given for fifteen hundred years to the
agonizing question of personal salvation. Saul became St. Paul because he
threw himself into the arms of his God. Behold all the difference between
Luther and St. Paul. Instead of calling immediately upon his Savior, Luther
resigned himself to his base passions: “Concupiscence is invincible.”
Around this time he began signing his letters, “Luder, son of Adam the
outcast.”
Up to this point, we have been following the story of a scrupulous
monk on the brink of despair. Suddenly, the theme changes, and we see
emerge Luther the Reformer, who has found holiness in the face of despair
and of perverse resignation. To put the seal on his transformation, he began
to call himself Lutherius, Martin the Freedman. Thus, for ten years, Luther
had been haunted by the question of salvation, seeking in vain how he
might escape the fury of the just Judge. In 1516, reading St. Paul to the
Romans, he finally discovered the decisive argument: “For the justice of
God is revealed therein, from faith unto faith, as it is written, ‘The just man
lives by faith.’”[38] Brother Martin explained that according to St. Paul, the
justification of God means covering with a purely extrinsic mantle the
accumulation of sin which is man. In order to be just, sinful man has but to
believe. Again from St. Paul, he would deduce that all of man’s efforts are
sinful; that he is without freedom; that he is only a beast driven either by
God or by the devil, whichever of the two is in the saddle. Depraved animal
that he is, man can do nothing by himself to win his salvation. It is useless
to perform good works since Christ has done everything in our place.
Salvation comes to man only when he has put all his faith in Christ–faith
here meaning blind trust. This confidence brought him to utter his “Pecca
fortiter et crede firmius–Sin heartily, but believe more heartily still.” This
axiom is not to be understood merely as the glorification of moral laxism.
Whether we sin or not is of little consequence; what matters is that we
believe. For Luther, to believe is to have a confidence as firm as it is blind.
Thus, the life of a Christian is nothing but a continual exercise in feeling
that we have not sinned even as we sin, confident that we have cast our sins
upon Christ.
All of Luther’s doctrine is clearly the result of his personal experience.
He transformed his needs into dogmatic truths. His inner feelings became
theological principles, and his particular case became universal law.
Thirsting for moral security and spiritual freedom, he liberated himself from
his scruples by despairing of any good work and by casting himself, sinner
that he was, into the arms of Christ. He had been preaching this doctrine at
the university for more than a year when the question of indulgences arose.
Abuses in granting indulgences were indeed to become the spark which set
all aflame, but in reality they were only a pretext for revolt. As he nailed his
ninety-five theses on indulgences to the church door of Wittenberg in 1517,
he had already refined his own teaching on the fundamental questions
surrounding eternal salvation, the justice of God, faith, and good works.
The primary objection of Luther and of Protestantism did not concern
the abuse of indulgences or scandals in the clergy, nor did his immorality
and his blasphemy arise directly from his theological errors. No, the whole
tragedy of the revolt is that a monk took it upon himself to erase fifteen
centuries of tranquil possession of divine truth, and that he gained an
extraordinary influence over the masses by claiming to be directly inspired
by God. The root of the problem is Luther’s boast to have understood St.
Paul better than anyone else hitherto, better than the Church herself,
interpreter and guardian of the divine word. Luther’s great victory was to
turn half of Christendom away from what it had accepted without dispute,
as a brilliant orator holding out the attractive offer of a free and automatic
paradise, and to have brought it to embrace the doctrine of a gratuitous
salvation simply because he claimed that he understood things better than
anyone had before him. Private judgment therefore emerges as the source
and origin of the Reformation. Luther’s private judgment would do more to
destroy what the Church held most dear than would any other point of
doctrine. Private judgment signed the death warrant of the entire treasure of
the Church.

2. In Philosophy: Ignorantism and Egology

Disdainful of ideas and favoring all manner of individualism, the era
of decadent Scholasticism and of the pagan Renaissance was little apt to
promote sound philosophy. By his profession of skepticism in all areas of
science and especially by his natural inclination to favor the will and
neglect the reason, Luther proved himself a true child of his times. His
discourses are rather blunt: Aristotle is the impious supporter of the papists;
he is to theology what darkness is to light; St. Thomas never understood a
chapter of the Gospel, nor of Aristotle. Such outrageous generalizations
correspond perfectly with the Lutheran teaching of human nature as
completely vitiated by original sin. Reason is utterly ruined, along with the
rest of human nature, so that all speculative sciences are erroneous. Luther
was not a theorist reasoning about his principles; he was a charismatic
leader who took hold of a popular movement and directed it intuitively
without the least concern for the laws of logic. To those who objected to his
contradictions and inconsistencies, he responded with force and verbal
diatribe, little troubling himself to frame a reasoned reply.
Because he stakes everything on faith without regard for common
sense, Luther is a fideist. In fact, his “faith” has no basis in anything
rational. It is an heretical pseudo-faith which could not fail to become what
it has become for so many Protestants today: a fatal leap driven by a
desperate pride; a flight toward the unknown, full of distress and
confidence, born in the depths of one’s own being. Luther’s faith is
sufficient to itself; reason can only corrupt it. Thus with a stroke of his pen
the reformer swept away a thousand years of fruitful theological endeavor:
Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed
and buried….She is the whore of the devil. It can only blaspheme and dishonor everything
God has said or done.…It is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and
philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.…Logic is nowhere necessary in
 theology because Christ does not need human inventions.…The Sorbonne, that mother of all
errors, has defined, as badly as could be, that if a thing is true, it is true for philosophy and
theology; it is godless in it to have condemned those who hold the contrary.[39]
If we take him at his word, Luther adopted wholesale Siger’s theory of
a “double truth,” according to which a truth of the Faith could be at the
same time a scientific error.
Another more positive aspect grafted itself onto the anti-
intellectualism of Luther’s doctrine. When man refuses to follow the natural
light which God places in him, he is moved only by a blind will and by his
lower passions, leaving him subject to every possible deviation. In Luther,
sentiment and the appetites reigned supreme. He was dominated by his
affective faculties–primarily the irascible but with a strong inclination
toward melancholy as well. Luther glorified liberty, the interiority of
personal experience, the genius of the individual. For him, his own will
constituted the ultimate, irrevocable justification for everything he believed
and did: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas–I will that it be so; let
the will take the place of reason”! He opposed the interior to the exterior.
All that comes from without ought to be rejected, in particular the
sacraments of the Church but also divine Revelation. Such is the logical
consequence of the Lutheran principle of “private judgment.” Fr.Yves
Congar, in admiration before Luther, was quite correct in affirming that he
had rethought all of Christianity. Why? Because Luther was incapable of
receiving anything which had not come from his own experience. This
principle of self-sufficiency was eventually adopted by Kant and developed
into a theory of pure reason emancipated from exterior realities.
3. Revelation under the
Scrutiny of Private Judgment
Luther well merited the name of “Protestant” in declaring war on all
authority that would presume to dictate any thought or conduct whatsoever;
he went on to invoke the same independence of mind in the face of
Revelation, be it the oral Tradition of the ecclesiastical magisterium or the
written Bible. Brother Martin first rebelled against Tradition by setting
against it his sola Scriptura–the Bible alone–as the rule of faith. Sola
Scriptura was only a pretext for avoiding the divine authority of the
Church, which had always condemned the doctrinal escape hatch Luther
concocted to ease his conscience. The infallibility of the Church, whose
voice was at least clear and direct, is thus overturned and replaced by the
infallibility of a book–a book which remains even today within reach of an
insignificant fraction of the population and whose meaning is the subject of
violent disagreements among the learned. The Bible, from which Luther
himself was to draw his often dubious theories, became the only source of
salvation. Every member of the Reform is at once priest and prophet. Yet
such a position is fraught with peril. Those who had always been
accustomed to believe what they were taught were henceforth burdened
with the arduous task of seeking out for themselves what they should
believe by examining the Scriptures, with the threat hanging over them of
horrible punishments in case of error.
In his rampage against authority, did our heresiarch at least intend to
hold respectfully to Holy Scripture? Not at all; his exaggerated defense of
sola Scriptura was only a camouflage for the theory of private judgment
generously extended to the Bible itself. Did he not claim to judge whether a
book is truly inspired “ex gustu et sapore–by its taste and savor”? Nor did
he hesitate to modify the sacred texts. The text from the Annunciation, “full
of grace,” he translated as “grace is in you.” The famous text of St. Paul:
“For we account a man to be justified by the faith, without the works of the
law,” became under Luther’s pen: “We consider that a man is justified
without the works of the law by faith alone.”[40]
He announced that the seven deuterocanonical books, universally
accepted by the Church, were in fact merely apocryphal. He showed the
same disdain for the five books of Moses. Nor did he spare the New
Testament. The letter of St. James he called an epistle of straw; turning on
the Epistle to the Hebrews, he warned his followers: “It need not surprise
one to find here bits of wood, hay and straw”; as for the Apocalypse,
“There are many things objectionable in this book. To my mind it bears
upon it no marks of an apostolic or prophetic character….Everyone may
form his own judgment of this book; as for myself, I feel an aversion to it,
and to me this is sufficient reason for rejecting it.”[41] Behind the
appearance of Luther’s bibliolatry fed by his sola Scriptura, there lurks the
heart of a biblioclast.
After these exploits, Luther managed to find cause for complaint in the
exegetical liberties taken by Karlstadt and other co-Reformers. He went so
far as to carve into the dinner table the words of the consecration, “This is
My body, this is My blood,” and threateningly insist that his followers take
them according to their literal meaning. He truly did not seem to grasp that
it was he who had set the example of radical liberty in Scriptural matters.
He had removed Scripture’s only defense, namely, Tradition and the
magisterium of the Church. It is as though, before inscribing the sacred
words on the table, he had personally sawed off the table legs. If the Bible’s
only authority is in itself, if its only truth is what I judge to be true in my
own mind, how can biblical texts written on dead skins impose anything at
all on my belief? In reality, for Luther, Revelation is a personal affair: my
Revelation is the Revelation. After his decision to break with Rome and the
Church, and in spite of the spiritual torments which time only intensified,
Luther’s egocentrism soon attained its paroxysm. Everything revolved
around Luther; every external rule became an intolerable insult to his
Christian liberty. “I do not admit that my doctrine can be judged by anyone,
even by the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be
saved.”[42] In his supreme rebellion, Luther put himself in the place of
Jesus Christ.

4. Theology Inside-Out and Centered on Man

The whole of Lutheran doctrine is born of the spiritual life of
scrupulous Brother Martin, despairing of ever stifling his concupiscence; it
ends in an excess of egocentrism. He erected his own personal drama into a
universal doctrine urbi et orbi. However, this doctrine is false, impious, and
blasphemous. Listen to how he condemns the Catholic theology of Original
Sin:
Hence the [Catholic] Scholastic doctors have taught nothing but error and blindness on this
point, namely, that since the fall of Adam…man is free to do good and avoid evil or, on the
contrary, to avoid good and to do evil. Again, that man by his natural powers can observe and
accomplish the commandments of God. Again, that man by his natural powers can love God
above all things and his neighbor as himself. Again, that if a man does what is in his power,
God will certainly give him grace.[43]
Here is his own doctrine:
Even after the regeneration, all are below what is commanded, and all are incapable since they
inherit a corrupted nature that fatally predisposes them to sin. Everything comes from grace,
nothing comes from works, and the gift of grace is the act of God alone. All that man will be
or do has been determined for him in advance from all eternity; some are born to be saved,
others to be damned, without regard for their own choice, which in truth is never free.[44]
This doctrine of exterior justification, which throws a veil of modesty
over the wretchedness of man, causes men to become whitened sepulchers.
It is fundamentally immoral and impure because it annihilates the natural
powers of man, above all his freedom; it denies him the ability to perform
the least good action; it renders him incapable of meriting heaven with
God’s help. Luther’s doctrine enfeebles the mighty hand of God, for He
becomes powerless to sanctify man inwardly. According to Luther, God is a
distant abstraction who saves by a juridical fiction and not by a true
conversion of the heart wrought from within. But he does not stop there.
His doctrine renders God unjust by imputing to him the double crime of
ordering the impossible and of predestining to hell souls deprived of liberty,
in the same way that He predestines others to heaven. Such a doctrine
demands the sacrifice of the human conscience by forcing it to adore God’s
arbitrary whims as eminently just. This God, concocted by Luther, is made
in the image of Lutheran man: fallen, unjust, and deprived of reason.
We said that Lutheran egocentrism is doctrinal. Worse yet, it becomes
theological. Here we glimpse the depths of the mystery of Lutheran
“theology.” In Catholic doctrine, everything revolves around God, who is
the source, the center, and the end of man. Since it is ordered to God,
Catholic theology is above all a speculative science. With God as his center,
the Catholic soul is fully satisfied with the awareness of the mysteries of
God and of His merciful love for all men. By his belief in God’s nature and
in the power of God’s action in the soul, the Catholic is not tortured by a
servile fear of damnation. He knows that he has all the treasure necessary to
assure salvation: namely, faith, hope, and charity.
On the contrary, the Lutheran soul is incapable of finding in God a
benevolent and merciful Creator. The Protestant God is the very One who
created a perverse humanity, who is incapable of saving him, and who is
prepared to chastise him. The Protestant has only one thought: escape the
divine wrath of the Almighty, in spite of the invincible concupiscence
poisoning his own nature. Since it has become the center of religion, the
human soul seeks salvation in the justice with which it covers itself. Luther
eliminates charity and retains servile fear to a certain point, such that the
knowledge of divine things revolves around human corruption. Following
Luther’s doctrine, the Protestant soul cannot exist without sinking into
despair, for he lacks the perfect confidence of being in the state of grace.
What becomes of God in this anthropotheology? He is reduced to an
abstract and far-off being who is both powerless and unjust. One might
have been inclined to think that God, for Luther, would be all the more
implicated in human salvation as man is rendered powerless. The opposite
is true. In spite of what would seem logical, the Lutheran should expect
nothing of God, because in fact it is ourselves and we alone who use that
“skill to leap from our sin on to Christ’s justice, and hence to be as certain
of possessing Christ’s piety as we are of having our own bodies.”[45]
In reality, with his absurd notion of exterior grace received from God,
Luther emerged as the founder of the most radical naturalism. He enclosed
man within himself, and, with man as his starting point and first principle,
deducted from him everything in every domain, including theology.

5. Luther at Odds with Lutheranism

In this study of Luther and his ties to modernist principles, our
intention is not to focus on Lutheranism itself. Why? Because the principles
of Luther are modernist; those of Lutheranism are not. Truly, the Reformed
Church created by Luther–with its hierarchy, its worship, and its dogmas–is
at odds with the principles of Protestantism. Thus, at the very heart of
Protestantism, there is solution of continuity, perfect illogic, and ultimate
contradiction. All the irony of Protestantism’s inherent schizophrenia is
captured by the Protestant scholar Harnack:
Protestantism suffers from an internal antinomy derived from its very foundations. If you
have no confession of faith, who are you? What society do you make up? Why do you exist?
And if you do promulgate a confession of faith; if you wish to impose it on me by your
authority and in spite of the resistance of my conscience, how are you still Protestant? What do
you do any differently from the Catholic, and against what do you claim Luther and Calvin did
well to revolt?
Likewise, Hausser, speaking of Calvin, states that he “did not see, or did not
wish to see, the frightful antinomy at the very root of his own effort: to
recreate an authority, a dogma, a Church, on the basis of private
judgment.”[46]
“Private judgment” is not a viable principle, and the course of events
soon put a little common sense back in the ideas of emancipated Brother
Martin. Luther found himself obliged to soften his principle, to apply it
selectively, in spite of the glaring contradiction involved. It is not that
halfway down the road he disavowed his principle of private judgment; it is
that he was a man above all opportunistic and pragmatic; our noble
libertarian quickly became a raging sectarian as soon as anyone threatened
his own liberty, which meant, in the context, his own authority. Now, the
principle of complete liberty for all–private judgment–can logically give
rise to nothing but chaos, anarchy, and universal rebellion against
everything in general and against Luther in particular. In 1525, he
proclaimed before all the world that the authorities had no right to hinder
anyone from teaching or professing his belief. Five years later, after the
schism of the Anabaptists, he ordered the authorities to hand the scoundrels
over to the executioner. The fact is, in the meantime, the heresiarch had sold
his doctrine of religious freedom to the State in exchange for protection. He
had therefore cut himself off from the group of radical peasants, hurling
insults at them and delivering them up to the justice of German princes. It
was a clever move, since in so doing Luther assured the survival of his
religion by confiding it to almighty princes. He denied the pope his spiritual
authority and, turning around, offered it to the princes, who thereby became
popes and despots rolled into one. These tyrants whom the will of Luther
had made popes soon came to him demanding outrageous concessions, and
before long Luther was obliged to surrender even those points of dogma
and moral teaching which he himself had not yet rejected, such as the
outlaw of divorce and of polygamy.
Such was the inevitable consequence of private judgment. Men
abandoned the faith of the Church and received the imperious dogmas of
Luther, Calvin, Elizabeth, Gustavus Adolphus, et alia. They were indeed
imperious, in Geneva perhaps more than anywhere else, to the extent that
wielding too freely one’s private judgment became a matter of life and
death. Calvin was a man to tolerate neither contradiction nor competition;
he burned at the stake whosoever dared propose a rival dogma to his own
and filled his books with foul insults against those whom he was powerless
to harm. The end result was that people had broken with the pope only to
swear allegiance to the Quakers, the Moravian Brethren, Knox, and a
thousand others whose only conclusive argument was that they had not
managed to find the truth. Erasmus laments their fate with a touch of irony:
“What a great defender of Evangelical freedom we have in Luther! Thanks
to him, the yoke we bear becomes twice as heavy. Mere opinions become
dogma.”[47]
✜✜✜
Our severe judgment of the fruits of the Reformation find an echo
among a number of sincere Protestants. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, eminent Protestants of the German High Church deplored the bitter
fruits of the Reformation, considering that, rather than celebrate the fourth
centenary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Protestants would be better off
doing “penance in sack-cloth and ashes”:
...that the movement of reform which took place in 1517 had a certain number of positive
results, but that it did much more to make the situation worse; that the movement cast out a
devil but brought in seven still more furious.[48] Luther strode through his century like a
demon crushing under his feet what a thousand years had venerated.[49] How small the
Reformer has become according to the Luther studies of our own Protestant investigators!
How his merits have shriveled up! We believed that we owed to him the spirit of toleration and
liberty of conscience. Not in the least! We recognized in his translation of the Bible a
masterpiece stamped with the impress of originality–we may be happy now if it is not plainly
called a “plagiarism”!…Looking upon the “results” of their work thus gathered together, we
cannot help asking the question: What, then, remains of Luther?[50]
To which Catholics respond: What remains of Luther is the
undermining of Christianity–and even the notion of religion–through the
effects of his principle of private judgment, the echo of Lucifer’s “Non
serviam–I will not serve.” The Reformation was far from truly reforming
man; on the contrary, it deformed and even perverted him. By what means?
It sufficed to withdraw from him all divine influence, leaving him to his
own devices. Man found himself isolated and separate from God even at the
heart of his religion. This horrific achievement was the work of Luther. He
invented the religion of private judgment, in which the faith of the believer
has its origin in the depths of his own consciousness. He created a Christian
who interprets divine truth and proclaims the sovereignty of his own reason
before the Church. For this reason, Luther personifies the arrival of the Self
on the spiritual and religious scene. Behold the very quintessence of
modernism, from Kant to our own day.
 CHAPTER 6: KANT AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF “MAYBE”
We have taken pains to emphasize that Lutheranism is at odds with
Luther’s own principles. Fundamentally, Luther makes a clean slate of the
rational, historical, and dogmatic past. He would allow individual freedom
to express itself openly, with its suite of disorder and anarchy. However,
since so lawless a doctrine would have been unlivable, he soon built up
walls and barred the windows of his system, and thus was founded the
Lutheran Church, the polar opposite of such freedom of thought and belief.
Lutheranism, with all of its offshoots, is an incoherent system oscillating
between two contradictory extremes: private judgment and religious
authority; salvation by personal effort and the need of a Church. For two
centuries, dogmatic Protestantism did its best to keep such a congenital
defect out of the public eye by drawing attention primarily to its moral
aspect or its political, anti-papal aspect; the subterfuge only postponed the
fatal arrival of a crisis.
The true successors of Luther are those who drew all of the logical
conclusions from the principle of private judgment. By their new
philosophy, their new religion, and their new Revelation, they rebuilt the
world on the basis of man and man alone, without human or divine law,
without reason or exterior revelation, without God or anything else. Such
would be the work of Kant, Strauss, and Schleiermacher, whom we will
study in the following chapters. Kant is the first chronologically and
incontestably the master; in our study, he is inseparable from Hegel.
The perennial philosophy, whose father is Aristotle, teaches that things
exist and that we can know their nature. In doing so, it supposes three
things: the human intellect can know the truth; it can know exterior reality;
and it knows what is stable in being, its nature and essence. Descartes
already introduced a new perspective: The Cartesian “Cogito–I think,
therefore I am”–begins with the subject and only after goes on to attain the
real. The Cartesian seed bore the bitter fruit of Kantian idealism. Kant
prided himself on having brought about a “Copernican revolution” in
philosophy. We long imagined that the sun revolved around the earth, and
Copernicus proved the contrary–that the earth moves around the sun.
Likewise, we had long assumed that the mind takes its measure from things
in order to know them, but Kant took it upon himself to prove, inversely,
that the object is measured by our thought and that thought is, in fact, the
center of gravity for all knowledge. Kant claimed that man cannot know the
truth of things and that the intellect is shut within itself, without reference to
the outside world. Thus he openly professed an ignorantist agnosticism and
an egological immanentism, limited to knowledge of the self. For his part,
Hegel attacked the third point, the stability of being, by his dialectic of
revolutionist evolution. Though Hegel might appear at first sight to be the
very incarnation of the modernist spirit understood as the evolution of all
Revelation according to the human consciousness, it is Kant who, by his
writings, offers the more profound reflection of the essence of modernism.

1. Kant and His Age

The eighteenth century is the age of the Aufklärung–the
Enlightenment. The Aufklärung is perfectly described by Kant as man’s
effort to free himself from his culpable immaturity, that is to say, from his
inability to reason without the guidance of another.[51] God and religion
are set aside, to be replaced by the religion of man. The Freemason
Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), with his Education of the Human Race (1778),
inaugurated the religion of pure reason set free from God: “Why should we
not in all positive religions see just that order in which the human
understanding everywhere solely, and by itself, is developed and must
continue to develop, rather than either smile or carp at any one of
them?”[52] This declaration was to inspire all of the theological
development–or rather, theological revolution–of the nineteenth century. Its
creator and principal advocate was not strictly speaking a theologian but a
philosopher of the Aufklärung, Emmanuel Kant.
Kant was born in Koenigsberg in 1724, the fourth child of honest
parents whom he always admired, especially his mother. “My mother was a
sweet-tempered, affectionate, pious and upright woman and a tender
mother, who led her children to the fear of God by pious teaching and
virtuous example.”[53] The education he received from his mother, who
was a member of a pietist sect, did much toward making him accept without
discussion the value of morality and religion. At the same time, during his
university studies, Kant was introduced to the modern sciences, in
particular to Newton’s astronomical system, which impressed him to such a
degree that it gave rise in his mind to a second fundamental truth, to him as
evident and undeniable as morality itself: namely, the existence of a
necessary and universal positive science. Aside from a short absence, he
spent all of his life in his hometown as a professor of logic and metaphysics
at the university.
In the words of the poet Heine, it is a difficult task indeed to write a
history of Emmanuel Kant’s life, since he had neither a life nor a history.
He led a bachelor existence with a mechanically ordered routine, lost in
abstraction, in a peaceful side street of Koenigsberg, an old city in
northeastern Germany. His life was the caricature of the university
professor: get up, have coffee, teach classes, eat, take a walk. Everything
had a set time; and the neighbors knew that it was half past four when
Emmanuel Kant, with his gray overcoat and Spanish cane, stepped out of
his door to stroll the length of the avenue–rechristened in his honor “The
Professor’s Walk.” With this routine, though he was of fragile health, Kant
succeeded in living out a long career replete with intellectual labors, the
fruit of his slow but profound and persevering reflection. It was only in the
1770’s that he began to ruminate on the system which was to revolutionize
philosophy. Though he was more sociable than Heine described him, since
his company was sought out by the bright society of Koenigsberg, it is a
fact that our bachelor’s morality of duty did much to promote the Calvinist
and Puritan mentality.
His philosophical work revolves around the two guiding lights of his
youth: the evident nature of Newtonian physics and the certitude that a
moral law lies deep in the heart of every man. All of his intellectual
ambition and his entire philosophical system went to defend these two
central themes to such a degree that he wanted written on his tomb: “The
starry skies above me, and the moral law within me.” This epitaph might
have been inscribed in subtitle to each of his works, for it characterizes
them exactly. Indeed, the entire philosophical system of Kant is an effort to
reconcile these two untouchable truths, Newtonian physics and Rousseauist
morality, but at the same time to confine each to its domain and so avoid
any conflict between the two.
In agreement with the English empiricist Hume, Kant admitted that
things really exist, yet he claimed that we cannot know them as they are in
themselves. The only science which may truly be called certain is Newton’s
experimental physics. Yet even physics does not attain the real in itself but
phenomena, that is to say, things as they appear through the eyeglass of the
human intellect. There is most definitely something under this informing-
deforming lens, but we cannot know whether the glass transmits what is
beneath. Substances, self and God, the real beyond the knowing subject: all
fall into the category of terra incognita, unexplored territory and no-man’s
land. Therefore, metaphysics, which treats of things-in-themselves, is an
uncertain science and often false–so declares his first book, The Critique of
Pure Reason. However, in his second book, The Critique of Practical
Reason, he defended pietistic morality and granted metaphysics the
cognitive value he had just denied it in the realm of physics. He clarifies: “I
have destroyed reason to make room for faith.”[54] Invalid in the domain of
science, metaphysics becomes valid when it is used in the service of
morality, whose only guide is a blind faith. The things-in-themselves of the
real world are scientifically false but morally true because they are useful
for life. What is doubtful in reality becomes a practical certainty with the
magic wand of the morality of duty. Life after death, God, the world, and
the free “self” are not the object of physical, scientific knowledge, but
because they are morally necessary they must exist. They are in the realm
of “maybe,” but we have to live “as if they were.” Man refuses to claim any
certain, rational knowledge of the world of things, but he must act as though
he knew a great deal about it. We can never be sure what lies behind the
eyeglass but we ought to live as though we saw reality as clear as day. This
dualism, hermetically separating the practical order from the speculative, is
what allowed Kant to maintain the two guiding stars of his life. It remains
for us to see in greater detail how this system is fundamentally ignorantist
and egological.

2. Can Being Be? Maybe!

Heine protests that Kant was a petty merchant whom nature intended
for measuring out tea and sugar. Unfortunately, Kant went beyond the limits
set by nature to become a thinker, and his thought destroyed a universe. It
was open season on “heretics” in Prussia during the first years of Kant’s
vocation as a writer. The little logic professor of Koenigsberg had already
published several works in an obscure prose, which could only have been of
interest to a handful of intellectual nonconformists, when he came out with
his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Its complicated, off-putting style saved
it from being censored by the Prussian Minister of Education. Had the
Berlin Inquisitor wanted to condemn the volume, he would have been hard
put to extract a single heresy against the Lutheran faith; it was largely
unsuccessful–few read it, and certainly no one understood it. Yet this little
book, misunderstood from the cradle, slowly but surely came into its own
as time passed. It has become the idealist manifesto because it refuses to the
intelligence any capacity to know the real. It is subjective agnosticism, the
philosophy of the incomprehensible. Kant was strongly influenced by his
contemporaries, and he meant for his system to reconcile the skepticism of
Hume with the physical science of Newton. To illustrate how Kant
understood the mystery of the understanding, let us imagine a conversation
between the two philosophers over a round of lawn-bowling:
“My dear Hume, my first ball is a hair’s breadth from the wicket. Let’s
see if you can knock it away!”
“No sooner said than done, my dear Kant! You see! I have the
impression of pushing away your ball with mine, but that is an illusion.
From my tender youth, I have been taught to associate before and after as
cause and effect, in such a way that the first movement of the ball would be
the cause of the second. In reality, there occurs nothing of the kind. I see
nothing more than does the parakeet perched on my shoulder. There are two
brightly colored blobs, two movements, one before and one after, nothing
more. Our friend Descartes was right to reduce bodies to their mere
extension in space. As for the rest–the substances which we term balls, the
first movement considered as the cause of the second–all that is the fruit of
our imagination and our childhood prejudice.”
“What you are saying is profound indeed, my dear Hume, and it
awakens me from my realist illusion. Can we ever be certain that we attain
things and their causes? It is something quite impossible. And yet, look! As
I throw my second ball, I am undeniably aware of the law of gravity
discovered by Newton. The question is therefore to discover whence comes
this self-evident, necessary, and universal law. To say that it comes from our
experience of outside things is wasted breath, I grant you. It must therefore
come from within, from the subject. As I understand it, knowledge is the
work of my mind, which produces its own ideas from raw facts, just as the
sculptor produces the statue by laboring the stone.”
Kant launches his critique by denying to things their nature and
essence. For him, neither pine nor oak shares the common nature of tree.
For him, human nature is not something shared by Tom, Dick, and Harry,
such that an intellect might class them under the concept of “man.” For him,
things are a formless plasma that cannot be known, and the intellect has
nothing to learn from the real. Can being be? Maybe, but raw things are
impenetrable for the intellect, and if there is understanding, the mind can
only have drawn it from within itself. Thus, our thought, believing it grasps
and contemplates a foreign object, grasps and contemplates only itself.
Behold the very essence of idealism: thought does not attain a thing but an
idea. In an idealist universe, the human mind, because it automatically
dismisses experience, is obliged to shape for itself what it knows.
Ultimately, it knows only its ideas, not the things around it. In the idealist
regime, especially among the radical disciples of Kant, the origin and term
of all knowledge is the mind, regardless of the world around us; nothing
could be farther from realism.
Idealist knowledge is a colossal illusion. It knows its thought–the
phenomenon–but not the reality–the thing-in-itself. The intellect is entirely
divorced from reality. Thus Kant proclaimed the human intelligence
completely autonomous in the face of external reality. The consequences
were tragic. Kant saw no contradiction in saying that a thing is subject to
laws and that the same thing in itself is independent of all law, for the
person ought to consider himself in two different ways.[55] Kantian
philosophy allows for the possibility of contradiction, since it accepts the
existence of a thought about nothing, of a representation without something
represented. It goes further still and undermines the eternal notion of truth.
Kantian truth is defined as the conformity of thought with itself: all that is
coherent is true. Under these conditions, it goes without saying that a
Kantian is never wrong; he is infallible always and everywhere, for the
ideas exuded by his mind are truth itself! His wildest fancies become true
ipso facto by the simple fact of being thought. A thought which never goes
outside of itself is nonetheless the definition of truth professed by all
modernists, following the lead of their master. Calling itself enlightened,
philosophy signs a pact with darkness and takes a public vow of
ignorantism. Calling itself wisdom, it plunges us into an abyss of
obscurantism.

3. Fideist Egologism
It is said that the Critique of Pure Reason threw Kant’s poor valet into
despair; by it, the professor had made a blank slate of everything, religion
included. That is why, ten years later, he decided to write the Critique of
Practical Reason, to leave room for morality. The second volume is the
counterpart of the first: something is only really destroyed once it has been
replaced. Kant had concluded that pure reason can know nothing.
Henceforth he set about proving that practical reason, which has to do with
questions of morality, can teach metaphysical truths about man and God by
the last portal that remains: the thinking self. This second work underwent a
more careful scrutiny at the hands of the Berlin inquisitors. The reason is
that the author touched on religious questions, such as the existence of God,
the immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will–all questions which had
in fact been treated in the first volume but remained well camouflaged
within the complex whole. Yet, here too Kant managed to slip through the
holes of the censor, proving the truth of religion by his own obscure and
original argument. The Berliners, though deploring the fact that the little
professor never set foot in a church, were nonetheless satisfied by his
correct answers in spite of a shoddy reasoning.
The fact is that for Kant the three great metaphysical ideas–God, the
soul, the world–are mere prejudices in the order of speculative reasoning.
God is of the order of the “maybe”; He is an unknowable “thing-in-itself.”
However, Kant inherited from his pietistic mother the undeniable
conviction that the moral life is necessary and a duty which forms the basis
of all right living. Duty–the categorical imperative–calls for certain
conditions: the existence of God, the human soul, and freedom. Thus, the
idea of God flows from the moral order and not vice versa since, for Kant,
morality is more important than God. If God exists, it is because He is
useful. Kant’s proof of God smacks more of wishful thinking than of
reason.
The escape hatch of moral necessity, proving what reason had
scientifically denied, is really but an echo of the theories of Luther and
Siger; of Luther most of all, for Kant gave the perfect expression of his
predecessor’s blind faith-confidence. Kantian moral duty never attains the
rational or the true. It is an act of blind faith in our moral instincts and in the
existence of God, the immortal soul, and the world. Next, Kantian morality
is fideism à la Siger. For Kant as for Siger, there coexist in peaceful
contradiction two completely independent orders of truth: truth as scientific
knowledge of phenomena and truth as blind belief in things. The two are
not on an equal footing, and scientific truth would soon pitilessly crush
fideist truth, relegated to the domain of the pietistic, sentimental dogmas of
his mother’s religion. Hence the recurrent theme among modernists that
what is speculatively false can be true in practice.[56]
 In order to apply his utilitarian principles to religion, Kant published a
third book, much more daring than his first two: Religion Within the Limits
of Reason Alone. It contains a detailed analysis of the key doctrines of
Lutheranism in order to deny them any historical foundation. The Protestant
creeds have a purely “symbolic” value. Whether or not man historically
committed an original sin is without importance, for the human conscience
bears sufficient witness to our evil tendencies. Historically, Jesus Christ was
only a man, but it is useful to present Him as God to the faithful so that they
might understand that they are also in a certain way sons of God. All of
Revelation is brought down to the level of pure reason. For example,
miracles have no need of proof since the only witness that counts is the soul
of each one, and the only God we can ever know is the God within. Such a
God is only a chimera, and no chimera ever had the power to send anyone
to heaven or to hell. Kant’s abstraction of the divinity corresponds to the
God of the Deists of his age, who had thrown down the blasphemous
challenge: “Let us make God in our image!” This abstract idea of God in
the image of an abstract humanity was to them the only means of obtaining
peace on earth. Thus, Kant rejects all divisive creeds and inaugurates the
religion of the conscience, the same later embraced by his disciple
Schleiermacher.

4. Hegel and Pure Becoming

Kant traced the origin of all things to a perfectly autonomous human
conscience. How could this static foundation have mutated into the
revolution of ideas? A dynamic element had to be added. This was the work
of Hegel, who bore the water to turn the idealist mill. Modernism closed the
loop with the evolutionist theory, which transforms evolution and makes it
truly revolutionary. Radical evolutionism is the linchpin of the modernist
system, by which modern thinkers justify their revolution in everything
from philosophy to dogma, from history to biblical exegesis. It is not a
question of Darwin’s evolution of species, but of the more subtle and far-
reaching hypothesis of universal becoming which is at the basis of the
“new” philosophy of Hegel and which is lifted straight out of Heraclitus:
being is not; all is pure becoming.
Hegel is not an easy author to read. In Germany, no philosopher is
taken seriously unless he is obscure. Though he employs a style just as
dense as that of his compatriot, Hegel has the great advantage of possessing
clear principles: according to him, the rational is the real and the real is the
rational; in other words, thought is reality. Philosophy is defined as absolute
knowledge, the knowledge that God has of Himself and of all things. The
philosophical work of Hegel consists in building a methodical link between
concepts in order to grasp the process of generation of all the universe.
Concepts (but according to him, concepts are things!) are held together via
the dialectic method which overcomes contradictions by pushing thought
toward ever higher ideas. His entire Logic, which proposed to describe the
universe according to his own well-ordered system, is a veritable waltz of
concepts in three-quarter time: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
In order to reach the summit of full self-awareness, religion, like every
other idea, must pass through a series of inferior forms arranged in threes:
the naturalist religion of the Orient with an impersonal God (magic,
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism); the religion of an individual, spiritual God
(Jewish, Greek, Roman or utilitarian); which come together to produce
Christianity, the religion of an infinite God united to a finite humanity (with
its own triad: Incarnation, Passion, Church history, all tied together in the
Holy Trinity). The Christian religion, synthesis of all the contradictory
riches of the past, nonetheless does not represent the summit of the
consciousness of the Spirit. Thus, the history of religions bears witness to
the evolution of inferior, primitive beliefs into the superior religions which
unite them in a more enriching synthesis, awaiting the day when all belief
will at last flow together into Hegelian philosophy, pinnacle of the religion
of reason.
A few monuments are worthy of note in this gigantic palace of ideas.
According to Hegel, God–whom he names the Absolute–is in the making;
He will only be really absolute at the end-point of His evolution. In fact,
before He is fully Himself in His final stage of development, the Absolute
is the very process of generation of the universe; He is thus an integral part
of the universe and of every soul. Furthermore, what follows is always
superior to what precedes. This maxim is one of the modernist postulates of
a necessarily progressing History–an extremely useful dogma allowing
them to discard any anterior belief, since what is anterior is a priori inferior.
For Hegel, man gradually becomes divine by his own efforts. This
uninterrupted movement toward the divinization of creatures, the ultimate
pantheism, is a persistent dogma among radical modernists, notably
Teilhard and Rahner. Rahner would later adopt as his own the Hegelian
thesis by which the concept of God–and God Himself–is a projection of the
human consciousness. God does not pre-exist man; on the contrary, He is
the fruit of the human spirit.
As we can see, the faith of Hegel set out to move mountains. Yet, by
making human concepts the measure of the world, he divinized man and
lowered God. Hegelianism is really atheistic pantheism at heart, according
to which pure matter emerges from an original being-nothingness, whose
progress by contradiction reaches a climax in the human brain. There,
reflecting on himself, man becomes aware of his divinity before possessing
it, for he is only a Deus in fieri–a God in becoming, a God who is not yet
and who can never be. Never before had pantheism been formulated with
such consummate rigor.
✜✜✜
Looking closely at the Enlightenment philosophers from across the
Rhine, a fact stands out that historians of philosophy have largely ignored:
all of these German idealists blame religion. Their combat is ultimately
theological. What, indeed, is the great temptation of German thought? With
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and even Feuerbach and Marx,
philosophy is engaged in an epic struggle against the transcendent God,
whom they would skillfully imprison in the mind of man. From Kant, who
made of God the guardian of morality, by way of Feuerbach, who made
Him into a product of man, all the way to Nietzsche, who pronounced Him
dead, the most illustrious German thinkers have striven to rub out the
eruption of the Christ-God in history, and then to eliminate the divine
supremacy. These supposed philosophers are openly ignorantist and
egological. The philosophers of the Enlightenment are, on the contrary,
quite obscure, and the fact that they renounce truths which are clear as day
strongly implies that they are moved by a prejudice: the hatred of religion
and of the authority it represents. There is a high price for entertaining such
a prejudice, for it demands the sacrifice of reason and of its object, truth.
They are of the race of the alchemists of the Middle Ages who claimed to
transform metal into gold with a philosopher’s stone. Likewise, our modern
philosophers would transform the nature of God and religion by the most
recent philosopher’s stone, the stone of ignorantism and egology. They
attack the God of their fathers in order to replace Him with a tailor-made
God, cut to fit the self-ego, beginning and end of all things.
 St. Pius X, in his condemnation of modernism, did not hesitate to lay
the blame on Kant personally: Kantianism is the modern heresy! Kant is the
theoretician and the prince of modernism. The disciples who came after him
only produced variations on the master’s theme. Nothing is lacking to his
system. Everything is already in place; everything has been said. His
successors–Strauss in Holy Scripture and Schleiermacher in theology–
would only capitalize on the ideas already coined by their leader. The Kant-
Hegel duo form a pause in the modernist symphony as they draw together
all of its fundamental principles. They and their followers championed the
notions underlying the religion of man, in which Revelation is a mere
secretion of the imagination and the consciousness of the believer. Such
principles draw us already into the heart of modernism.
 CHAPTER 7: THE MYTHICAL GOSPEL OF STRAUSS
In itself, biblical criticism is neither Protestant nor rationalist. It began
with the Bible itself, and Catholics were the first to defend and explain the
holy Books. However, the philosophers who have attacked the Gospels in
the name of scientific critique are legion. Already in the first century,
Celsus denied the Incarnation by reducing Jesus to a mere man. Shortly
thereafter, Porphyrus led a concerted attack on the reality of biblical
Revelation with no other motive than the rejection of the Cross, folly and
scandal in his eyes. This shows that from the start some critical studies of
the Gospel, rather than seeking historical fact, were distorted by
philosophical or theological presuppositions. Such, unfortunately, is the
common characteristic of all Protestant critics, a theme repeated by the
choir of Catholic modernists.
After a general overview of the ramifications of the various biblical
schools, our study will be concerned with the exegesis of Strauss in his
Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) in order to discover its underlying philosophical
principles. The subsequent exegetical chapters–concerning Loisy, de Lubac,
and Ratzinger–will reveal that, for all of the essentials, the same strategy is
still in use, albeit now wielded with a greater dexterity.

1. Overview of the Schools of Critical Exegesis

The Holy Bible has been from antiquity the object of profound study,
but biblical criticism as such increased considerably after Luther and
Descartes. The increase was due to the arrival of Protestant private
judgment in the sixteenth century, and, in the following century, of the
Cartesian mindset which sought to explain all things in terms of
mathematics. Critics wanted to discover a technique which would serve as a
key for explaining the Bible scientifically. The nineteenth century brought
criticism back into the forefront as the progress of the sciences–geology,
astronomy, paleontology–raised new objections against the traditional faith.
Nonetheless, these difficulties were not such as to change substantially the
kind of answer–based on the nature of things–which the Church had always
provided in similar circumstances. In the sixteenth century, Baronius was
already explaining, with a great deal of good sense, that the Holy Scriptures
were not written to show how the heavens go round (astronomy) but how to
go to heaven.
 In reality, the exegetes of the nineteenth century used science as their
excuse to throw into doubt not only the Bible but all of religion. Numerous
schools of exegesis came into being, all fundamentally the same in spite of
their superficial differences. Above all, their common goal was to resolve a
problem which, for them, was not open to debate: how to explain Jesus
Christ and the Church without Revelation. From the dawn of Christendom,
apologists had been proving that a given effect points to a given cause. If
the effect is holy and divine, the cause, too, must be holy and divine. The
sanctity and the divinity of the Church make us look back to her Founder,
and this Founder was a Prophet, a Wonderworker, and a divine Being
according to every oral and written tradition. Protestant doctors in theology
were about to upset something that eighteen centuries of Catholic faith and
three centuries of Lutheran belief had tranquilly accepted as the most basic
truth. In so doing, they were faced with a problem hitherto unimagined:
accepting Jesus and His Church while denying divine Revelation.
Previously, the critics–even those who claimed the pompous title of
“scientific”–believed in the principle of causality, the foundation of all
science. Henceforth, biblical speculations had a new goal. They strove to
show that the existence of the Church and of Jesus Christ did not prove the
existence of an historical Revelation by God. Yet how was it possible in the
same breath to deny that God had spoken to men and still grant a certain
historical reality to Jesus, the enigmatic figure who founded that
bothersome society known as the Church? Obviously, such an about-face
did not just suddenly happen. Prussian Illuminism, straight from the
Masonic lodges, with its rationalist, sentimental conception of religion, had
played a definite role in this exegetical revolution.
The Aufklärung actually defines God as the projection of the human
imagination. Its first representative was Lessing (1729-81). He first
proposed the principle of a religion created by man: even if we could not
refute all of the objections against the Bible, religion would nonetheless
remain untouched in the heart of those Christians who have acquired a
profound sentiment of its truths.[57] He claimed that the New Testament
was riddled with contradictions. The Gospels were a thinly veiled fraud;
Jesus, a charlatan and an impostor. Kant said no less with his Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1794), reducing history to symbols,
Revelation to lies, and miracles to natural events. Why? Because the
supreme rule of exegesis was not to seek what an author, inspired or
otherwise, had actually said but what he ought to have said to be in
conformity with natural religion.
Less brutal but no less radical was the effort of Paulus (1761-1851),
son of a pastor versed in spiritism, to explain all of the Gospel accounts
according to the naturalist principle: what is beyond the laws of nature does
not exist. Apart from his absurd fabrication which had Jonas passing a few
nights in the disreputable haunt, “The Whale’s Tail,” Paulus’s work
consisted in a critical sifting of the various miracles and prophecies of
Jesus. Thus the apostles said they saw Jesus walking on water because the
mist gave them an illusion of perspective; Jesus, buried alive, was revived
in His tomb by the cold. His exegesis was an attempt to maintain the
Gospels while dismissing the Evangelists. Yet lowering an account
consistently supernatural to a natural level was like trying to unsalt the sea,
as contemporaries were quick to notice. Paulus’s attacks were so outrageous
that rationalists themselves condemned his extravagance. They learned
from his mistakes and went back to work to find a better solution.
Where other rationalists had overshot the mark by excess of zeal, Baur
and his student Strauss brought their own methodical response to the
Gospel accounts of miracles. By their theory, these supernaturally charged
miracle stories were in fact produced much later by Christian communities
overflowing with imagination and eager for anything extraordinary and
mythical. Strauss’s “demythification” succeeded where the other systems
had failed. The mythical school was crowned with success and lived to see
an abundant posterity. It was taken up by Ritschl in Germany and by Renan
and Sabatier in France, then passed down to Loisy and Bultmann, until it
finally reached de Lubac and Ricœur. The different nuances of
interpretation give the impression of a veritable cascade of critical schools,
all the more difficult to distinguish as the individual authors often revised
their hypotheses. The various schools of criticism had such a tendency to
multiply as each new arrival discredited the previous one, only to be swept
away by its own successor, more critical yet. Harnack begged to differ with
the original mythical school and founded the kerygmatic school (God is
Father). Loisy disagreed with Harnack and founded the eschatological
school (the imminence of the end of the world). Since the eschatological
school could not explain the success of Christianity in the Greco-Roman
world, which had remained perfectly indifferent to the dreams of Israelite
messianism, the syncretist school was founded (“Christianity is the sum of
non-Christian religions”). This latest avatar was supplanted by Bultmann’s
powerful Form History, to which Loisy later pledged his allegiance. Form
history has since cornered the market of modern critique, and we will have
occasion to revisit it.[58] This proliferation of radical methods of criticism
bears witness to the tremendous influence of Strauss’s mythical school.

2. The “Mythical” Life of Jesus

David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was born in Würtemberg and
studied to become a pastor. He attended the lectures of Schleiermacher at
the University of Berlin, but he was more strongly influenced by one of his
professors, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), whom he followed to
Tübingen in 1825. At that time, Baur was developing the original idea that
the first Christians were divided into two camps declaring a war to the
death: the Judaizing Petrines and the Paulinian Gentiles. The books were as
divided as the Christians. The New Testament texts were in reality
polemical manifestos of the two parties, written after the fact by
antagonistic communities as late as the second century. Why was it
imperative that they be written so late? To allow several generations the
time to produce the “Gospel myth.” Baur’s dialectical antagonism
dovetailed with Strauss’s Hegelian sympathies. For Strauss as for Hegel,
everything evolves, the world is in constant progress, and Christianity can
be but a step in humanity’s march toward the future. Like thoughts
themselves, writings develop through the struggle of rival tendencies in
history. The internecine war of the early Church gives the key to numerous
problems in New Testament exegesis, at the risk of an occasional bending
of history to make it agree with the hypothesis.
Other influences played a considerable role in Strauss’s biblical
interpretation. The historical method had come into vogue to explain how
legends had formed around the founding of Rome. In the same vein,
modern scholars claimed that the account of the Pentateuch–the first five
books of the Bible–was in contradiction with the data gathered from the
rocks. Why not use the same historical method to examine Bible History?
Such an archaeological tool could chip away more than the rocks; it had the
potential to reduce the Gospels themselves to rubble.
Armed with his critical method, Strauss–who was a mere twenty-seven
years old in 1835, and a young instructor at the Lutheran seminary of
Tübingen–undertook to rewrite the Life of Jesus with a view to explaining
why the writings of the four Evangelists were unreliable. This volume
marks a watershed event in the history of modern rationalism. After
Schleiermacher’s Discourse on Religion, which turned creeds into
interchangeable symbols,[59] no other single book had such an effect on the
Lutheran Church. It made a blank slate of historical faith and in so doing
upset more than just the creeds of the Lutheran Church: the very foundation
of Christianity was destroyed, on the whole and in detail. The entire
Christian edifice effectively stands or falls with the historicity of its
Founder.
To the general astonishment of the Christian world, the Lutheran
professor came out with a Life of Jesus which dismissed as false or
unimportant everything about Jesus Christ that the Church had considered
vital. The historical framework around which dogma had developed was
practically reduced to nothing. The reader sets down the book with a very
vivid picture in his mind but one having nothing to do with the traditional
Christian idea of Jesus Christ. Strauss paints for us an enthusiastic young
Jew who held religious formalities up to ridicule and denounced the moral
corruption of his time; who had been put to death by the scribes and the
Pharisees; whose biography was written by four men only after the definite
facts had long been buried under a mass of legends. This biography in turn
gave rise to a system of outrageous dogmas, which had taken shape around
a few ill-defined myths. This Jesus was described as born miraculously of a
Virgin, as performing miracles throughout his public life, as resurrecting
after three days in the tomb. In so doing, Strauss–Lutheran pastor and
alleged defender of Christianity–seemed to be shaking hands with the
enlightened rationalists, the sworn enemies of religion.[60]
Not long after, in France, a disciple proved greater than the master.
Renan (1823-1892), in his own Life of Jesus, took up the ideas of his
colleague from across the Rhine. This time, the gentle dreamer from Galilee
is transformed into the extraordinary individual on whom the universal
conscience has bestowed the title of Son of God, and rightly so–did he not
bring religion to a new and incomparably higher state?[61] In an age when
scientific progress was casting doubt on so many supposedly miraculous
events, such ideas could scarcely be taken seriously. The task was rather to
explain how they had taken form. Here Strauss bears the water to turn the
rationalist mill.
 Why are not the Gospels a trustworthy account of the life of Jesus?
The eighteenth century and all of its “philosophical” critics of the Bible had
replied that they were nothing but a fraud. Yet, for the nineteenth century,
that was not a sufficient answer. The explanation behind such a deformation
of historical events was not to be found in a will to deceive but rather in the
notion of myth in the minds of the Apostles. These men were sincerely
convinced of the truth of the miracles they described, for they lived in
expectation of the Messiah. The Orient was full of messiahs. Deprived as
they were of all critical sense, their obsession made them take the arrival of
this young, enthusiastic Jew for the reality. Everything went to consolidate
and confirm the mythical figure of the awaited Messiah.
Behold the reason for so many modifications of the original meaning
of Old Testament texts, molded into prophecies announcing the Christ.
Behold the reason why the apocalyptic writings are said to announce future
events. Identical myths had taken shape around the founders of the other
religions. When the Gospels are understood in this way, their contradictions
no longer make them unintelligible; they can finally be understood. The
“Gospel myth” gave the scientific key to unlocking the enigmatic New
Testament. A myth is the spontaneous creation of the primitive faith of the
Church, unconsciously giving flesh to its beliefs and preoccupations with a
multitude of accounts which are first elaborated as part of an oral tradition,
then taken down by the Evangelists in perfectly good faith. The Gospels do
not recount the story of Jesus but the beliefs of the community that authored
them.
To separate real history from imaginary myth, Strauss used what he
called scientific criteria. He set aside all accounts of miracles, then all
accounts which reflect the preoccupations of primitive Christianity. None of
this weighing and sifting prevented him from maintaining the “truth” of
what he called mythical. He proclaimed ingenuously that the supernatural
birth of Christ, His miracles, His Resurrection, and His Ascension into
heaven remain eternal truths, whatever doubt may be cast upon their reality
as historical events. An argument which appears contradictory to us can in
fact be perfectly logical to a thinker imbued with Hegelian dialectic.
To the negative aspect of the myth deprived of historical value, Strauss
added the positive aspect drawn from Kant and Hegel. The myth is
essentially symbolic: It symbolizes the progress of humanity. The myth–the
symbol–is more important than the fact. The Gospel does not so much
speak of events which took place eighteen hundred years ago in Palestine as
of the mystical evolution of souls represented in these alleged events:
Humanity is the union of two natures; God become man; the Infinite manifesting itself in
the finite remembering its Infinitude; it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible
father, Nature and Spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human
history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man.…
It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven; from the suppression of its mortality as a
personal, rational, and terrestrial spirit arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens.
By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God;
that is, by the kindling with him of the idea of humanity, the individual man participates in the
divinely human life of the species.[62]
Passages such as this one from the Life of Jesus are full of double
meaning so blatant that certain of his Protestant contemporaries found it
hard to accept, even those naturally sympathetic. His writing contains, of
course, the typically Kantian and Deist idea of a God who is made in the
image and likeness of man. It contains likewise the Hegelian conception of
the man who becomes God as he gradually becomes conscious of himself.
Ultimately, Strauss is peddling the age-old conception of the Manichaeans,
both immanent (all things are in me) and pantheistic (all things are God),
resurrected by Freemasonic Illuminism alive again today in the New Age
movement.[63]

3. The Philosophical Principles of Critical Exegesis

It is one thing to define the contours of Strauss’s exegesis in his Life of
Jesus and quite another to unearth its underlying principles. These self-
proclaimed scientific and exegetical principles are nothing of the sort. They
are essentially philosophical, since they are founded on working hypotheses
assumed by all of modern philosophy. We present them here as they appear
in Strauss, working from the obvious to the more hidden.
Above all, there is the notion of the myth, an account which bears the
appearance of history without its reality. The principle of the myth amounts
to saying that the primitive community threw a veil over history as it really
happened. As we read the Gospels, we have the impression of reading the
testimony of eye-witnesses or at least near-contemporaries of the facts
described. In reality, Strauss tells us, the Evangelists are essentially
recounting myths, legends, and fiction. The Gospels are pure illusion. They
were disfigured by later Christian communities for apologetic and apostolic
reasons. Strauss assumes that those who had known and loved Jesus Christ
were supremely indifferent as to any substantial biographical information,
whereas the second century brought a sudden interest.
In reality, the Straussian principle of the myth does not hold water: it is
a gratuitous sociological a priori denounced by sociologists themselves.
Moreover, the principle of the myth supposes that the Evangelists of the
second century ignored the Eighth Commandment–“Thou shalt not bear
false witness”–by passing off as eye-witness accounts what was really
legendary and written well after the fact. We should be demythologizing the
Life and not the Gospels. The mythical Gospel of Strauss is the real myth,
and not the testimony of the Gospels. It is not difficult to trace his idea back
to its source. The Straussian postulate which opposes myth to history is an
echo of the Kantian philosophy which distinguishes between visible
appearances and unknowable reality, between Christ known by faith and the
unknown Christ of history. Ritschl (1822-89) acknowledged his Kantian
lineage more frankly than did his master, Strauss:
But why do you seek to know who Christ is in Himself, and what Revelation is in itself,
and what miracles are in themselves? Those are metaphysical judgments, judgments about the
existence of the unknowable “thing-in-itself” [Seinsurteile], and that kind of judgment is of no
interest to the religious soul.[64]
When we see the nature of Strauss’s “Gospel myth,” we are entitled to
wonder if it is possible to be both a genuine exegete and a Kantian. Is an
exegete enamored of Kantian philosophy capable of engaging in Christian
exegesis, since he becomes an ignorantist by his very adhesion to Kant,
denying that historical facts can be known?
A second principle buttresses the first: the Gospels were written long
after the fact. Distance between the events and the testimony is necessary
because a myth needs time to develop through the deformation of concrete
facts. Legends are woven around facts in the imagination of the people long
after their heroes are dead. If legends arise too close to historical fact, they
are rejected as false and lose their popularity. Here again, we find a
preconceived idea with no justification in the text: a free-floating pendulum.
Strauss himself admitted that his entire mythical system would fall apart if
the Gospels had really been written by eye-witnesses or men close to the
actual events. Now, it is obvious, for example, that the “late redaction”
theory cannot be applied to the Resurrection of Jesus, since St. Peter was
preaching it in Jerusalem two months later in front of three thousand Jews.
It is therefore clear that a Resurrection myth “invented after the fact” was
drawn out of thin air by Strauss, not by the Evangelists. In fact, Harnack,
one of the most illustrious successors of Strauss in the realm of radical
critique, defended the older dating of the texts by saying that the Gospels
are incontestably the reflection of a primitive tradition. Harnack is seconded
by the small fragment of St. Mark’s Gospel (6:52-53) found in the caves of
Qumran and labeled 7Q5. It discredits the mythical Gospel, since all of the
experts date it to the year 50.
In reality, there is a working hypothesis hidden behind Strauss’s
prejudice. As one train can hide another, so one working hypothesis can
keep us from seeing the real culprit. Strauss establishes his sociological and
mythical theories only the better to dissimulate his twin theory of
rationalism and naturalism, which can be expressed in very simple words:
everything which is beyond the reach of my little mind cannot exist,
because by definition I can know everything. Thus anything surpassing the
forces of nature does not exist. In the context of these hypotheses, miracles
cannot exist, and if the miraculous events are spectacular, they are judged
guilty of not corresponding with the hypothesis and so are purely and
simply denied. To be exact, Strauss does not explicitly deny miracles. He
does something much worse: he preserves the name and empties it of all
substance. For him as for all “scientific” exegetes, miracle is only the
religious label which believers affix to an event. Any event, even the most
commonplace, becomes a miracle the minute it is susceptible of a religious
interpretation. The more religious we are, the more we see miracles
everywhere. For Strauss, everything is a miracle, which amounts to saying
that nothing is a miracle.
✜✜✜
Laying bare the secret workings of a system built entirely on rationalist
a priori maxims is the best refutation. Case in point, Strauss’s system
denies God and His revelation before studying the historical facts and
weighing their value. Cast aside the facts, Strauss tells us, for they have
nothing to do with the question at hand. For him as for all the critics who
followed in his footsteps, philosophy marches in the first rank, history
comes second, and, finally, internal critique of the actual text arrives a sorry
third. Now, since the first principle affects all subsequent applications, it is
obvious that Straussian critique, far from being objective and impartial, will
be agnostic, immanentist, and evolutionist. As a result, whoever follows
and accepts its methods implicitly professes the same errors, in opposition
to Catholic doctrine.[65]
 There is no better remedy for demythologizing and de-Straussifying
our souls than to read what the caustic St. Irenaeus wrote about certain
methods already in use in the second century by Strauss’s ancestors, the
Gnostics:
Deform the texts; invent new ones; throw out the Gospels or Epistles that are disagreeable; say
that we have to grasp the deeper meaning, since the obvious meaning is only symbolic;
conjure up new texts; work with the translations, saying that they were not correctly rendered.
Use a pompous vocabulary full of abstruse, pseudo-scientific terms; dissimulate your heresy
and pass yourself off as a Christian; claim that since the Gospel was written after an oral
tradition, we should believe what the Gnostics say about it rather than taking the Gospel
literally; but in the same movement reject the Tradition of the Church and the Apostles; affirm
that the Apostles did not preach the Gospels according to the truth but according to their
listeners; and, finally, affirm anything and everything with an air of authority as though you
were yourself an eye-witness of the events.[66]
 CHAPTER 8: SCHLEIERMACHER’S RELIGION OF THE
CONSCIENCE
The phenomenon of Kantian philosophy redefined the rules of the
intellectual game. Kant appears as a milestone. Thinkers are henceforth
divided into pre-Kantians on the one hand, and on the other hand, those
who have received the philosophical initiation and “baptism” of his critique.
The division was manifest throughout the nineteenth century in Germany,
where the orthodox Protestants fought vigorously with the enlightened
liberals. The latter were enamored of the new cultural movement, a
Romanticism exalting the cult of self and raising sentiment over reason.
Ironically, profound religious disagreements threatened the very essence of
Protestantism even as the country itself found political unity.
Kant remains the point of reference for the new philosophy, but liberal
exegesis is defined by Strauss, tracing its origin to him just as much as the
idealists can be traced back to Kant. However, when it comes to dogmatic
theology, another figure appears on the Protestant scene. He became the
father of a great multitude as his influence spread throughout the
Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Luther
personifies the rupture with the Catholic Church, setting himself up in a
certain sense as the chaplain of the Renaissance, so Schleiermacher
personifies the rupture with Lutheranism, becoming the theologian of
sentimental Romanticism and the ancestor of modernism. Chronologically,
Schleiermacher was the first to open fire on the conservatives with his
dogmatic symbolism. Strauss’s liberal exegesis, taken up in turn by
Harnack, raises the stakes with its theories of mythical and mythological
Scripture. Ritschl brings up the third line of attack. He took it upon himself
to organize the mystical Church dreamed up by his master, Schleiermacher;
their combined influence came to France through the popular writings of
Sabatier. These different authors, for all their individual preoccupations,
remain well within the liberal main-stream of the nineteenth century, all
maintaining the same philosophical and theological principles inherited
from Kant and Hegel. After giving a rapid overview of Schleiermacher’s
synthesis, we will examine how he conceives of dogma–its foundation, its
development and its end-point, the Church.

1. The Man and His Doctrine

 The radical ideas of Kant and his successor, Fichte, were not well
received by the general public, which saw in them the personification of the
revolutionary spirit that had just wreaked havoc in the kingdom of France.
The common people know little of the obscure investigations of university
professors and they care even less; they tend to condemn theories that are
completely beyond their understanding. Their interest, however, is aroused
as soon as the same ideas are presented in popular form by an orator or a
journalist of talent. Such a man appeared on the scene in the beginning of
the nineteenth century: Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834).
A study of his life will serve as an introduction to his teaching.
He was born in the same year as Chateaubriand, and his aspirations
were much the same. The French romanticist produced The Genius of
Christianity, presenting a defense of the Faith by sentiment and feelings;
Schleiermacher, too, wrote a defense, but he went much farther than the
poet. His father was a Calvinist military chaplain who practiced his ministry
without believing. When he rediscovered the Faith, he joined the sect of the
Moravian Brethren, a mixture of pietism and moralism in which he reared
his son. The sect was more or less indifferent to dogma and directed souls
entirely toward a feeling of salvation by Christ and of love for Him–a
spirituality which struck a sensitive chord in the profound and mystical
young man. However, at the age of seventeen, suddenly unsatisfied by his
religion, he went through a spiritual crisis and entered the University of
Halle, at that time divided between the two opposing schools of rationalism
and supernaturalism. As a young theology student, Schleiermacher was
profoundly marked by his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. There
he drank in the agnostic solvent that dissociates religion and reason, casting
doubt on the historical facts of religion and objective knowledge in favor of
personal conscience. These Kantian principles were a revelation to
Schleiermacher and formed the substance of his preaching. He spent time in
Berlin passing through the worldly salons, breeding ground of
Romanticism, and made the acquaintance of the honored masters of the age:
Fichte and Hegel, Goëthe and Schlegel.
In 1799, in order to justify his attitude, Schleiermacher undertook to
write a defense of religion aimed at people of the world, On Religion:
Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.[67] He understood that, for the
distinguished and superficial minds in the circles he was frequenting,
neither the great metaphysical ideas nor severe exhortations on morality
would have the least effect. He founded religion on the human heart as the
source of feeling. Henceforth, he assumed the role of chaplain to
Romanticism. His moment of glory came in 1806, after the Prussian retreat
before the French army of Napoleon. His eloquence brought consolation to
his fellow countrymen, and he was elevated to the post of preacher at the
principal church of Berlin, the Trinity. His sermons were to form the basis
of his doctrinal synthesis, The Christian Faith, published in 1821.[68] He
died after having celebrated the Last Supper with all of his family, saying:
“I have never been a slave to the letter, but I press these words of Scripture
to my heart–they are the foundation of my faith; we are and we shall remain
united in communion and in the love of our God.”[69] This ultimate
testimony holds the spirit of his doctrine.
What is the seat of religion? This is the first question which
Schleiermacher answered with his new doctrine. Religion, he replied,
comes from our own consciousness because it is primarily a feeling. Indeed,
it is neither a dogmatic belief nor a moral code but a sentiment, and, more
exactly, the sentiment of dependence, the sentiment of being a cog in the
great machine of the universe. Is not man himself a being lost in the
Cosmos? This feeling of dependence is one of the most profound of our
whole spiritual life. In it we find the essence of piety and religion, from
which is born the Church, that is, the society of those who are aware of their
dependence on the universe considered as a Cosmic Unity. Only then do
individual churches begin to construct their particular system of dogmas,
varying in function of the depth and the purity of a church’s sentiment of
dependence. Next, every religion makes some appeal to Revelation. This
Revelation is not a doctrine received from God but on the contrary the
subjective fruit of the concept of God which springs forth from the religious
sentiment of dependence in the depths of our consciousness or conscience.
From the essence of religion, Schleiermacher moved on to the essence
of Christianity, which represents the purest form of religion. Christianity is
defined in reference to Christ and His redemptive mission. Just as the heart
of religion is the sentiment of dependence on the Cosmos, so also for
Christ: what was most profound in his conscience was his own awareness
of being united to God and of being a mediator between God and souls. Yet,
was Jesus God? An empty question, since the divinity of Jesus was his own
awareness of it. His superiority over us is only a question of degree since
humanity possesses the strength to produce another such apparition of God
in the world as the term of its own evolution. Nature and supernature are
but two sides of the same coin. As for the work of Redemption, Christ
saved us when he solemnly affirmed his awareness of his own divine
mission before the Sanhedrin. His awesome “Yes” is the greatest word a
mortal has ever pronounced. His death is an example for us, and if it does
redeem our sins, it is redemption in a most original sense. In fact, the sin
from which it frees us is, like religion itself, a question of sentiment. Sin is
a sickness affecting our religious sentiment and cutting off our awareness of
God in ourselves; this is the reason why Jesus, in the intensity of his union
with God, could declare himself to be without sin. Thus the Redemption is
defined as the passage from a state of consciousness which is dormant or
dead to a state of consciousness which is fully alive. This passage is the
work of faith in Jesus Christ, as Luther had already explained.

2. The Religion of Sentiment

The religion described by Schleiermacher aims above all else at
conciliation. It is designed to reconcile the worldly with the Faith and to
reconcile all creeds around the essence of Christianity. To do so, he drew
inspiration from his intellectual masters, Kant and Hegel. Of Kant, he
savored most of all the immanentist ideas which oppose the unknowable,
exterior world to the individual consciousness, queen and center of all that
is known. This consciousness–or, here, this conscience–plays the role of
ultimate judge of the Faith, since a given religion is only authentic if it
satisfies the natural inclinations of man. Schleiermacher adopted Kant’s
idea that the doctrines and rites of the Church are pure symbols, with no
intellectual significance whatsoever, yet valid as life-principles on account
of their interior and moral aspect. Hegel, too, influenced our theologian of
Romanticism. According to Hegelian teaching, dogmas are only
approximate symbols; what we must attain above and beyond dogma is the
idea. Once this idea is grasped, it ceases to be subjective and becomes
objective.
Theology thus construed is infinitely malleable. The mind can choose
between diverse phases and inspirations on the road to truth. Schleierma-
cher’s mysticism and Hegel’s theorizing, cleverly combined, would prepare
the advent of a green-house theology–a purely immanent creation
blossoming in the depths of each individual religious conscience. Moreover,
since all of the Protestant denominations are in agreement on the moral and
religious superiority of Christ, one may say that the Christian community
was formed and consolidated around Christ’s experience of the divine,
which finally becomes the essence of Christianity and the basis of all faith.
Where did Schleiermacher discover this new definition of faith? His goal
was ecumenical, in the absence of any rational motive, reason having been
deliberately set aside to leave room for sentiment and imagination. Truly
the father of ecumenism, Schleiermacher longed to reunite all
denominations by transcending creeds and other points of division. His
attempt to form a super-Church is most enlightening, yet how many truths
did he sacrifice on the altar of such an enterprise?
Kant had nothing but disdain for the historical bases of religion.
Miracles, original sin, the divinity of Jesus Christ–everything was brought
down to the level of nature and deprived of any real foundation. Religion
was founded on conscience. In the realm of exegesis, Strauss, as we have
seen, developed ideas which completely undermined the historicity of the
Gospels. Schleiermacher’s mysticism of the heart was built upon sand;
dogma in no way reflected reality. Schleiermacher declared serenely that
not one phrase of his doctrinal synthesis, The Christian Faith, would lose
its force if there were no life after death, or if Jesus Christ had never
existed. Why? Because the value of a dogma and of religion itself consists
only in its practical utility. Religion is not valid because it is true, but
because it gives rise to a sentiment of piety. While the orthodox founded
their religion on historical truths, the liberals flatly refused to do so. The
orthodox would assert: “We believe something that, once upon a time,
nineteen hundred years ago, happened outside of us but for us,” to which
the liberals respond: “We believe in something that takes place within
ourselves; we have our faith [in Christ].…But why do you seek to know
who Christ is in himself, and what Revelation is in itself, and what miracles
are in themselves?…[T]hat kind of judgment is of no interest to the
religious soul.”[70]
Once all historical foundation has been eliminated, it is easy to see
how our apostle of sentimental religion understands Revelation: it is the
sentiment of our absolute dependence on God, a pure “event of our
consciousness.” It is an emotive and pious experience, God felt by the heart.
The Bible itself is none other than a collection of privileged religious
experiences, whose sole interest is to provoke similar experiences in
ourselves. Until then, Protestants considered religious experience as a sort
of compass to orient their faith. Luther used it as a trampoline for his leap
into the absurd. The religious experience was used to believe in God but not
to create Him from nothing, along with Revelation and Jesus Christ.
Henceforth, thanks to Kant and Schleiermacher, personal experience was
used quite literally to replace the historical fact of divine Revelation.
Sentiment lived and experienced secretes the very object of belief, as the
liver secretes bile. The individual experience is at once Revelation, faith,
origin, and consummation of all religion. “Divine Revelation that does not
take place in us and does not become intimate to us does not exist for us at
all. To eliminate the self in this instance would not even be possible, for it
would mean eliminating at once the matter and drying up the living source
of knowledge.”[71] Behold the very essence of modernism, which Cardinal
Mercier so aptly defined as the religion which draws the object and motive
for faith from its own inner depths. Hegel could not resist exposing the
weakness of such a system, and the joke he made at the expense of his
contemporary has gone down in history:
If religion is only founded on sentiment, it truly is determined by nothing but a sentiment of
pure dependence, and in that case the best Christian would be the dog, for he possesses that
very sentiment to the highest degree and admirably puts it into practice.[72]
What becomes of God once He is relegated to the depths of the
conscience? Kant never did explain exactly what was signified by this
vague term of “consciousness” or “conscience.” Schleiermacher took
advantage of the ambiguity and inserted his own pantheistico-religious
theory. For him, religion is the profound sentiment of man’s identity with
God:
It is in fact religion alone that is able to reveal to us what we truly are in the context of what
Being truly is.[73] Seek the Infinite and the Eternal in all that is and moves, in all acting and
all being acted upon; unite oneself to the Infinite and the Eternal by a sort of immediate
awareness; possess all things in God and God in all things: behold Religion.…Religion is the
unity of all our being in all of Being, felt ineffably in the most profound depths of ourselves.
[74]
God is not a phenomenon that can be observed outside of oneself, nor
a truth to be demonstrated by logical reasoning. Whoever does not feel it in
his heart will never find it on the outside. God is perceived by religious
emotion and by that emotion only does He exist. Schleiermacher’s God
transcends the most diverse dogmatic formulae. God is the indifference of
contraries and could not exist if the world did not. In this pantheistic and
Hegelian universe, man saves himself by becoming ever more conscious of
God, in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, who alone was fully conscious of
God.
The benefit of this religion of the heart, making man at once savior and
God, is its absolute universality. The beliefs of all humanity are united, not
by a common element–not even a common dogma at the interior of these
religions–but rather by a common drive behind them all. What they all have
in common is man’s sentiment of adoration and dependence in the face of
an invisible Power. “Religion is the immediate consciousness that
everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in
and through the eternal.…The true God denotes the Whence of our sensible
and self-active existence.”[75] Schleiermacher thus became the first of all
firm believers in ecumenism, pouring out his heart in an ode to fraternal joy.

3. Dogma: An Evolving Symbol

The concept of dogma takes a mortal blow with the advent of a
religion of the consciousness. Dogma according to Kant is contained within
the limits of pure reason. Schleiermacher is far more efficient; he rejects all
limit whatsoever and empties dogma of its content as one might empty old
skins to fill them with new wine. The dogmas that remain are but dead
wood, adhering to the living tree of sentimental faith and destined to break
off little by little. If we could only shed the various creeds of the
denominational churches we would rediscover the essence of Christianity,
just as a man peeling a fruit eventually comes to the pit. Beneath the letter
of dogmatic formulas, we need to discover their spirit, their religious
content and the spiritual experience to which the letter invites us. All
Christian dogmas are to be judged in function of their value for the spiritual
life. They are authentic if they inspire piety, if they warm the heart. Playing
on the word symbol, modernist Protestants pass from the symbol of the
Faith–the Creed–to symbolic faith. Dogma is nothing but a symbol. A
symbol of what? Of nothing, in fact, for dogma is only the intellectual,
figurative, and approximate translation of our religious experience of
inaccessible realities. Yet if dogma is only a symbolic representation more
or less accurate, it goes without saying that it must also be subject to the
law of transformation, like any other manifestation of human life and
thought. Dogma is not some kind of exotic truth sent down from our
supernatural homeland. On the contrary, it is produced and developed by
man and for man. Far from representing a barrier to his liberty, it is the very
expression thereof.
Establishing dogma on so precarious a foundation as the sentiment of
the individual leads to the pure and simple destruction of dogma. In this
domain, Ritschl went further than any of his predecessors. Down with
theological quarrels! His theology is a masterpiece of compromise,
conserving the traditional expressions and allowing the believer to fill each
one with the religious content of his own preference. For example, God’s
Revelation becomes for Ritschl the conviction of a religious community
that has achieved a uniform education of the conscience among a large
number of individuals. He has no difficulty in proclaiming Jesus Christ as
the Son of God, but his tortuous explanations leave us skeptical.
Yes, Jesus undoubtedly felt tied to God by a religious relation of an entirely new character.…
Christ’s two qualities, that of an accomplished revealer of God and a public prototype of
spiritual mastery over the world, are contained in the epithet of divinity....Was Christ but a
man, pure and simple? Could it be possible? I do not even consider my enemies to be mere
men, for they have a certain education and a certain moral character.…But why do you seek to
know who Christ is in himself?…We believe in something that takes place within ourselves;
we have our faith in Christ.[76]
Even the casual reader has no difficulty grasping the equivocation
hidden behind Ritschl’s words: the divinity in Christ–Gottheit in Christo–
unanimously proclaimed by all denominations, in place of the divinity of
Christ–Gottheit Christi. Around the same time, Harnack, a disciple of
Ritschl, taught at the University of Berlin that the bothersome verse of the
Creed, “born of the Virgin Mary,” was archaic and need no longer be
accepted since it would soon be replaced by another symbol. These disputes
about dogma poisoned the debate to the extent that men began to ask if
there were two truths, the truth of the Lutheran Church and the truth of
university professors; the truth of the Faith and the truth of history. This
serious ambiguity on dogma could only give rise to an ambiguous
ecclesiastical organization.

4. Ritschl’s Church of Ambiguity

After he had destroyed the authoritarian system proper to the Catholic
Church, Luther battled the return of any form of infallibility imposed from
without. Protestantism took pride in having transferred the seat of religious
authority from the exterior to the interior, from the Church to the Christian
conscience. However, such a transfer raised as many thorny problems as it
had solved. What could be the form of a church so deprived of all
authority? If all revolves around the individual, what is the basis of any
community? Schleiermacher wanted each one to hear within his own heart
the echo of the religious conscience of the Christian community; but the
mystical theologian got nowhere, in spite of his pious longing for a
common understanding. Harnack saw the Church as one spirit nourished
with the same spiritual food, the Gospel, which should be a source of
understanding and not of division. However, he subordinated the collective
experience to the experience of the individual, thus undermining every
notion of a Church and making him even more radical than his predecessor.
He prudently invited his followers to be in the Church but not of it.
Ritschl (1822-89) brought his talents for organization into the struggle,
so as to avoid the splintering of churches into individual consciences. He
judged it too difficult for the common man to discover Schleiermacher’s
famous awareness of the community within his own conscience. Therefore,
he made things plain and simple. Let each one give himself over to the
action of the Spirit in reading the sacred books in search of an experience of
the divine. The kingdom of God is the totality of those who, founded on
Scripture, believe in Christ and are moved by love. Thus religious society
presents the harmonious diversity of an infinite variety of religious
experiences, each satisfied with itself and infinitely tolerant of others. What
is the source of unity in this Babel of charismatic experiences in which each
is moved by a unique spirit? It is the dead letter of Scripture, the creed
emptied of all meaning, the language of the Bible, however equivocal.
Whoever employs with sincerity the language of the Bible and of the Reformation, even
without properly understanding; whoever uses the words of this language with the firm and
true intention of fidelity to them, holding them to be the sacred words of Christianity,
expressions that cannot be cast aside, though they have for him a different meaning…that man
should not be disdained; he should be honored for his piety. This language is a source of unity,
like a common tongue.…Let us rejoice to see all theologians gather around the same words.
[77]
Luther once boasted of having discovered the spirit behind the letter; the
liberals came full circle and dismissed the spirit to cling to the dead letter.
The reaction in the opposing camp was bitter indeed, as orthodox
Protestants reviled the use of such devalued currency as nothing less than
hypocrisy.
The followers of Ritschl little appreciated the insult. Methods aspiring
to bring peace only succeeded in sowing discord throughout the last part of
the nineteenth century. The traditional symbol of the Creed was the
touchstone of the debate. With a certain logic, liberal pastors asked why
they were invited, as theology students, to deny a creed which had been
debunked by their university professors but then, as spiritual guides, to
expose the very same creed, teaching it and giving the impression of
believing in it themselves. Over the heated debates that followed between
religious authorities and universities, the voice of Wilhelm II rang out as
supreme pontiff of the Prussian Church. Caesaropapism entered the fray,
throwing the weight of its authority on the side of the Incarnation of Christ.
The State decided to endow two university chairs, occupied by orthodox
professors, in an institution otherwise dominated by free-thinkers; the
orthodox were quickly deprived of all influence by the gibes of the liberals,
who treated them as “professors of chastisement.” When the authorities
insisted, imposing the pure and simple recitation of the creeds as the
observance of a liturgical order, the liberals sneered and declared through
the mouth of Pastor Sydow of Berlin: “I do not profess these articles of the
Creed; I read them!”
The German Evangelical churches of the late nineteenth century gave
the impression of fighting not so much unbelief in itself as unbelief frankly
and unequivocally proclaimed. Sincerity became a crime meriting sanction.
Yet the sanctions were only to maintain a false front; they lacked audacity
to defend the substance of the truth, the authentic and traditional meaning of
the Creed. And for good reason! In order for the Protestant Church to have
remained firm in its condemnation of its own pastors unfaithful to the pure
doctrine, it would have had to possess an authority to define what that
doctrine might be. Pastor Schrempf, one of the victims of official
harassment, shed light on the perplexity of the authorities and irrefutably
demonstrated their illogic: either the Church ought first to demand
unreserved adhesion to its creed and then inform heterodox theologians that
they could no longer exercise the divine cult; or else it ought to allow an
individual churchman to explain that the creed is a purely historical
document of the Church, without inquiring into his personal reservations on
the subject. However, the Protestant Church could accept neither of these
options, for to embrace the orthodox solution would have been to renounce
the freedom of private judgment, which was the original battle cry of the
Reformation, while to embrace the second solution would have been to
legalize anarchy and dissolve Church structure.
 The reader will pardon us if we adopt a lighter style for a moment, the
better to show the absurdity of the religious situation across the Rhine. In
fact, were it not for its tragic counterpart, the modernist crisis, Protestant
liberalism would be comical as Prussia takes on an uncanny resemblance to
a classroom in an uproar. Nothing is lacking. Between the romantic
dreamer, Schleiermacher, and the leader of the hotheads, Ritschl, the bad
children taunt the good ones who sit quietly in the front row. They take no
prisoners, savaging the most fundamental dogmas of the Faith. Between the
two camps we find the Harnack, the fence sitter, who thinks with one
faction but acts with the other. In rushes the dean of discipline, Wilhelm II,
breathless, to beg for calm on bended knee in company with the supreme
high court of German churches, fearing lest their disorderliness scandalize
the Catholics in the classroom next door.
So German Protestantism disintegrated, in perfect accord with the
logic of its principles as the church of ambiguity and duplicity. The
historian Rivière ends his study of liberal Protestantism by pointing out that
it gives us a glimpse of what the Church would have become if modernism
had gained a foothold.[78] Today we feel the full weight of such a
diagnosis, as we witness the de facto establishment of a liberated Catholic
Protestant Church.
 CHAPTER 9: ASSESSMENT OF PROTESTANT MODERNISM
It would be useful to recapitulate the essential points common to the
authors we have seen, in order to discover how far modernist Protestants
have advanced beyond Luther. We will have to bring together and compare
all of the forms of modernist Protestantism by studying their common
fundamental principles. We will then be in a situation to address the
question of the Protestant Reformation: was it a simple reform of Catholic
ideas, or a full-blown cultural revolution?

1. Summary of the Authors

The pessimistic doctrine of Luther was born of an experience at once
extremely personal and profoundly false. Despairing of ever being able to
avoid sin, Luther’s only escape from guilt is to proclaim that fallen man is
deprived of liberty, thus making God responsible for evil. Yet this solution
offends the holiness of God and undermines Christian morality. Even more
serious and consequential is that Luther adopts such a position by following
his own personal inspiration rather than right reason and the Catholic Faith.
He automatically dismisses all authority other than his own autonomous
conscience. He goes on to introduce the same voluntaristic and
individualistic inversion into every point of Catholic doctrine, putting each
to the litmus test of private judgment. Every Reformer is his own pope and
makes his own truth; likewise, every Protestant, having rejected the
magisterium of the Church, sets himself up as priest and prophet of the
word of God. Lutheran dogma turns man into his own savior and God
becomes superfluous, all the more so since this God is but the carbon copy
of Luther’s fallen humanity: cruel, unjust, and ultimately powerless. Private
judgment fashions the whole framework of Luther’s doctrinal heresy and
serves as his rallying cry for launching the Reformation. His political savvy,
however, quickly made him become disenchanted when he finally
understood that the pure and simple application of the individualist
principle would be the ruin of society. Lutheranism, the religion for which
he is responsible, with its Church, authority, and tailor-made dogmas, in
effect denies the principle of private judgment, which nonetheless remains
the Magna Charta of the Reformation. Lutheranism establishes a semi-
revolution at odds with the impracticable axioms of Luther.
With Kant, we witness a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Rather
than minds depending on reality, reality revolves around the human mind.
Philosophy refuses to seek nourishment and its true good in the
contemplation of the universe, and becomes instead an indoor sport. The
Kantian critical philosophy openly confesses its ignorantism. Things and
their nature are hidden behind appearances. Do they even exist? Can we
ever really say we know them? They are mere “maybes,” and so they
remain. The mind never escapes itself; truth becomes an interior swirl of
ideas liberated from experience. It is a nearsighted vision which sees
nothing beyond the self, a subjective and egological philosophy. Thus, the
Kantian religious consciousness is more important than all the real facts and
the historical miracles of Christ. The same consciousness poses an idealized
image of God as an abstract divinity, vague enough to fit all possible
interpretations. For Kant, faith is a gift of the heart, and religion is the work
of the individual consciousness. Hegel pushes the idealist system to an
extreme with his evolutionist pantheism in which the human consciousness
is but a product of the formless matter of the earth slowly divinizing itself.
He bequeathed the evolutionary, revolutionary aspect to modern philosophy.
These two fathers of modern philosophy leave us with the distinct
impression of a phobia toward all external authority, natural or divine,
which might attempt to impose itself upon the human intellect.
Strauss illustrates the unleashing of Protestant exegesis, liberated from
the taboos of realism by Kantian critique. The German modernists twisted
themselves round in circles in feats of astonishing mental prowess as they
labored to explain the existence of the effects–Jesus Christ and the Church–
while denying the cause–divine Revelation. After several fruitless attempts,
notably using Kantian naturalism and other forms of rationalism, Strauss
finally stepped onto the stage of history to present a most satisfying
solution: the myth of The Life of Jesus. It is satisfying because it effectively
destroys the historical foundation of the Gospels and allows critics to
dismiss all supernatural events such as miracles and prophecies, while
letting the historical figure of Jesus Christ slip slowly into the nebulous
realm of pious legends. It is satisfying, too, because the notion of myth is
eminently positive by its evocation of symbols. The myth of Jesus, Son of
God, Wonderworker and Prophet, is symbolic of the progress of humanity.
More fundamentally, The Life of Jesus is founded on hypotheses
independent of all scientific exegesis: the mythification of the Gospels by
later redactors, the dating of the Gospels as written long after the events
took place, and a naturalism which denies mysteries and miracles a priori.
 In theology, Schleiermacher resurrects the Kantian definition of faith
as the religion of conscience and sentiment. Having rejected the historical
facts pertaining to divine Revelation, he re-established all religion on the
personal and intimate experience of God in the depths of the consciousness.
Moreover, this “religious consciousness” is rather vague on the distinction
between man and the God who appears to him in the depths of his being.
With such pantheistic and egological principles as his foundation, the author
makes a first attempt at ecumenism. He tries to meld the various
denominations into a Christian whole united by the single fact that they all
manifest man’s sincere yearning for God. In this regime where
consciousness and the individual conscience are king, the dogmas of the
Creed are reduced to practical truths which are eminently disposable–
equivocal symbols which ought to evolve at the rhythm of our religious
experiences. Ritschl, Schleiermacher’s successor, established the Church of
ambiguity with no other foundation than the letter of the Creed, open to the
most contrary interpretations and freed from all authority and doctrine.

2. Points of Contention Between

Luther and Modernist Protestants
Luther is the father of Protestant modernism in that he bestowed on his
successors an entirely new set of dogmatic principles. However, even in his
own lifetime, he did not put them strictly into practice. Consequently, there
is a veritable abyss between Luther and Lutheranism–between a set of
principles giving rise to the Reformation and a Church whose very
establishment is the contrary of the reforming principles. In the same way,
there yawns an abyss between the ideas of Luther and those of his most
audacious successors, the modernist Protestants of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, generally called “liberals.”
Luther, following his natural inclinations, let himself be guided above
all by his self-will and his emotions, to the detriment of his intellect and
objective truth. His doctrine is but the expression of the personal drama
which he experienced in the depths of his soul and in his mortal flesh. For
him, the journey of the Reformer begins with morality, passing into the
realm of doctrine before it finally ravages all that is Revelation and reason.
For the modernist Protestants, the journey runs in the opposite direction.
Philosophy is their first victim, which they then employ to taint all other
disciplines with the same ferment of skeptical critique within the realms of
Revelation, dogma, and morality. Kant raised Luther’s personal experience
to the level of a fundamental right and a universal principle. He made it a
principle of speculative knowledge that the intellect cannot know being and
that truth is independent of reality.
There is also a great difference between Luther and Strauss in the
realm of exegesis. Strauss denies all miracles and even the possibility of a
miracle, whereas the heresiarch admits them, for all intents and purposes.
Strauss also denies the historical fact of Revelation, which Luther
consistently defends, though admittedly taking considerable liberties with
the text. Strauss accounts for the Gospels and the person of Jesus Christ by
calling them pure legends, myths invented by the primitive community to
symbolize man becoming God through an ever-deeper awareness of his
intimate divinity.
Schleiermacher goes further than his old master, but in the realm of
dogma. While Luther establishes consciousness and sentiment to be the sole
motive for faith, his disciple establishes the consciousness not simply as the
motive of faith but as actually productive of its object. For the romantic
Protestant, the personal experience of God in the depths of the individual
consciousness creates Revelation and so becomes the very foundation of
faith and religion. For Schleiermacher as well, man is so at one with his
faith and the object of his faith that religion becomes pure and simple
pantheism. Finally, Luther’s intention was to maintain the spirit of Jesus
Christ while throwing out the letter of Roman pharisaism; Schleiermacher
preserves the dead letter of the Creed stripped of its spirit and devoid of
meaning.

3. The Unity of the Fundamental

Principles of Modernism
Thus Luther is not entirely in harmony with his liberal successors. Yet,
despite their differences, if we look closely at Luther and his most radical
successors, there remains a profound communion of thought. Luther is the
man of the Non serviam, the cry of revolt against all authority and all
doctrine which does not have its origin in man. The individualistic and
voluntaristic principle of private judgment contains the seeds of every form
of modernism. The worm was already present in the Protestant fruit and
ultimately rendered the doctrinal and moral corruption that is religion
according to Kant and Schleiermacher. Could even Luther, casting off the
yoke of all authority and establishing himself as an advocate of the rights of
the individual conscience and of the faith dwelling in the depths of the
heart, fail to recognize his own mind and offspring in the religion of the
consciousness of Kant and Schleiermacher? Although Luther was not
strictly speaking a modernist, he certainly deserves to be called the father of
modernism. His sons have a worthy father and take pride in their lineage.
Though Luther sowed the seed, we must peel the fruit if we want to
understand the nature of the thing and how it holds together.
All of the Protestant masters revolve around a common axis, whose
negative pole is pure critique and its positive, the individual conscience.
“Private judgment,” the element of corruption within Lutheran critique, is
able to infect every discipline: in philosophy, it yields the Kantian critique
of reason; in Scripture studies, Straussian Gospel criticism; in theology,
Schleiermacher’s critique of dogma. It acts like an acid to bring about
universal skepticism. It wipes the slate clean of all that came before,
eliminating the being of things, demoting “to be” to the level of “maybe,”
labeling as legends the historical facts of miracles and prophecies,
confusing the object of faith with the believer and finally God with man.
Schleiermacher drank with gusto at the Kantian source, imbibing in The
Critique of Practical Reason the agnostic solvent dissociating religion and
reason, casting doubt on both the historical facts of religion and the realist
theory of knowledge to glorify instead the individual consciousness. He
ingenuously declares that not one sentence of his masterpiece The Christian
Faith would lose its force if there were no afterlife–likewise for the
existence of Jesus Christ. His disciple Ritschl is explicit: “But why do you
seek to know what Christ is in himself, and what Revelation is in itself, and
what miracles are in themselves?…That kind of judgment is of no interest
to the religious soul.”[79] What more proof do we need that such critique is
ignorantist to the core? It destroys the very foundation of human thought by
removing its self-evident object: the truth of things.
As a second step, the egological conscience sets to work to restore
everything it eliminated, this time by submitting all things to its own
subjective and individual measure. Thus to one degree or another the
Protestant consciousness, be it Lutheran, Kantian, Straussian, or
Schleiermachian, is what weaves the fabric of the real, the Faith,
Revelation, and God Himself. In the words of Schleiermacher:
 Seek the Infinite and the Eternal in all that is and moves, in all acting and all being acted upon;
unite oneself to the Infinite and the Eternal by a sort of immediate awareness; possess all
things in God and God in all things: behold Religion.…Religion is the unity of all our being in
all of Being, felt ineffably in the most profound depths of ourselves.[80]
So it is also for Strauss and his myth. The myth is what springs
naturally from the primitive faith of the Church, unconsciously embodying
its beliefs and preoccupations through a multitude of stories, first developed
as part of an oral tradition and then consigned to writing by the Evangelists
in all good faith. Egology is at the heart of Schleiermacher’s religion,
founded as it is on nothing but the sentiment of dependence produced by the
conscience. Thus, the only truth is what the conscience draws from within
itself: I think, therefore things are; therefore God is. The creative work of
the new homo faber reaches a climax in the Deist blasphemy: “Let us make
God in our image.”
The consequence of such a position, at once ignorantist and egological,
is the systematic evolution of all thought and all doctrine. For dogma has
weighed anchor and drifted away from all that once bound it to reality, to
float freely on the Revelation of a liberated conscience. Kant openly
declares that only by casting overboard their cargo of creeds could the
Protestant Churches assume the easy burden preached by their Founder. For
Hegel, the history of religions is a proof that inferior primitive beliefs
evolved into superior religions, which will ultimately gather their different
elements into a perfect synthesis: the Hegelian philosophy, pinnacle of the
religion of reason. Accordingly, the Christian religion is the sum of the
contradictory riches of the past, itself advancing toward an evolutionary
summit: the consciousness of the Spirit. Schleiermacher seems to espouse
the same evolutionary doctrine. He claims to have emptied dogma of its
content as one might empty old wineskins to fill them with new wine. The
dogmas he retains are like deadwood, clinging still to the living tree of
sentimental faith but destined to break off with the passing of time. Yet
dogma is not an exotic truth descended from a supernatural homeland. On
the contrary, as a thing entirely produced and developed by man, it is the
expression of his liberty and not an obstacle to it. The dogmatic formula of
the Creed is not a truth to be believed but a life to be lived. It is an
approximate image and a symbol of a totally unknown universe.
Furthermore, like every image and like all symbols, it becomes false when
it no longer produces the symbiosis of conscience and the sense of the
divine within oneself. These considerations are meant to show that Kant,
Strauss, and Schleiermacher all propose a polymorphous dogma, adapted to
any state of soul and incapable of affirming anything true or absolute about
a supernatural world. Theology no longer presents the fullness of truth and
being but becomes a summit of all confusion, whose plurality of
contradictory formulas is hailed unabashedly as a sign of richness and
profound piety. Credo quia absurdum: I believe because it is absurd! Such
would seem to be the last word of the religion of private judgment, which
yet bears the signature of Luther, like it or not.

4. Evolution or Revolution?
To conclude this investigation of Protestant modernism, we still must
confront it with the foundations of Christian culture and so finally sketch a
preliminary definition of modernism. As we did in our study of authentic
Christianity, we will divide our inquiry, comparing their respective
principles in order to judge whether there might be unity between the two,
then assessing the consequences of these principles in the domain of truth
and unity.
Can there be common ground between the fundamental principles
underlying Catholic theology and modernist Protestant theology? Is there a
meeting of the minds or only irreconcilable differences concerning the
central notions of each? The realist is drawn to belief through fidelity to
what is. He sees that he ought to believe for reasonable motives, judging the
facts and the nature of things. For an egologist, facts have nothing to do
with religion. Luther’s own will is at the origin of his faith: “I will that it be
so, I command that it be so; let the will take the place of reason!” Kant
echoed the same “private judgment” when he claimed to have destroyed
reason to make room for faith: the only God we can ever know is the God
within. Strauss is true to his intellectual masters when he removes all
historical foundation from the Christian Faith and qualifies as mythical the
person and the actions of Christ in the Gospel accounts. It was the same for
Schleiermacher, whose religion emerges from the consciousness and is
defined as the sentiment of dependence shared with the entire universe
considered in its Oneness. Reality has so little command over his theology
that, according to Schleiermacher, theology would lose nothing of its force
if there were no afterlife. His position is nothing less than revolutionary. It
is indeed a Copernican Revolution, as Kant so aptly coined it. The center of
gravity for all knowledge passes from the real object to the thinking subject,
himself lost in the abstract disconnected from what alone might give his
thought substance. Henceforth, the man who thinks floats with the tide of
his dreams, which are more real and more important than reality. The
Kantian is the first dabbler in virtual reality. In defiance of Creation and of
its Author, his goal is to cast off the shackles of concrete reality and
construct his own world by an act of will. The consequences are obvious for
truth in general and religion in particular. Each one shapes his truth to his
own taste. Each one is free to judge and to believe as he wishes, since truth
and faith are the product of man’s capricious will.
For Catholicism, truth is the conformity between thought and reality.
In the regime of the consciousness, truth remains prisoner of the idea.
Luther condemned the Sorbonne for having defined that if a thing is true, it
is true both for philosophy and for theology; he was in fact condemning
reason itself, directly opposing it to the Faith. His private judgment makes
the truth depend on human liberty rather than on facts, which impose
themselves independently of our will. Similarly, Kant undertakes the
defense of truth liberated from reality, a simple coherence of ideas. He does
not quail to admit the possibility of contradiction within truth itself. Strauss,
with bewildering logic, persists in defending the truth of what he himself
labels “mythical.” He openly declares that the supernatural birth of Christ,
His Resurrection, and His Ascension remain eternal truths, though doubt
may be cast on their reality as historical facts. Schleiermacher makes a
more general application of the same principle: the only truth to be found is
in the mystical and supernatural order. God is not a truth to be proved by
logical reasoning; He is perceived and exists only insofar as our religious
feeling sustains Him. Such was the opinion of Kant, for whom God was a
mere chimera, perfectly incapable of sending anyone to heaven or to hell.
For the realist, truth is always concrete and particular and therefore
exclusive and absolute. What does truth become for an egologist?
Egological Protestant truth has weighed anchor to liberate itself from what
is real, floating with the tide, subject to change and contradiction. Luther
blazed the trail. He quickly passed from absolute liberty in matters of faith
to a condemnation of the Anabaptists, who dared refuse his authority. For
Kant, the only religion capable of bringing peace on earth is the one which
will unite all men: an abstract humanity under the aegis of an abstract God.
He appeals to Luther to unburden the Protestant Churches from the weight
of their creeds. Schleiermacher, for his part, interprets dogma as the symbol
of the religious experience which varies according to the whim of each
believer. Ritschl, his successor, founds the Church of Ambiguity, rallied
around the empty words of a meaningless creed.
The ambiguity of dogmatic formulas would seem to be the logical
consequence of “private judgment” and of a religion of the heart which
rejects all external authority. Such a religion can only founder in complete
skepticism. Believing that religions are all more or less true, their
contradictions aside, is another way of admitting that they are all equally
false. When private judgment is the supreme principle of faith, it leads
straight to indifferentism and to disdain for religion.
Another consequence touches the ecumenical question. There, too, we
find an irreconcilable difference between Catholic and Protestant culture.
For the Catholic, the quest for unity consists in conforming one and all to
reality, to the historical facts of Revelation and to the only theology which
follows rigorously on these facts. Whoever would attempt a union on a
foundation other than the true and the factual would be regarded as mad.
For a member of the religion of the consciousness, the search for unity
takes priority over the search for truth. In fact, the Protestants faced a
problem hitherto unknown: how to reintegrate the adherents of the principle
of disintegration that is private judgment–the Magna Charta of the
Reformation. The Protestants are like those who, realizing they have broken
a vase, scramble to glue all of the pieces back together again. But how can
unity be achieved among those whose only point of agreement is that they
disagree? The unity of Protestants could only be maintained by ignoring
their differences: by ignoring the truth of things and facts as in Kant’s
critique, and by ignoring historical Revelation as in the religion of Strauss
and Harnack. Schleiermacher’s ecumenism is the most avant-garde of all.
For him, the beliefs of humanity as a whole are unified not by a dogma
common to all religions but rather by a common impetus: man’s sentiment
of dependence on a God dwelling deep in the individual consciousness.
In the final analysis, how shall we describe a modernism most
perfectly embodied in Schleiermacher yet originating in Kant and Luther? It
is not a system of thought proposed as an alternative to other systems; it is
rather the total dissolution of all thought as such. It is the systematic
destruction of all that is systematic and the principled rejection of every
principle. It is not a modern Lutheran Church set up in face of the Catholic
Church. Having reached the ultimate stage of Schleiermacher’s malleable
creed and Ritschl’s phantom Church, this final Church is not a religion but
the disintegration of everything a Church represents–indeed, of all religion.
The religion of Protestant modernists causes everything to revolve around
the human consciousness as the source of all being, truth, Revelation, and
even of divinity itself, hidden in the depths of man. Thus, we can already
give a summary definition of modernism, subject to rectification or
improvement as we advance in our historical inquiry. Modernism, at least
Protestant modernism, appears to be an ignorantist, egological, and
revolutionist system of thought professing an ontology without being and a
Revelation without a Revealer, whose endpoint is a theology without God.
 PART III: “CATHOLIC” MODERNISM
It was simple enough to gauge the dependence of Schleiermacher’s
theology of sentiment and Strauss’s biblical critique upon the philosophical
principles of Kant and Hegel. These theories taken together make a
remarkably coherent system: the logic is flawless leading from modern
philosophy to its religious applications. The common denominator is their
limitation of knowledge to the thinking self, on the supposition that raw
facts cannot be known. The system of liberal Protestantism–which would
be better named modernist Protestantism–resembles nothing so much as the
bronze colossus with feet of clay, from the vision of the prophet Daniel. All
of its pseudo-science is founded upon the immanent self–in other words, on
fantasies and fiction. Established on so fragile a base, the mighty giant of
bronze was bound to come crashing down with all its weight.
The scientific endeavors drawn to a screeching halt by the revolutions
of the late eighteenth century were resumed in the nineteenth by the
Catholic nations, particularly France and Italy, in a movement led by
scholars of every domain: De Rossi for Roman archaeological history, Dom
Gueranger for liturgical renewal, Rohrbacher for the history of the Church,
and, finally, Lacordaire, the man who restored the Dominican order in
France and a brilliant apologist, in spite of certain liberal leanings. At the
same time, a structural renewal gave birth to a number of Catholic Institutes
after 1875, to become the seedbeds of a new intellectual elite in France.
While it is true that Rome had called for intellectual reform, the Catholic
Institutes in France did not follow the Roman model, which had put the
emphasis on theology, canon law, and philosophy; the French, for their part,
were enamored of the more positive sciences in vogue. Rome feared that
such a predominance given in France to history and Scriptural critique
might well lead to a neglect of doctrine. The events proved her fears sadly
justified, since it was precisely the ecclesiastical scholars formed in these
new intellectual centers who brought modernism into being. Scholars they
were, yet lacking in healthy philosophy or solid theology, without which
historical and biblical critique were left at the mercy of the Protestant
deviations in style across the Rhine. Simply as an example, Fr. Lagrange,
founder of the Institute in Jerusalem, was a pioneer in adapting the
historical biblical method to a Catholic climate. Yet, even though he quickly
dissociated himself from the modernist Loisy, whom he had first welcomed,
the illustrious exegete remained susceptible to certain influences of
rationalist critique.
Undeniably, these more positive studies were inspired by a
praiseworthy motive. For the honor of ecclesiastical science, the French
clerics at long last felt it incumbent upon themselves to take up the
challenge of Protestant critique, whose progress and wild success were
showering unbounded prestige upon its scholars. The fact that in France
alone the need was felt to commence the work of biblical criticism, joined
to the classically French preoccupation with logic and candor and their
courageous and sometimes overconfident generosity, explains why
modernism–provided that leadership would not be lacking, and it was not–
came to make its home on French soil.[81] The primary aspect of Protestant
modernism, critical ignorantism, remains omnipresent. Religion is cut off
from God, just as reason is cut off from the real. Things in themselves, the
facts of Revelation and God Himself are all ultimately denied; only what
comes from man is accepted. “Liberal” Protestantism was thus the pure and
uncompromising denial of orthodoxy in religion. The novelty of “Catholic”
modernism would be its emphasis on evolution and life, which develop
through successive doctrinal forms and so avoid contradiction between the
Catholicism of the past and that of the future. French modernism is
primarily biblical but with deeply flawed philosophical foundations and
theological consequences. The philosophers Bergson and Blondel are first
chronologically, before the Scriptural works of Loisy and the theological
synthesis of Tyrrell. We will close this particular study by considering the
action Rome took against modernism, namely its condemnation by St. Pius
X, before finally taking stock of the modernist crisis as a whole.
 CHAPTER 10: BERGSON’S EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY
In the section on Protestant modernism, we were witness to the
massive attack launched by the great scholars of Germany upon the
philosophia perennis–the philosophy of common sense, in which things
exist and we can know them. The original and dubious honor of having
founded modern philosophy falls to the Frenchman Descartes and his
subjective cogito. Then Kant denied our intellect all access to outside
reality, redefining truth as the mind’s conformity with itself. He
reconstructed man as an ivory tower without doors or windows. To ease the
idealist captivity and give the imprisoned mind a semblance of evasion,
Kant proposed a new philosophy of moral action with the self as its first
principle: God and liberty must exist because they are useful to me! Hegel
then pushed the Kantian world view to a new extreme with his pantheistic
evolutionism, melding everything into its contrary. Hegel’s being-
nothingness dichotomy, by successive oppositions and syntheses,
transformed itself into the human brain, which eventually becomes God
through gradual awareness of its own divinity.
This Franco-Germanic idealism permeates all of modernist philosophy,
explicitly or otherwise. At the turn of the twentieth century, a new star
appeared on the philosophical horizon, this time in France: Henri Bergson.
He was not a Catholic, but his disciple and successor at the College of
France, Edouard LeRoy, was himself a practicing Catholic, as was Maurice
Blondel, Bergson’s chief philosophical apologist. In spite of his originality,
Bergson remained faithful to the three principles which make up the
Achilles’ heel of Kantianism: revolutionism, ignorantism, and egology. The
last of the three will receive special mention in a final discussion around
Blondel’s immanent method.

1. Life and Teaching of Bergson

Born in Paris of an emigrant Jewish family, Henri Bergson (1859-
1941) showed a remarkable aptitude for mathematics but chose to study
philosophy instead. He was a student at Ollé-Laprune and Boutroux, then
professor at Angers and Clermont before settling definitively in Paris. He
began teaching at the College of France in 1901 and became a great favorite
among the youth, whom he inspired as much by the depth of his teaching as
by the captivating eloquence of his style. Bergson offered his young
audience a doctrine to free their souls from the bonds of scientism and
materialism gripping intellectual France, a doctrine mingled with profound
admiration for the great mystics of the Catholic Church. His philosophical
masterpiece is Creative Evolution, published in 1907, the fruit of long years
of teaching; it was to exercise a powerful influence on the modernists of his
day.[82] He was named president of the Intellectual Commission of the
League of Nations and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932),[83] Bergson’s final work,
reflects his religious and moral preoccupations as he approached the end of
his life. The book is an argument from mystical intuition for the existence
of the divine nature. He almost converted to Catholicism but decided
against it on his deathbed, fearing lest his conversion appear as a betrayal of
his persecuted Jewish brethren.
Bergson’s philosophical system was meant as a response to several
other contemporary schools of thought: to Kant and Comte, Spencer and
Darwin. He wanted to propose an escape hatch from the suffocating prison
of German rationalism and of materialistic French determinism. His new
spiritualist philosophy was an attempt to account for biological evolution
while avoiding the pitfalls of Kant’s rationalism and Spencer’s materialism.
For historians of philosophy, Bergson is the creator of the last great modern
philosophical system–not counting existentialism, a non-system by
definition.
Bergson’s entire doctrine hinges on a single universal principle:
evolution. Essentially, he taught that reality is not the stable being which we
know with our minds but a pure becoming to which intuition is our only
guide. Bergson was a consummate psychologist and his theorizing began
with an analysis of the human subject; he divined that self-reflection gives
man an intimate, intuitive understanding of himself. Eureka! At last, he had
hit upon a new faculty of knowledge, capable of salvaging metaphysics.
Bergson followed Kant by denying the intelligence any capacity for
absolute truth; however, he took his stand against the Master by affirming
that a metaphysical absolute can indeed be known but by a different faculty
or method: by a certain divining intuition. He indiscriminately labeled this
intuition as “imagination,” “creative emotion,” and “intellectual sympathy.”
The terms he used to describe it are more poetic than philosophical, as was
his wont. Bergson’s vital sympathy gives vanishing intuitions of the object.
This “faculty of seeing…springs up, somehow, by the twisting of the will
on itself.”[84] It allows a man to penetrate within the object and join
himself intimately to what it possesses of the unique and ineffable, in a
knowledge analogous to the supernatural intuition mystics can possess of
God’s presence within themselves, or to the sensitivity of a poet allowing
him to vibrate in unison with another being.
Bergson had discovered the ultimate philosophical faculty; his next
move was to place before its gaze a philosophical object, the real. To a
newly discovered faculty would correspond a newly discovered object; the
object of vital intuition would be the élan vital, the “life force” or “impetus
of life.” For behold, absolute truth, the only reality, is but pure becoming.
All things become; nothing remains identical to itself; nothing is distinct
from anything else. Bergsonian becoming is duration in time, life force, and
self-awareness–all three synonymous in his writings. The world seemed to
Bergson animated in some way, as though a mighty current of
consciousness, a life force, radiated throughout matter to organize it. Yet,
matter by itself is descent; it is the inversion of the spirit; it is élan vital in
regress. Some other power is necessary to make matter progress. The life
force provided Bergson with a much more satisfying explanation of
universal evolution than had all the mechanistic, materialistic theories of the
past. Everything in the universe suddenly makes sense if we admit life as
the unique reality–not life cast within the mold of species and natures but
life at once progressive and inventive, open and unforeseeable, advancing
by successive creations through its own élan vital. The élan vital, the great
current of consciousness, is absolute truth; act in its purest state; the force
behind all harmony in the universe: we might call it “God.” So it is that in
seizing upon the life force, upon duration in time, upon movement itself, or
upon consciousness–all synonymous, for Bergson–we touch, with divining
intuition, the absolute truth at the heart of the universe.
Bergson’s double edifice, psychological and physical, would have been
incomplete without a third floor dedicated to religion and morality. For
Bergson, religion and morality each present a dichotomy. Morality has a
closed and rigid aspect, characterized by conformity to duty and by static
ritualism. The corresponding religion is dominated by egoism and
fabulation as men invent myths and rites in view of preserving social
cohesion. However, there is another aspect to morality, one on the contrary
open and dynamic; it is the domain of heroes and of saints, of fraternity and
the rights of man. Accordingly, there exists a deeper religion, that of the
prophets and of Jesus Christ, in which direct contact with the life force
imparts to the believer something of its own energy, all of mysticism and
charity.
In a word, then, man is the point of origin for Bergson’s universe.
Moreover, a ubiquitous dualism marks every level of his philosophy:
knowledge is either intellectual or intuitive; the universe is divided between
matter and élan vital; morality and religion are either static or dynamic. He
does not reject either side of the dichotomy but integrates the material and
static aspect of things into what is living and dynamic and hence more truly
real. Not surprisingly, historians of thought hail Bergson’s philosophy as a
remarkably coherent system, revolving around one supreme principle:
creative evolution. As such, it earns him a place rather with the anti-
intellectual existentialists than with the idealists who built everything
around the mind. He is more closely related to Sartre than to Kant, to
Heidegger than to Hegel.
Although his guiding principle, creative evolution, separates him from
the idealists, his conclusions are worthy of the purest Hegelian. Bergson
transposes idealist ignorantism into “intellectual sympathy,” egology into
“self-awareness” and evolutionism into “pure becoming.” Since the last of
these, evolution, is the key to Bergson’s system, we shall consider it first,
under the name of revolutionism, before tackling his agnostic ignorantism.
Finally, when we come to Bergson’s egology, we will focus rather on
the original apologetic method of immanence developed by his disciple
Blondel, since Bergson himself merely handed down the tradition of his
predecessors.

2. “Creative Evolution”
In Creative Evolution, the book that sealed his glory, Bergson
resurrected the ancient Greek sophism: being is not; everything is pure
becoming. Reality flows on and we cannot say if it goes in one direction,
nor even if it is always and everywhere the same river flowing. We change
without ceasing–our very state of being is change. There are no objects,
only actions. Reality is fluid–an ongoing, never-ending creation; it is
movement.[85] In his own seductive prose, LeRoy echoed the thought of
his master in describing an intuition of the profound self:
We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running
water through the mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon
myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality.…Do I love? Do I think? The question has no
longer a meaning for me.[86]
Being is not, all things become; such is what Bergsonians called pure
duration.
Fatal consequences flow from a principle of absolute movement. In
perfect logic, movement as an ultimate reality excludes other principles as
self-evident and fundamental, such as substance and causality. Bergson’s
universe is essentially movement and life, continuity and simplicity in an
uninterrupted fluidity. It admits of no mummified substances; it is not
chopped up into distinct individuals or even species. It is a world of change
with nothing to undergo the changes. It is a swallow’s flight with no
swallow. It is a transition from cold to hot in which the water vaporizes
altogether. Bergsonian change has no need of a support; Bergsonian
movement does not imply an object moved. “The truth is that if language
here were molded on the real, we should not say ‘The child becomes the
man,’ but ‘There is becoming from the child to the man.’… ‘[B]ecoming’ is
a subject. It comes to the front. It is the reality itself.”[87] Sir Peter no
longer becomes a man from the child that he was; he is obsolete, replaced
by Sir Becoming, the true subject and the only reality. No one has ever
really passed from childhood to the age of man. Thus, to become is an
impersonal verb without a subject: we might say, “There is becoming,” just
as we say, “It is raining,” or, “It is snowing.”
The upshot of making absolute movement an ultimate principle is that
we acknowledge the possibility of pure contradiction. Logically, then,
Bergson abandoned all logic, fully aware that he was condemning the
intelligence to catastrophe, obliging the human mind to a sort of unnatural
and “dolorous” contortion every time it would attain some truth.[88] LeRoy
and the modernists went further: the principle of non-contradiction is
neither universal nor necessary; it is the rule of human discourse but not of
thought in general. Far from being a sign of error, absurdity is the very
foundation of all reality in nature: “What is becoming, if not an unending
series of contradictories melding into one another…in the supra-logical
depths?”[89] Was LeRoy aware that with statements of this kind he was
undermining the experimental sciences, the pride and joy of modern man?
The same disdain for the laws of thought would be revived by de Lubac in
what he called living tradition, according to which the Faith of today is not
expected to follow logically upon the Faith of yesterday.[90]
LeRoy astutely observed that the most serious consequence of
modernism–and its primary point of contention with scholastics–touches on
the very notion of truth. Firstly, because modernists reduce knowing to
willing, knowledge to desire, all bendable and blind though the latter be.
Secondly, because there can be no knowledge of things if there are no more
things. But here we defer to the modernists themselves:
Are there eternal and necessary truths? There may be some doubt. Axioms and categories,
forms of the understanding or of the sensibility: all are becoming, all are evolving; the human
spirit is plastic and can change its most intimate desires.[91] We believe that the truth is life,
therefore movement and growth rather than end point. Any system, the moment we close it off
and so raise it to the level of an absolute, by the very fact becomes error. The truth is that the
good of man is no more immutable than man himself. It evolves with him, in him, through
him; and that does not prevent its being truth for him; it is such, indeed, only on that condition.
[92] You seem to believe that, in the religious and moral order, the true and the false are
absolute, well-defined categories. That is not quite the case.[93]
Thus, truth is not a function of reality: a thing can be true without
being real! The result is a Blondelian definition of truth, classic among
modernists: the mind’s conformity to life.[94] Such is supreme error, for an
error touching the first notion of truth leads astray in all that follows.

3. Bergsonian Ignorantism
Bergson acquiesced to the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant
places reality out of reach of the human mind. LeRoy expressed the Kantian
principle in a classic modernist axiom: Anything beyond thought is
unthinkable. LeRoy considered his argument unassailable: Thought, in
search of an absolute object, finds nothing but itself. Thought is being itself
and the structure of all reality. Idealism is inevitable. When Bergsonians
accepted a priori such a defeat of thought, they were setting out on exactly
the same road Kant took as he pursued his ignorantist philosophy. Yet, had
not Bergson dedicated his efforts to the rediscovery of an absolute? Indeed;
but Bergson settled for a metaphysical absolute which purged reality of its
being; nature and causality vanished along with being. In a word,
Bergsonian absolute reality is a great void. Our philosopher denied being in
favor of pure duration, since for him contradiction and change constituted
the matrix of reality. His entire system is radically ignorantist, since his first
step was to destroy the object of the intelligence.
Bergsonian ignorantism has another source: reality, such as it is, is
grasped not by the intelligence but by a newly proposed faculty, “intuition.”
This new faculty happens to be anti-intellectual and far from universal.
Bergson referred to his hypnotic intuition as the continual humming of the
soul or as the uninterrupted buzzing of life in its depths. LeRoy is even
more evocative:
Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we are in these regions of
twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the
warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us.
Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task….[95]
The most worrisome aspect of this chimerical intuition is the multitude
of strange and contradictory revelations to which it gives rise in the various
authors. Bergson claimed to touch the essence of life, as indeed of all
matter, but Blondel rather perceived a concrete and progressive
manifestation of the Infinite. LeRoy glimpsed the presence of God. Before
any of them, Schelling had discovered within his intuition the stability of
eternal life, contrary to all of Heraclitus’ disciples, who detected only pure
becoming. What discoveries would this divining sympathy hold for future
adepts of intuitionism and mysticism? All is possible and all is believable
when the only standard is sentiment and the flair of the individual instinct.
St. Pius X rightly declared intuition to be the mother of the modernist
heresy: “It seems to Us nothing short of madness…to accept for true, and
without investigation, these incomplete experiences which are the vaunt of
the Modernist.”[96] From these ignorantist theses denying the power of the
intelligence to attain the nature of things and destroying all knowledge of
reality and of first principles would emerge consequences disastrous for
apologetics.
Let us imagine someone denying the immortality of the human soul. In
Bergsonian philosophy, matter and spirit are but two directions of a single
action; physical is only mental, but inverted. Truly, how can we hope to
prove the immortality of the soul to unbelievers when the distinction
between you and me is itself an illusion?
Some deny the reality of miracles, understood as suspensions of the
laws of nature. For Bergson, uniform laws which help us explain natural
events only exist in our own intelligence, the faculty with which we chop
up and deform reality. Since nothing is uniform in Bergsonian reality, laws
and their exceptions are irrelevant. Miracles are obsolete: what might have
seemed miraculous is in fact simply a natural event with an element of
surprise, requiring no particular intervention on God’s part.[97] Such an
arrangement perfectly satisfied Loisy, since it eliminated miracles while
seeming to retain them. Moreover, for Loisy, miracle and prophecy are but
antiquated forms of religious thought, bound for extinction.[98]
 Some reject the existence of God. A God, Supreme Being, infinite and
substantially distinct from the universe He created, is no longer conceivable
within the modernist world view, which tosses aside substance and
causality. Modernism echoes Hegel, for whom God is in the process of
becoming; it imitates Renan, who answered, “Not yet!” when asked if God
exists. The Bergsonians declared that God is creative emotion, love in
action, life in perpetual becoming, and the concentration of duration. “God
thus defined has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action,
freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in
ourselves when we act freely.”[99] There is no need to appeal to a
mysterious force. The presupposition that the creative act is “given in block
in the divine essence” needs to be “eradicated.”[100] “I do not present this
center [from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display] as a
thing, but as a continuity of shooting out.”[101] “For us, God is not, but
becomes. His becoming is our very progress.”[102] Such is what Bergson
had the audacity to describe as “orthodox pantheism.”
Is this the thought of a lone philosopher, or do ecclesiastical
modernists hold the same ideas? There can be no doubt when we read from
the pen of Loisy:
If we find ourselves grappling anew with the problem of Christology, it is due to the
integral renovation which has taken place and still continues within modern philosophy. The
question at the heart of the religious problem of the present day is not to know whether or not
the pope is infallible, or whether or not there are mistakes in the Bible, or whether or not
Christ is God, or if there is such a thing as Revelation–so many secondary problems or
problems whose meaning has changed and which now hang upon the great and unique
problem. Rather it is to know whether or not the universe is inert, empty, deaf, without soul or
viscera; if the human consciousness is able to find a truer, more real echo than within itself.
There is no proof we might call definitive, allowing us to give a yes or a no.[103]
In layman’s terms, the problem is the philosophical question of
whether or not there exists a personal God distinct from man, a question
upon which the leader of the modernists, on the coattails of Hegel and
Bergson, is not yet able to pronounce.
In spite of the fundamentally anti-Christian tenets of his system,
Bergson continued to maintain the superiority of the Christian religion as
evidenced by its universality. Yet for him, the value of a religion is due only
to its initial creative emotion, independently of all rational foundation. For
Bergson, the revealed dogmas–the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation–and all of
the organization of the Church’s hierarchy and sacraments are fabrications
emerging from primitive religions or from the emotion of an original
charity. For all intents and purposes, he preached the religion of
Schleiermacher, for whom knowledge of God is essentially sentiment. In
both cases, the believer never leaves the realm of pure consciousness, the
source of emotion. This same consciousness, without reference to the
exterior, is where Bergson’s disciple Blondel discovered man’s natural need
for the supernatural and the yearning for revealed religion present in the
depths of everyone.

4. Blondel’s “Immanent Method”

The new apologetic method, called of the threshold (du seuil), was
inaugurated with the book Action (Paris, 1893), written by the Burgundian
Maurice Blondel. He might as well have been German, given the obscurity
of his ideas and of his style, to say nothing of his sentimentality. In this
doctoral dissertation, the young philosopher laid siege to the prison of the
individual consciousness in the name of action. He later explained:
There is one notion to which modern thought jealously clings as the condition for all
philosophizing, and that is the notion of immanence; in other words, the notion that nothing
can enter into man which does not first come from him and correspond in some way to a need
of expansion, and that for him there is no truth worthy of the name nor acceptable precept, be
it historical fact, or traditional teaching, or obligation added on from without, which is not in
some way autonomous and indigenous to himself.[104]
It is upon this same immanent foundation that Blondel constructed a
defense of the Christian Faith. He wrote Action to announce the marriage of
immanentist philosophy, radically man-centered, with the supernatural
Christian religion, necessarily divine. The union would demand a
reconciliation of the irreconcilable, but Blondel valiantly made the attempt.
His solution was the method of immanence, which would have Christian
truth spring forth from the needs of the subject and so trace the supernatural
back to the inclinations of nature. The supernatural is thus “absolutely
impossible and absolutely necessary for man.”[105] According to the
apologetics of action, an act of faith is not acquiescence before external
truths presented by a higher authority but the external expression of
religious sentiment. We thereby eliminate the need for missionary action,
for the act of faith no longer follows upon the preaching of certain
propositions held up for belief, nor does it call for proof that it is reasonable
to believe. Faithful to his “threshold” apologetics, Blondel redefined truth
as the mind’s conformity to life–a definition which later earned him a
memorable epistolary joust with the Roman theologian Reginald Garrigou-
Lagrange, of the Dominicans.[106]
A group of admirers soon formed around Blondel, complete with its
own publication, the Annals of Christian Philosophy, under the Oratorian
priest Laberthonnière.[107] Laberthonnière went even further than Blondel,
replacing an outdated intellectualism with the aspirations of the human
heart as he applied Blondel’s apologetical method to every Christian
doctrine. His starting point was the principle of intellectual autonomy
according to which man cannot be subjected to an outside truth. He attacked
all notion of the supernatural understood as a system of abstract truths
imposed by an external authority. Laberthonnière’s metaphysics echoes his
psychology:
Therefore, when philosophers…in order to preserve this autonomy constitutive of our moral
personality, rally around a truth which is immanent, that is, which belongs to them, which they
can discover in themselves, through what they are and what they ought to be, we cannot but
most heartily agree.[108]
What applies to reason also applies to the truths of the Faith.
Laberthonnière professed an aversion for religion as a network of externally
imposed formulae. He would replace such a system of belief with a faith
coming from within, in which the mind proclaims its autonomy and
determines for itself the truth to which it will adhere. Quite naturally, then,
Laberthonnière disdained all dogma in favor of a kind of mystic spirituality:
Christianity is first and foremost an active presence of God within
humanity, and if it proposes to our belief a system of supernatural truths, it
is because we have a supernatural life to live. Humanity has never believed
except in view of life, and by living. Laberthonnière had the candor to
expose Blondel’s fundamental confusion of the natural and supernatural
orders:
Since there is a supernatural order; since every man is in fact–we do not say by right–called to
live supernaturally, it must be that God acts by His grace on the heart of every man and
penetrates it with His charity; it must be that the very action which fundamentally constitutes
our life is in fact supernaturally informed by God.…Even unrecognized, God is always there!
[109]
Blondel’s obscure theory was advocated by a number of prominent
friends and quickly found itself the object of bitter attack–ironic, for in its
original form it could scarcely have attracted general interest. The theory
appeared tainted with naturalism or, at best, with illogic. The Dominican Fr.
Schwalm, of the Revue Thomiste, set about officially refuting Blondel’s
system. He denounced the dangers for the Faith posed by egological
idealism: the suppression of any definite relationship between the Christian
and the Church, the visible rule of a Christian’s faith; the suppression of
every proof of the historical fact of Revelation and of its sacred deposit
confided to the Church; the suppression of all harmony between
philosophical reason and faith. He argued that such a philosophy rendered
impossible the objective recognition of the supernatural as embodied in
Christ and in the Church. If, indeed, historically speaking, God deigned to
raise man up to a supernatural end, it is not in “man purely as man” that we
will find the proof. The religion of man purely as man will never be
anything but a natural and human religion.[110] Loisy actually echoed
Schwalm’s argument to expose the weakness of a system like Blondel’s:
The philosophy of immanence seeks God within man, bending over backwards to find
experiences in our nature which imply the necessity, the existence, the presence of God, and of
God as He is presented in the Catholic Faith, incarnated in Jesus Christ and acting in the
Church. A conscientious attempt at apologetics, with the fatal flaw of disproportionality
between its orthodox conclusions and the psychological foundation of its proof.[111]
Likewise for the work of Laberthonnière:
This system, which is basically Blondel translated into French and stripped of its doctoral
pretensions, is a throwback to Protestant illuminism; it is the essential negation of theological
dogma as passed down by Tradition as well as of the authority of the Church, its sovereign
guarantee. Those people believe in all the dogmas of the Church, but they do not believe the
way they should, on the basis of an objective Revelation and on the testimony of the Church;
their sole authority is their interior experience, just like the Protestants; they are subjectivists
and they are not orthodox.[112]
Just as with Luther and the question of grace, the question of the
supernatural is the great stumbling block for every one of the immanentists–
Blondel and Laberthonnière in the lead, with de Lubac, Rahner, and Pope
John Paul II following right behind. Teilhard de Chardin complained that
St. Augustine spoiled everything by “inventing” the supernatural. He
understood very well that if religion, Revelation, and grace are truly
supernatural, they necessarily imply divine intervention. Yet this sweet yoke
of God ruling over our conscience without violating its integrity is odious to
the modernists, impatient of the slightest hindrance to their freedom. What
Catholic doctrine considers the sole means by which man is justified,
Luther saw as the violation of the conscience by a divine Tyrant. Pure
immanentists of the Kantian school hold that everything comes from within
man and that he receives from God nothing whatsoever. Moderate
immanentists like Blondel adopt a watered-down version of the same error.
Rather than purely and simply denying supernatural action, they muddy its
definition until it becomes indistinguishable from natural, human action.
The result is the same: the denaturing of the supernatural and the
supernaturalizing of human nature. Small wonder, then, that Blondel met
with severe criticism from those who saw the logical consequence of his
theories. Man is necessarily divinized and rendered scarcely distinguishable
from God. Man becomes the origin, measure, and goal of this religion of
the heart à la Schleiermacher. The immanent method remains faithful to all
that is immanentist. It is pure monistic, pantheistic fantasy.
✜✜✜
Such is the basic structure of this ivory tower “with neither doors nor
windows” in which agnostic subjectivism would hold reason enclosed, as in
a seamless prison. Such is the tower of Babel of modern philosophy
reigning over the most astonishing confusion of ideas and languages.
Descartes laid the first stones by his subjectivism; Kant built up an edifice
of colossal proportions, eminently complicated and uncomfortable; Hegel
maintained its towering heights in a continual fog of non-being. Bergson in
turn, and the modernists after him, did not want to demolish the Kantian
monument and merely added another floor. He had the noblest of
intentions: to correct the excesses of Kant and reconquer reality and
absolute truth, given up for lost and unknowable. However, Bergson did not
build a top floor but dug out a basement, with the tool of creative
imagination, deep within the human subconscious. There, deprived of the
light of reason and guided by blind intuition–“creative emotion”–he
produced works in a language of brilliant inspiration. He was doomed to
failure by the method he chose. The basement is never the place to cut out
doors and windows; turning off the intelligence is not the way to shine a
light on reality.[113]
Only later would Bergson’s philosophy be applied to religion, obliging
Rome to issue a condemnation. When Pope St. Pius X bombarded the
overbold edifice of anti-intellectualism with multiple anathemas, he was
defending human reason against the suicide of absurdity. The Pope wanted
first and foremost to defend the deposit of faith, but he was obliged in so
doing to warn philosophers against the guiding principles of modernism.
Kant, Hegel, and Bergson are in reality the most dangerous captains of the
modernist assault, taking their hatchets to the very roots of dogma and the
Gospel. Their philosophical synthesis–particularly that of Bergson–
dovetails perfectly with Schleiermacher’s religion of sentiment and of the
conscience. Ecclesiastical modernists, notably Loisy and Tyrrell, were great
admirers of our French philosopher. Quite simply, the philosophy of
creative emotion corresponds to modernism perfectly; Bergson’s system is
tailor-made to accompany an immanent Revelation and symbolic dogma in
perpetual evolution. The following chapters should leave no doubt.
 CHAPTER 11: LOISY’S EVOLUTIONIST “GOSPEL AND
CHURCH”
Kant is the incarnation of Protestant modernism by the tight logic of
his philosophical, scriptural, and theological teaching; he meets his French
Catholic alter ego in Loisy, rightly considered the leader of the modernists.
Kant was above all a critical philosopher, but his philosophy corrupted
every discipline within reach. Loisy had been trained in exegesis and was a
master of the trade, but his critical method supposes a Kantian-Bergsonian
philosophy and leads straight to a symbolist theology. To reach a better
understanding of the new and “inspired” contribution of Loisy to the
modernist movement, we must first sketch a portrait of the man and his
principal writings.

1. The Man and His Thought

Fr. Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) was born of humble parents who held a
farm in a little village on the Marne. His health was delicate, and he entered
the seminary at a very young age. He complained of the scholastic
education he received there, too dry and rational for his more simple piety.
To fill the void, he joined the Third Order of St. Francis and had his first
taste of liberalism with the writings of Lamennais, Montalembert, and
Lacordaire. In June 1879, the night before his ordination, he was assailed by
doubts as to the absolute truth of Christianity, suspecting some fraud at the
origin of our religion. His suspicions grew with his arrival at the recently
created Catholic Institute of Paris, where Louis Duchesne had invited him
to teach. Similar institutes all over France had an unfortunate tendency to
greet modern philosophy and critique with an imprudent openness of mind,
to the detriment of solid theology. Members yearned to be up to date and to
make up for lost time in tackling the problems of modern science, taking up
the challenge thrown down so long ago by their Protestant adversaries.
Duchesne, in Paris, was particularly active in this domain and founded
a scriptural review, the Critical Bulletin, in 1880. He preached the method
of direct contact with the sources and of uncompromising severity in textual
criticism. Loisy shone beside him as a brilliant disciple and the students’
favorite lecturer. Even his adversaries gave him credit for certain eminent
qualities: his talent as a researcher was undeniable, joining a keen eye for
detail to a critique which aimed straight for the essential, both in Semitic
philology and contemporary religious thought; his expositions were
remarkable for their subtlety and penetration.[114] Meanwhile, Renan, at
the College of France, was busily occupied with tearing apart Holy
Scripture, both the Old and the New Testament. On Duchesne’s
recommendation, Loisy undertook to read Renan’s works in order better to
refute him. Unfortunately, contact with the skeptical historian was fatal: far
from discouraging our budding young scholar from the path of critique,
reading Renan pushed him further still and confirmed his unhealthy
tendency. He voiced a number of the doubts he was entertaining about the
different Gospel narratives of the Nativity and the Resurrection, both of
which seemed to him incompatible with history. The holy Books were
written with less exactitude than the profane. If the Holy Ghost made any
contribution at all, He does not seem to have helped select the most reliable
historical sources. Even before he had read “the Germans”–the agnostic
Kantian philosophers–Loisy began casting doubt upon the objective reality
of Thomistic philosophical conclusions. He nonetheless believed it was
possible in scriptural studies to maintain a happy medium between the
scholar and the Christian.
Eighteen eighty-three marked a watershed year for progressive
exegesis, which suddenly fell under a stigma. It was the year the Catholic
Institute broke with Saint-Sulpice for the latter’s having anathematized the
“Germans”; when Loisy, with his pure critique, broke with Vigouroux, who
defended traditional exegesis and soon forbade his students to hear the
lectures of the Institute professor and his unbridled critique. At the same
time, Loisy began making friends with the future leaders of the modernist
movement, with Laberthonnière and Denis of the Annals of Christian
Philosophy. Most notably, he came into contact with the Catholic Baron
Frederick von Hügel, who used all of his influence, money, and enthusiasm
in fostering the modernist movement from his home in London. Together
with Duchesne, Loisy was initiated into Kantianism by Fr. Hébert, then
director of the Fénelon School. For Hébert, critical philosophy had already
discredited the rational foundations of the Faith and in particular the notion
of a personal God. He had espoused the exegetical thesis which Loisy
would later make his own: the Church, truth, and things divine all evolve;
the Gospel is pure legend and symbol, as Strauss had already demonstrated.
[115]
 So it was that, little by little, Fr. Loisy let go of the traditional Faith. A
few years later, in 1886, he had come to consider Catholicism as an obstacle
to the intellectual development of humanity. According to him, the only
religious truth a student can ever accept is one both relative and symbolic.
His comparative studies of the Assyrian religions led him to generalize his
doubts about Holy Scripture. These doubts blossomed into the skeptical
critique of the possibility of revelation in any religion whatsoever. Reading
Newman’s Comparative Study of Religions in 1892 only confirmed his
professional preconceptions. However, his situation was precarious. The
same year, he was at last forced to leave the Catholic Institute under the
pressure of the French bishops. In 1893, Leo XIII published
Providentissimus, censuring both the Institute and Loisy for minimizing
scriptural inspiration and claiming to detect errors in the Holy Bible. Loisy
found himself assigned as chaplain to a girls’ school in Neuilly with ample
time to pursue his scriptural research.
Incidentally, 1893 was also the year Johannes Weiss saw his book, The
Kingdom of God in the Preaching of Jesus, translated into French.[116]
This book was to play a major role in convincing Loisy to believe that the
Gospels were purely eschatological. Jesus, like all of his contemporaries,
expected the end of the world sometime in the near future. His mission was
to proclaim the imminent kingdom of God which he had come to establish
on earth. Loisy would soon make use of this idea to explain his own theory
of the dynamic of the Gospels and of the Christian religion as a whole.
During his five-year sabbatical, he produced his notorious “unpublished
work,” the substance of many of his later writings. The book analyzes the
three “postulates” of the Faith which, in Loisy’s opinion, no longer stand up
under the scrutiny of the modern sciences of critique, biology, and
sociology. The theological postulate held God and Creation to be concepts
which had never changed and never would change–“whose authors had
assuredly not foreseen Darwin.”[117] The messianic postulate would have
it that Christ and the Church had been announced in the Old Testament.
Finally, the ecclesiological postulate declared that the Church, with her
hierarchy, sacraments, and dogmas, was directly instituted by Jesus Christ.
Loisy wanted to help the Church find an issue from the impasse into which
she had wandered in relation to science. What she ought to do was adapt the
three postulates to the laws of historical development, which would be
much more satisfying for the Faith than some tissue of miracles.
 After parting ways with Duchesne, Loisy started drawing closer to the
open-minded and reasonably liberal Jerusalem School directed by Fr.
Lagrange.[118] Only later, in Things of the Past,[119] would he admit that
he had long since lost his faith, a circumstance which apparently did cause
him a certain crisis of conscience. Collaboration soon became difficult. In
1894, Battifol, the Institute’s secretary, refused to publish one of his articles
because it questioned the divinity of Christ. Loisy retorted, with a devilish
chuckle, “So you’re still hung up on that!”[120] In 1896, the same
secretary, still complaining of Loisy’s slippery, equivocal manner, wrote to
Lagrange that he no longer felt like hitching Loisy to their cart because he
was prone to bolting. Loisy struck off on his own and founded the Review
of Religious History and Literature,[121] with the collaboration of the
somber Joseph Turmel, among others, whose double-dealing eventually set
off one of the great scandals of the modernist crisis.
Loisy’s school presented itself as purely concerned with critique,
hoping thereby to sidestep the doctrinal norms laid down by Leo XIII in
Providentissimus. It took down the guardrails of scriptural inspiration and
Church authority, and declared its intention to approach the Bible without
preconceived ideas, following the sole guidelines of science, history, and
archeology, leaving to apologetics the task of reconciling their scientific
conclusions with the Faith. In reality, in spite of all its pretended
impartiality, pure critique clearly took its lead from the Protestants, whose
faith is not intellectual nor is it founded on reasonable motives, but on the
contrary remains fundamentally agnostic. Moreover, Loisy was already
infected by much more radical ideas: “If I am anything in religion, it is
more pantheist-positivist-humanitarian than Christian.”[122]
A Jesuit, Fr. Fontaine, fired the first salvo with “Protestant Infiltration
and the French Clergy” (1899). He denounced Loisy for dismissing the
historical authority of the fourth Gospel and “A. Firmin” (one of Loisy’s
pseudonyms) for his articles on “Primitive Revelation.”[123] A. Firmin was
again attacked in 1900 for “The Proofs and the Economy of Revelation”
and for “The Religion of Israel,”[124] which Cardinal Richard of Paris
censured as contrary to the principles of the Church. That same year, the
study “Babylonian Myths and the First Chapters of Genesis”[125] came
under the same cloud for its treatment of the delicate question of man’s
creation.
 In spite of the bad publicity which he stirred up all around him, Loisy
had the support of high-ranking ecclesiastical patrons, notably Archbishop
Mignot of Albi. At the very moment he was publishing the notorious red
books which were to set the spark to the tinder, his pose as the
misunderstood scholar, together with his scientific studies, gave him such
notoriety that he was actually proposed as a candidate for the bishopric of
Monaco, if not for one in France, by Cardinal Mathieu of the Roman Curia.
Once his mask fell and he was pinpointed by the authorities as a dangerous
heretic, Loisy adopted a low-profile, hiding behind his equivocations for
four years, long enough to recruit a number of followers to the cause of
“pure science” and “progress.” Excommunicated in 1908, he left the
Church to receive a chair of religious history at the College of France. From
there he undertook to launch the religion of Humanity devised by Auguste
Comte, his predecessor at the College. Nothing could be more enlightening
as to the logical outcome of the modernist religion than this strange religion
of Comte revived by Loisy.[126]

2. “The Gospel and the Church”

This work (1902) was prompted by the publication of What Is
Christianity?, a series of lectures delivered by the liberal Protestant
Harnack at the University of Berlin in the year 1900.[127] Harnack
congratulated Luther for having set the stage for a movement of
emancipation, but went on to criticize him for only going halfway and not
rejecting dogmas and rites altogether to rediscover, in its primitive
simplicity, the authentic religion of Christ. The essence of Christianity had
to be unburdened of its faded wrappings.
The work was foreign and Protestant and therefore not likely to
interest the public at large. Intellectual circles, however, were quite
naturally attentive, Loisy closest of all. He took up his pen all the more
willingly that his own Christian synthesis lay waiting in a drawer. He
gallantly stepped forward, taking up the Berlin scholar’s challenge with the
publication of The Gospel and the Church, followed by Concerning a Little
Book, its complement.[128] The evolutionist and symbolist declarations
which were rampant within and which would be obvious to today’s reader,
were camouflaged at the time behind an excessively subtle exposition in
which the author’s statements about religion became so nuanced as to be
equivocal and so counterbalanced as to be ambiguous. A clear affirmation
was nowhere to be found. Every expression of subtle reserve in the French
vocabulary had its place. A strange, disconcerting book, perfecting the art
of insinuating conclusions without ever stating them outright. It was
destined to dupe, and the dupes came in droves when it first appeared.
In fact, under the guise of refuting a Protestant book, a whole new
conception of Christianity slips in as the work’s defining element. Loisy
denounced Harnack’s Christianity with a point of sarcasm: Christianity is a
spoiled fruit which must be peeled away to reach an incorruptible pit.
According to Harnack, Christ only had one true notion among a plethora of
false ones: the intimate and individual relation between man and God by
mystical filiation. Behold all of the Gospel, according to the kerygmatic
school. Behold the essence of Christianity, such as it appears in Jesus’
preaching and example. A man is religious, in the secret realms of his
conscience, to the extent that he knows, loves, and actively honors God as
his Father. It was a reductionist conception of the Gospel, seeing it only
under the angle of divine paternity. Whatever did not fit into that notion was
rejected without further ceremony as an apocryphal add-on.
Loisy mocked the idea of a Gospel “fruit” which had to be peeled off
to get to the central core, but his own theory was little different. He
practiced a parallel reductionism, since he considered the Gospels purely
under the angle of the imminent kingdom of God. In so doing, he was
aligning himself with the eschatological school of Johannes Weiss, who
taught that Jesus nourished the same hopes as His contemporaries. Loisy
went on to interpret the entire Gospel from his conception of a starry-eyed
Jesus, living under the illusion of an impending Parousia. Like his German
predecessors, Loisy claimed to distinguish the Christ of faith from the
Christ of history. For Strauss, as for Harnack, the faith of the community
had produced a host of mythologies which had crystallized around what
was pure history. Loisy followed suit: the historical Gospel amounts to very
little indeed, since the synoptic tradition betrays a work of progressive
idealization, of symbolic and dogmatic interpretation. Neither the Christian
preachers nor the Evangelists were greatly concerned with historical
accuracy; their goal was to instill faith, and they interpreted the Gospel in
recounting it.[129] The apparent realism of the scenes in the Gospel
according to St. John is due to the mystical imagination of the author and to
the energy of his conviction, which did not allow him clearly to distinguish,
in his religious meditations, the ideal from the real, theory from history, the
symbol from its object. Yet, the fourth Gospel is a book of mystical
theology in which we hear the voice of the Christian conscience, not the
Christ of history.[130]
In the final analysis, the Gospels tell us the story of a man named Jesus
who, in the last years of his life, preached the imminence of the kingdom of
universal political domination, so long awaited by Israel, and penance as the
necessary condition for entering therein. This hope first overtook Jesus as
he listened to John the Baptist, and he went on to convince himself that he
was the Messiah who would preside over this work at his own upcoming
glorious return. He was entirely caught up in this idea of an imminent
Parousia and certainly never dreamed of founding a church. He swore to
his disciples that they would sit on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes
of Israel, drunk as he was on his messianic dreams. A coup d’état on
Jerusalem failed, and the insurgents were arrested and condemned for high
treason because Jesus had declared himself King of the Jews, a crime for
which he was executed. His body was buried in a common grave and never
recovered. Roughly, that is what Gospel history teaches us about the life of
Jesus, stripped of all legendary accretions. With the stone rolled solidly in
front of Jesus’ tomb, the historian’s work is done.
Jesus dies. Everything changes. The pre-Paschal cycle, or the cycle of
history, gives way to the Paschal cycle, or the cycle of belief. Reality gives
way to faith, fact to legend, Gospel to Church. The Church emerges from
the Gospel as a butterfly from its cocoon. The first cycle gives way to the
second, but the second is not entirely foreign to the first: it continues the
first as the plant continues the seed or a reality its symbol. It is contained in
the first, even as it contradicts the first. Jesus fixed a definite moment in
time for the coming of a purely earthly kingdom, while the “belief” of the
disciples projected this kingdom onto an endless horizon where it became
universal and was swallowed up in eternity. The Apostles, especially St.
Paul and St. John, did not know how to abstract themselves from this
movement of symbiosis and embroidery within the primitive community.
For this reason, modern textual critique encounters much more dogma than
history. To give an example, Loisy explains that: “the appearances [of Jesus
after the Resurrection] are a direct argument but one uncertain in its
significance.…[S]ensory impressions are not an adequate testimony to a
purely supernatural reality.…The historian will reserve his conviction,
because the objective reality of the appearances is not defined for him with
sufficient precision.”[131] “The reality of Jesus’ divinity is not a fact of
Gospel history open to critical verification.”[132] “Christ is God for the
faith.”[133] In short, the risen Christ no longer belongs to the order of the
present life or to sense knowledge but to the world to come. The disciples
“believe” in the Resurrection of the Master. “For them,” he entered into his
glory; he became Lord–was consecrated, as it were; he has stepped into
immortality. The coming of the kingdom is transformed by an evolution of
belief into the heavenly kingdom of eternity for which every man must
make ready.
Here Loisy betrays the first of his preconceived ideas: the opposition
between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, the latest edition of the
Kantian divorce between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. A few
other philosophical presuppositions–having nothing to do with biblical
criticism–complete our picture: the theory of immanent pantheism (“let us
make God in our image”); progress and science hold the secret of man’s
perfection; the duty to conform the Church’s creeds to the latest science;
historical facts (miracles) cannot prove the divinity of Christ. We rest our
case with a few salient quotes revealing the gravity of Loisy’s intellectual
malaise:
If we assume that the truth, insofar as it is accessible to human reason, is something
absolute; that Revelation possesses this character and dogma, too, has a share in it; that not
only the object of knowledge is eternal and immutable in itself but also the form which this
knowledge has taken in human history; then the assertions of the little book [The Gospel and
the Church] are more than audacious; they are absurd and impious.…A tradition which, like
the one focused on the miracles of Jesus, is inevitably legendary.…God does not intervene in
History.…The common idea of Revelation is pure childishness. God reveals Himself in and
through humanity. The conscious individual can be considered nearly interchangeably either as
the consciousness of God in the world, by a sort of incarnation of God in humanity, or as the
consciousness of the world subsisting in God by a sort of concentration of the universe in man.
[134]
In reality, behind this reform of faith and Holy Scripture, Loisy was
advocating a veritable ecclesiastical insurrection. He was perfectly aware of
the fact, writing ten years after the events:
My argument against Harnack implied a critique of the Gospel sources which on several points
was more radical than that of the Protestant theologian; on the other hand, my defense of the
Roman Church…implied the same rejection of absolute theses as professed by scholastic
theology [the Councils of Trent and of Vatican I] concerning the formal institution of the
Church and of the sacraments by Christ, the immutability of dogmas and the nature of
ecclesiastical authority.…I insinuated, discreetly but really, an essential reform of biblical
exegesis, of theology as a whole, and even of Catholicism in general.[135]
3. The Gospel and the Church in Evolution
Setting Harnack aside to follow Loisy is essentially passing from an
onion you peel to a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. The comparison
points to an entirely new element in modernism proper to Loisy. Bergson
had brought the Kantian revolution a step further. He had introduced a new
factor, the keystone of all thought and all being: pure becoming, pure
duration, life, creative evolution. From there, Blondel deduced a new notion
of truth, the mind’s conformity with life. Loisy was at that time in search of
an exegetical method to account for the existence of the Church and of the
Gospel yet without implying the fact of a divine Revelation. The
philosophical watchword of Bergson-Blondel, development and life, would
serve as the perfect critical tool for dismantling the Gospels.
Loisy’s innovation was nothing less than revolutionary, even from the
point of view of the radical Protestants. When the Protestants opposed the
Christ of history to the Christ of faith, or the historical Gospel and the
dogmatic Church, it was always in view of disproving the latter. Loisy
offered a new solution to the dilemma. The essence of the Gospel is not a
pure nucleus hidden under the tatters of an aging Church, to be removed as
you would remove the decay from around a rotten fruit. It is the living seed
which develops in a progressive way to live its life or its various lives, just
as the oak arises from the acorn or the butterfly from its cocoon. In reality,
Loisy goes much further than the radical Protestants since, for him, vital
development takes the impossible leap from frog to lizard; Loisy would
have a donkey arise from a chicken. Yet for a true and noble modernist,
nothing is impossible. He deftly steps over the contradiction, in proper
Hegelian fashion. That is why the pre-Paschal cycle and the Paschal cycle,
the Gospel and the Church, should not be considered as things opposed to
one another as though they were mutually exclusive contraries. They should
be united in an entente worthy of Bergson: they represent the historical
evolution of the Church, for the Church, like the Gospel, is life. Since
transformation is the governing principle of every culture as of every living
being, we have only to conform ourselves with this irresistible impulse of
human nature, abandoning neither the Gospel nor the Church. Such is how
Loisy explained the successive and contrary additions which, far from
opposing the vital seed, are in fact its perfect expression. Life is a
movement of adaptation to perpetually variable, perpetually new
conditions. Thus, “Judaism was to live a risen and glorified life in
Christianity,” becoming compatible with the Greco-Roman mold into which
it had just inserted itself. “Has not every organism got its limits of
development after which it must decay, and be content to survive in its
progeny? …May not Catholicism like Judaism have to die in order that it
may live again in greater and grander form?” [136]
Armed with this master key of interpretation, Loisy could explain
everything and its contrary with disconcerting ease. The most sacred things
and ideas are thus conserved: truth, Revelation, doctrine, Gospel, Church,
dogma, etc. As with Ritschl’s equivocal creed, the shell is preserved, but it
is emptied of all its contents. Truth, Revelation, dogma, Gospel, and the
divinity of Jesus Christ are all cast into the evolutionary whirlpool.
The terms are the same, but they have been completely changed or
thrown out of context by the magic wand of perpetual development.
Obligingly, Loisy himself exposed this process with admirable clarity:
Truth considered as the good of man is no more immutable than man himself. It evolves
with him, in him, through him; which does not prevent its being truth for him; indeed, it is so
only on that condition.[137] The truth of Revelation, insofar as all believers participate in it, is
perpetually created in them, in the Church, with the aid of Scripture and Tradition.[138] It is
just the idea of development which is now needed, not to be created all at once, but established
from a better knowledge of the past.[139] Jesus had been much less the representative of a
doctrine than the initiator of a religious movement. The movement which he inaugurated
perpetuated itself according to the normal conditions of every living human movement.[140] It
cannot be too often repeated that the Gospel was not an absolute, abstract doctrine, directly
applicable at all times and to all men by its essential virtue. It was a living faith, linked
everywhere to the time and the circumstances that witnessed its birth. In order to preserve this
faith in the world, a work of adaptation has been, and will be, perpetually necessary.[141] In
one sense Jesus was the Messiah, in another sense He was presently to become the Messiah.
He was, in so far as He was called personally to govern the New Jerusalem; He was not yet,
since the New Jerusalem had no existence.…[142] The divinity of Christ is a dogma which
grew up in the Christian conscience. It existed only in germ in the notion of a Messiah, Son of
God.[143] The realities and the ideas of hierarchy, primacy, infallibility, dogma, and even of
sacrament, correspond to a development of the Christian community–a development of which
the Gospel contains only the seed.[144]
✜✜✜
A more felicitous alliance between the Gospel and the postulates of
modern philosophy could scarcely have been forged. Loisy espoused the
Kantian ignorantism which denies the thing-in-itself (the historical Christ)
and put subjective egology in its place (the Christ of faith and of the
primitive community). The two Christs, although contrary, unite in the same
vital, evolutionary movement of the Church, her rites, and her dogmas.
Obviously, it is another question whether or not such a transformation of
dogma could be proven by a reading of the Bible. Most of all, its viability is
highly problematic. For the transformation effected by Loisy is not just a
development more or less relative to a starting point; it is a veritable
contradiction of what came before: God is and is not distinct from the
world; the soul is and is not immortal; Christ is God but not at first. Rather
than calling his book The Gospel and the Church, Loisy would have been a
little more honest had he called it An Explanation of Christianity According
to Evolution, Immanence, and Universal Relativism.
Nowhere has modernism found a more complete and faithful
expression than in these little red manifestos. Rome saw the danger, and in
February 1903 the first book was condemned by Leo XIII. The Holy Office
under St. Pius X placed on the Index various works of the same author
before condemning the system itself four years later; by then modernism
had infected the atmosphere, and Loisy was now legion.
 CHAPTER 12: TYRRELL’S SYMBOLIC THEOLOGY
The eye of the modernist hurricane was in France, but it wreaked
considerable havoc in the surrounding countries as well–in Italy, as we shall
see briefly in the next chapter, but also in England. Its most prominent
representative was Tyrrell, a Jesuit; to him do we owe the theological
synthesis of modernism such as it would be condemned by Pius X. The
advantage of Tyrrell’s theology over the works of his friends abroad–
LeRoy, Blondel, and especially Loisy–is that it draws theological
conclusions without weighing itself down with dry philosophy or exegesis.
Tyrrell did not bother with tortuous, oversubtle arguments but wrote clearly
what he thought, since he considered himself safely hidden behind a
pseudonym. Moreover, the roots of this ill-converted former Protestant
pushed him to logical conclusions at which his cradle-Catholic friends
would have balked. So it is that no one could be better suited to the task of
defining modernist theology in its tenets and its outcome than this fiery
Irishman.

1. The Man
The Baron von Hügel was the first to bring modernism across the
Channel during the glory days of Loisy, and he blithely passed on the virus
to his golden child, George Tyrrell (1861-1909). We would do well to
mention a few of the influences which marked Tyrrell’s personality before
delving into his biography as such or into his activities. Born in Dublin to a
Calvinist family and himself a convert to the Catholic Faith, he was carried
along by his own personal mysticism toward a theology of intuition over
intelligence, tainted with a certain Protestant individualism. Tyrrell
remained in continual contact with the Baron von Hügel, who plunged him
into the writings of the German philosophers and into Loisy’s biblical
debates. He abandoned dogmatism and Scholasticism, professing an affinity
for Blondel’s philosophy of immanence, whose conclusions he claimed to
anticipate by a sort of spiritual kinship. Finally, he accepted wholesale the
conclusions of scriptural criticism, all the more naively for his own
incompetence in the matter.
Our Irishman realized he was something of a chameleon by
temperament and ingenuously admitted: “If I have any gift at all, it is a sort
of feminine ability to jump to conclusions without the help of premises, of
divining what History should say, of forging hypotheses and
syntheses.”[145]
Those who knew him best judged him severely. His mind, so jealous
of its own thought, seemed only to think by the suggestion of others, a trait
which may be due to the fact that he lost his father before his birth and had
a difficult time affirming his own personality. He had a mystical
temperament with all its baggage–lively intuition, disdain for the banal, and
an incorrigible impetuosity. Once he had made a decision, he knew no
retreat. Tyrrell defined himself as an original blend of a German head and
an Irish heart, with a predominance of the latter. His complex personality
also hid the bitter obstinacy of the Englishman, matched with the ardor of
the Irishman, to which we might add a morbid nervousness and an
adaptability approaching duplicity. He constantly questioned his own
motives but at the same time made no scruple about hiding his game behind
lies, if lies might serve a noble cause.
As we read his autobiography, we are tempted to agree with his own
description of himself: all of his life, he played at religion by taking it apart
and putting it back together, just as, when a child, he used to dismantle his
electric trains. Unbelief and atheism smoldered beneath thirteen years of
solid Jesuit formation, and sooner or later they were bound to rise to the
surface. The conversion of George Tyrrell to the Catholic Church happened
in two stages. He was educated in Low Church Anglicanism, which he left
at the age of sixteen as a skeptic and an unwitting disciple of Nietzsche. He
sought to rediscover the security he had once known by joining the High
Church, more to play at religion than by real conviction, as his prayer from
that period bears witness: “Oh God, if there be a God; save my soul, if I
have a soul.”[146]
Before long, weary of the ritualistic High Church, he entered into
contact with Catholicism, started to read avidly, educated himself, and at
last knocked at the door of the Jesuit retreat house in London. Within a few
hours, the man who had arrived with no intention of being formally
received into the Church returned a papist and half a Jesuit.[147] He was
ordained priest in 1891, and his first years were spent defending the
Catholic cause against every enemy, rationalist or liberal Protestant with
vehemence and a definite taste for polemics. He began to preach retreats
and published a number of articles which were released in 1901 as a book
of a decidedly conservative tone, The Faith of Millions. Yet his heart was
already elsewhere. He was forging friendships with the liberal London set,
particularly the Baron von Hügel, who put him in contact with European
philosophers and exegetes. He was to become the indefatigable promoter of
the modernist cause. To tell the truth, although Tyrrell is rightly referred to
as the theologian of “Catholic” modernism, he was not so much a professor
or a writer as he was a missionary. His modernism was stamped with an
apostolic character. His role seems to have been to organize the scientific
labors of his French masters, Loisy and Blondel, into a living theological
system.
The influence from abroad slowly appeared in his writings, beginning
with the publication of Religion of Theology and Devotion. He was
convinced that the pressing need of the moment was to battle all
conventional forms of philosophy and theology. A man of his times, he
longed to re-establish the Christian Faith upon intimate personal
experience, interpreting everything in terms of evolution and life. He
considered that the hour had come for the Catholic Church to molt and
change her skin, all the while posing as a staunch advocate of Rome.
Paradoxically, all of Tyrrell’s theology consisted in protecting the Faith
against the encroachments of theology. He would exploit, for example, the
Thomistic notions of analogy and connaturality, using them to draw the
most radical conclusions. Analogy thus became for him the basis of
skeptical, ignorantist symbolism. Such a use of the terms is not only a
deformation but a pure and simple betrayal of Thomism, a theology whose
sole aspiration is to speak of God truly.
Tyrrell did not hide his disdain for dogmatic formulae. He spoke of the
historical tension between the abstract and the concrete in religion, between
nature and supernature, and between the superficial treatment proper to
Aristotelian metaphysics and the depths of analogy. Theology comes after
devotion and ought to be corrected by it, just as the lex credendi–the law of
belief–ought to be determined by the lex orandi–the law of prayer. A new
article, “A Perverted Devotion,” defined his own faith as the experience of
a power within himself and within every man, pushing him to become just
in spite of his basic corruption. Clearly, the spiritual and religious itinerary
of Tyrrell is not a natural progress from faith to reasoned apology. On the
contrary, the Tyrrellian effort is wholly dedicated to leaving rational
apology behind so as to advance unencumbered toward a pure faith–a faith
which inevitably becomes an apology of irrationality.
 These writings sent up a red flag for the authorities, who placed Tyrrell
under closer scrutiny and distanced him from his London audience. Our
author saw fit to spread his egological ideas clandestinely, and under the
cloak of mystical piety he began to dupe even the shrewdest of readers in
France, where the name of Tyrrell had gained a certain renown. He adopted
various pseudonyms. “Ernest Engels,” in a philosophical essay, reduced
human nature to its moral aspirations, and these aspirations to a sense of the
absolute, after the manner of the Deists of the Enlightenment. “Hilaire
Bourdon” took Ernest Engels’s abstract theses and offered a concrete
application of them to the Church. One could no longer claim that the
Church infallibly preserves a revealed deposit of faith: any such pretension
had been discredited by modern exegesis in general and by Loisy in
particular, whose cold, hard facts had debunked both the infallibility of the
Bible and the miracles on which Christ’s supposedly infallible doctrine had
been based.
Finally unmasked, Tyrrell was expelled from the Society of Jesus; he
admitted that he was not entirely surprised but had, on the contrary, already
seen trouble coming. Thanks to an effective team of translators echoing his
grievances throughout France and Italy, Tyrrell was able to throw all the
passion of his zeal into publishing the little administrative drama of his
rupture with the Society, while requesting approval from Rome to continue
celebrating Mass. He attracted worldwide attention by his exchanges with
the orthodox press, particularly the Italian Corrispondenza, and all were of
one voice in celebrating the innocent victim of Roman despotism. The
modernist cause had gained a new martyr and it was quick to profit.
As Tyrrell published article upon article, his theological positions
crystallized in a sense ever more radically opposed to the Catholic Faith.
According to him, the dilemma facing modernism was not so much
Catholicism–a simple phase, now obsolete–as Christ Himself, Christianity
as such, and the very idea of God. Toward the end of his life, he concluded
that the real Christ, who redeemed him and who was God, lay within and
that he was himself “quite cured of the outside God.”[148] He finally
published a number of his articles together in a single volume under the
evocative title, Through Scylla and Charybdis. The excessive dogmatism of
theologians and the utilitarian pragmatism of certain philosophers were two
neighboring shoals through which he meant to indicate the passage toward
an essentially mystical, egological, and symbolist Christianity. His work
was a reply to Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Sabatier, but in a language
adapted to minds which Catholicism had taught to appreciate and seek out
an exterior social tie, a symbolic liturgy, and, above all, historical
continuity. He was claiming to save appearances while systematically
annihilating historical Christianity.
Paging through the works of Tyrrell or examining his life, one is struck
by the wealth of his imagination and the clarity with which he expresses
modernist theology as condemned by St. Pius X. At the same time, there is
something profoundly disturbing in his bitter and even violent attitude
toward Rome:
Not only has excommunication been despoiled of most of its medieval terrors, but it has
become a baptism by fire, a means of sanctification for the pious man.…Rarely in [the
Church’s] history have all eyes been fixed upon her in a more anxious expectation; one hoped
that she would give bread to these millions who die of hunger, to all those who suffer from that
vague need of God so scorned by the encyclical.…Alas! Pius X comes toward us with a stone
in one hand and a scorpion in the other.[149]
Coupled with such disdain, Tyrrell adopted the contradictory and
dangerous attitude of clinging to membership in the Church he so radically
disparaged. He preserved to the very end an invincible attachment to the
Church–the modernist Church, understood as the People of God–along with
a desire just as invincible to aid in her transition from Vaticanism to
modernism. So much so that, at his premature death at the age of forty-
eight, he expressed his desire that the words “Priest of the Catholic Church”
be engraved on his tomb with images of the host and chalice, symbols of an
outdated culture, a simple phase in the advent of the religion of man.

2. Tyrrell’s Theology
Many of Tyrrell’s articles are gathered in his final work, Through
Scylla and Charybdis. They cull the essence of modernist theology
concerning what is most vital to Catholicism: God, Revelation, dogma, and
the Church. He wrote prolifically, and a number of his volumes were put in
their final form and published only posthumously; together, they provide a
panoramic view of modernism, throwing into relief its true nature as a
religion in which an historical, exterior God vanishes within the depths of
the human consciousness.
Religion is the tie binding man to God. We must step forward to assist
modern scientific man, walled within his immanent prison, and offer him a
religion tailor-made to meet his needs. Religion is the spontaneous result of
the demands of the human spirit fully satisfied by the emotive experience of
God in us. God is not a distant being, far from man. We need to praise the
virtues of the various theisms, pantheism and polytheism, for polytheism is
“a better expression of the divine than anthropomorphic deism. No room for
all good qualities in one man. Yahweh cannot be at once Apollo and the
Man of Sorrows, Minerva and St. Francis.”[150]
Tyrrell reduces Jesus Christ to His simplest expression. He was never
the Savior at all. He could not contain within Himself all the wealth of the
Spirit which was to manifest itself over time in the work of the Christian
community. He was mistaken because, in the words of Loisy, “Jesus
foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came….”[151] He
announced the modern irrelevance of the “categories and concepts” of
Jesus:
Are we to frame our minds to that of a first-century Jewish carpenter, for whom more than half
the world and nearly the whole of its history did not exist; to whom the stellar universe was
unknown; who cared nothing for art or science or history or politics or nine-tenths of the
interests of humanity but solely for the kingdom of God and His righteousness?[152]
Revelation can be founded on one of two things, as far as Tyrrell was
concerned. It supposes either a pantheistic conception of man as “God” or
else an immanent conception of man closed in upon himself without God.
Either way, Tyrrell left no room for a God who would promulgate a doctrine
and commandments under pain of condemnation. This is so for two reasons.
Firstly, because Revelation is not a revealed deposit of intelligible
information; it is only an irrational experience, a mystical touch felt only by
the heart. Secondly and more importantly, because the voice of God is at the
same time the voice of the believer intimately united to God. In brief,
Revelation is a product of the consciousness, for man is a little piece of the
spiritual universe and of the supernatural order. Here are a few exemplary
texts:
Our best God is but an idol, a temple made with hands in which the Divine will is as little
to be confined as our hell-purgatory-heaven (rez-de-chaussée; entresol; premier étage)
schematization.[153] Because man is part and parcel of the spiritual world and of the
supernatural order; because in God he lives and moves and has his being, the truth of religion
is in him implicitly, as surely as the truth of the whole physical universe is involved in every
part of it. Could he read the needs of his own spirit and Conscience he would need no teacher.
[154] For, there it is always and necessarily we ourselves who speak to ourselves; who (aided
no doubt by the immanent God) work out truth for ourselves.[155]
Dogma and the Creed according to Tyrrell are as flexible as the
equivocal creed of Ritschl. Cast in the same mold as Tyrrell’s purely
interior Revelation, dogma is as living and changing as the human
sentiment from which it springs. Dogmatic formulae may well be bursting
with divine truth, but they have been subjected to human elaboration; rather
than falling from heaven ready-made, they have been lived, and so are, in a
sense, the product of life. He explained his symbolic theory, straight out of
Schleiermacher and Ritschl: “Revelation belongs rather to the category of
impressions than to that of expression”; it is not so much affirmation as
experience.[156] Doctrines and dogmas are to the true Church what a
pocket map of London is to the city itself, “a sufficient guide in certain
matters for certain practical purposes.”[157] Theological elaboration was
useful in its time, for: “Amid all the protective theological accretions, the
nucleus of Christianity has been preserved like a fly in amber, or like a
mammoth in ice.”[158]
Yet the spirit of Christianity survived and has developed in the
collective life of the faithful.
The Trinity, the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection,
heaven and hell, angels and devils, the Madonna and the saints, all are pieces of one
mosaic….It is only through the variegated stained glass of some such creed that God’s pure
colourless light streams in upon us to guide us.[159] Doubtless, as an expression, [the Catholic
religion] is full of distortions, excesses, defects; its truth lies inextricably mixed with error as
gold in the ore; yet the ore may be richer than any yet given to man; and pure gold may be
unattainable as long as man is man.[160] What she [the Church] says is often absolutely wrong
but the truth in whose defence she says it is revealed, and to that truth alone we owe adhesion.
[161] But in what sense are religious revelations divinely authorised? What sort of truth is
guaranteed to by the “seal of the spirit”?…[A] truth which is directly practical, preferential,
approximate, and only indirectly speculative.[162]
The Tyrrellian Church is as elastic as its dogma. “The notion of a
complete ecclesiastical organism produced directly by a divine fiat the day
of Pentecost” is pure fantasy.[163] The Church is not an institution like the
ecclesiastical empire of the Vatican; she is the life of a people in progress.
The inspiration of Christ first set the Church in motion; it is sufficient that
she maintain that movement until the end of time. The monarchical, Roman
Church must be clearly distinguished from the collective consciousness of
the People of God, which is always healthy and robust, and which truly
possesses authority and infallibility.
It is He who sends us to them [the official interpreters of the mind of the Church]; not they
who send us to Him. He is our first and our highest authority. Were they to forbid the appeal,
their own dependent authority would be at an end.[164] Official Catholicism is outmoded but
we must not abandon it, for it still holds the treasures of the spiritual life on condition that we
distinguish between the living faith and dead theology; between the real Church and the
governing authority. Judaism was to live a risen and glorified life in Christianity.…Well, may
 not history repeat itself?…Is God’s arm shortened that He should not again out of the very
stones raise up seed to Abraham? May not Catholicism like Judaism have to die in order that it
may live again in greater and grander form? Has not every organism got its limits of
development after which it must decay, and be content to survive in its progeny?[165] The
Roman communion may be no more than the charred stump of a tree torn to pieces by gales
and rent by thunderbolts; she may be and probably is more responsible for all the schisms than
the schismatics themselves, yet, unlike them all, she stands for the principle of Catholicity, for
the ideal of a spiritually united humanity centred round Christ in one divine society…; she is at
least an abortive essay towards [a] perfect all-embracing religious association….[166]
Tyrrell finished his critique of Vaticanism with a brief description of
his dream-Church of the future. She would include what is positive in every
religion in order to become the primary and, ultimately, the only world
religion.
The true Catholic Church would not be an institution in the legal sense
but a school of divine charity; she would be the keeper not of a body of
doctrine but of a way of living. Such a Church would look rather more like
a Buddhist community, and the Catholic creed would resemble their own: “I
put my trust in Buddha; I put my trust in the Doctrine [of Deliverance]; I
put my trust in the Community.”[167] “True Catholicism is not the
Christianized Judaism of the N[ew] T[estament], but rather Christianized
paganism or world religion….[T]his is altogether a liberation and a spiritual
gain–a change from tight clothes to elastic.”[168] The coming of Jesus
proved to us that: “Man is then no longer a servant or imitator of the Divine
Will but a son of God, a free and original co-operator in the Divine work.…
Now it is no longer from without, but from within, that God reveals Himself
as a mysterious, transcendent force,” for man now “explicitly recognises
this inward principle as the Divine Spirit, the condition and foundation of
his personality.”[169] “The Spirit of Jesus uttered in the Church, in the
Gospel, in the sacraments, is apprehended by His followers, not as a
doctrine but as a personal influence, fashioning the soul to its own divine
nature.”[170] Jesus set in motion the auto-divinization of the human
consciousness: “In this sense Humanity…is a mystical Christ, a collective
Logos, a Word or Manifestation of the Father; and every member of that
society is in his measure a Christ or a revealer in whom God is made flesh
and dwells in our midst.”[171]
Thus, impatient with mere ecumenism, Tyrrell longed for a union
combining the best of every religion. He was, however, a realist and
admitted that such a union could only happen by the survival of the fittest
religious system which would destroy all the others.[172]
3. Are You a Model Modernist? Take the Test!
Obviously, Tyrrell’s creed was no different from that of his modernist
friends, first put into words by the protomodernist Marcel Hébert, director
of the Fénelon School in Paris. Ten years before the crisis broke, a work
entitled The Creed of the Savoyard Vicar (1894) outlined a total
transposition of the Catholic Creed, complete with pantheistic overtones.
Hébert’s Rousseauist profession of faith was a first attempt but a masterly
one.[173] It serves nicely as a summary of the essential tenets of
modernism, allowing us to present the reader with the whole of modernist
doctrine in the form of a test, a sort of standard for judging the pop
theologians of the twentieth century.
I believe in the objective value of the idea of God, of an absolute and perfect ideal, distinct
but not separate from the world which He draws and directs toward the Better…; one and
three, for He can be called: infinite activity, intelligence, and love. And in him in whom the
union of the divine and human natures was achieved to an exceptional, unprecedented
degree…: Jesus Christ, whose brilliant superiority dazzled simple hearts and was symbolized
for them in a supernatural conception…; whose powerful action after death…determined in
the minds of the Apostles and the disciples certain visions and apparitions recorded in the
Gospels and was symbolized by the myth of a liberating descent into Hell and an ascension
into the upper regions of Heaven…I believe in the Spirit of love (one of the aspects of the
triple ideal) which vivifies our souls…I believe in the Holy Universal Church, visible
expression of the ideal communion of all beings…I believe in the survival of that which
constitutes our moral personality; in everlasting life which is already present in every soul
living a superior life…and which the popular imagination has symbolized with the resurrection
of the body and eternal happiness.[174]
Here, then, is a summary of modernist doctrine.

Philosophy:
1) Thomistic philosophy is outmoded. It was definitively supplanted by the
philosophy of Kant and Hegel.
2) Things do not exist. God is not; He is becoming. There is a swallow’s
flight but no swallow.
3) The principle of non-contradiction admits of certain exceptions. A dog
can both be and not be a dog.
4) Truth is not speculative. It is moral, an affair of the heart and not of the
mind.
5) Truth is subjective and evolves. It is the mind’s conformity with itself and
with life.

Revelation:
6) Revelation does not transmit an intelligible truth. It is only an
experience, an impression and a religious sentiment, perceived by every
man in the depths of his conscience.
7) Revelation is fallible. It is a spontaneous emotion which generates a
fallible image.
8) Revelation is human and subjective. It comes not from God but from
man, who speaks to himself.
9) Revelation is utilitarian. It spreads not truth but life.
10) Revelation is individual and incommunicable. The Revelation of Jesus
was formally valid only for himself.

Dogma:
11) Dogma is a symbol. It is a symbol which means nothing to the mind but
speaks volumes to the heart.
12) Dogma is changeable. It varied between the naïve faith of the Apostles
and the speculation of the Greeks.
13) Dogma spreads not truth but life. It is a practical truth, leaving the
believer free to choose.
14) All of the dogmas of contradictory religions are essentially the same.
The various systems of belief are all true since they all nourish the soul.
15) Dogma is a fallible approximation. Definitions of dogma are often
false.

The Church, the Rule of Faith, the Sacraments:

16) The conscience is the rule of faith. No external authority may ever come
between God and the believer to interpret his faith.
17) It is not necessary to believe in dogmas. No one can be forced to
believe in a fallible dogma.
18) The sacraments are symbols which resurrect past emotional
experiences.
19) The Church is only a beneficent institution designed to transmit the
religious experiences of the past.
20) The Roman Church is not sufficiently catholic. In the religious evolution
of humanity, the Church is but an awkward attempt at universal
communion.
✜✜✜
 In Thomistic theology, the dogma of the Faith is founded on the
Church of Peter, which was founded on the immovable Rock, Jesus Christ,
God made man. The dogma of Tyrrell and his colleagues is founded on a
substance generally unified but slippery in the extreme: on the life lived
deep within the personal consciousness. Their theology is riddled with
sudden drop-offs into the gaping abyss, since contradiction holds no fear for
Tyrrell. It is subject to the most radical mutations and to every possible
interpretation, except the interpretation of an external God revealing
Himself to man. Modernism chose its own illogic and reaps the logical
consequences: modernist “faith” is founded upon a free-floating glacier,
upon an iceberg drifting aimlessly through the sea of universal doubt.
 CHAPTER 13: THE CONDEMNATION OF MODERNISM BY
ST. PIUS X
In spite of the evils which are part and parcel of any crisis, modernism
brought with it an immeasurable good: it allowed us to witness a saint and a
pope in action, of a greatness scarcely paralleled even in the splendid
history of the Church. The marvel is that Pius X was not only a saint but
also a pope, a combination the world had not seen for a four hundred years.
While Leo XIII had been a nobleman and an adept of world affairs, St. Pius
X was not; nor was he the backwoods country curate his enemies love to
portray. In a pontificate lasting just over a decade, the Venetian was to
navigate the bark of Peter with consummate wisdom through some of the
most dangerous waters the Church had ever traversed. He was labeled a
reactionary for having turned a deaf ear to the modernist sirens preaching a
“pure Gospel” and dooming the Church to transformation or death.
Ironically, few pontiffs more justly merit the title of reformer than Pope
Pius X for the enormous progress he accomplished in domains as varied as
ecclesiastical studies, canon law, the Holy Bible, and the liturgy.
Yet even more than a champion of reform, Pope Pius X was before all
else a conservative. His greatest honor is to have obeyed the urgent
command of the Doctor of the Gentiles to hold firmly to the deposit of faith
in season and out of season, against impious rulers of nations and against
modernist infiltrators within the bosom of the Church. His clear-sightedness
as sovereign doctor of souls matched the steadiness and strength of his hand
for applying the drastic, salutary treatment. Cardinal Mercier reserved the
highest praise for the pope he had served: “If the Church had been led by
pontiffs of Pius X’s caliber when Luther and Calvin raised their heads,
would the Reformation have torn a third of Christian Europe away from
Rome? Pius X saved Christendom from the tremendous threat of
modernism, that is, not from a heresy but from all the heresies put
together.”[175]
St. Pius X owed that caliber to his faith, lucid as a theologian’s and
firm as the land that bred him. This holy pope believed that human reason is
able to know the truth; he believed in the historicity of the Gospels; he
believed in Jesus Christ, sole Savior and true God. Behold the secret of his
determination to prevent the modernist groundswell from sweeping away
reason and religion in the name of a vague theory with no truth, no God,
and no Christ.
Loisy was the great guru of that theory. We have seen the measures
taken against him by the local authorities and then Rome herself beginning
in the first half of the year 1903. However, the tumult had not been quieted.
We should not be surprised, then, to see the supreme authorities determined
to strike a decisive blow and engage a mortal combat against the threat of
general apostasy. This chapter will provide an overview of Rome’s reaction
to the movement; to do so, we need to gauge the extent of the crisis and its
depth before going on to examine the three pontifical documents dealing
with the crisis, and, finally, underlining the lessons the Church drew from it.

1. The Gravity of the Modernist Crisis

Up to this point, we have focused our attention on the modernist shock
troops, a study which kept us primarily in France, the indisputable
birthplace of the movement and its principal base of operation. Now we
need to measure the crisis abroad.
Tyrrell, for one, was doing his part to spread throughout Britain the
ideas he himself had received from his friends across the Channel. In Italy,
the torrent of modernism flowing out of France and England was a rising
tide. A fiery, sanguine national temperament ill disposed Catholic Italy to
intellectual innovation but made it quick to assimilate the newest imports
from abroad. The Studi Religiosi appeared in Florence in 1901, touting the
advances of modern science. Minocchi was the resident Scripture critic and
the Barnabite priest Fr. Semeria wrote on the origins of Christianity;
Buonaiuti, who had already earned a name for himself in Roman circles,
arrived as an expert on religious philosophy. This last, only twenty-four
years old at the time, went on to found the Rivista Storico-Critica delle
Scienze Teologiche, treating with consummate eloquence topics as varied as
religious philosophy and the history of dogma and religion. The great
Italian novelty was Murri’s democratic movement, violent from the outset
and spreading rapidly. As early as 1905, Murri was translating the works of
Tyrrell under a pseudonym. Moreover, all of these authors were in a sense
but translators, taking the scholarly works published in other countries and
restating them for the masses with a new Italian flair and passion. One man
of letters, Senator Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911),[176] took it upon
himself to give a voice to the various modernist aspirations with his novel Il
Santo (Milan, 1905) and so awaken the present generation to the principle
of adaptation. The novel–by no means great literature–brought together in a
single volume the essential ideas of Blondel, Laberthonnière, Loisy, and
Tyrrell.
Not only was modernism spreading throughout Europe, but the
intensity, the density, and the sheer quantity of polemics surrounding the
movement gave it all the earmarks of a crisis within the Church herself.
Religious philosophy and psychology, exegesis, the history of dogma: the
attacks came from all sides at once, and Catholics seemed to be losing their
footing. The spirit of modernity was penetrating every domain and forever
mutating. Loisy’s cursed little red books alone had worked considerable
mischief in a number of Catholic circles. Publications of increasing
boldness, all the more brazen for their confident anonymity, were issued at
regular intervals to fan the flames. The sensus catholicus was waning in a
disturbing number of minds.
However, it is difficult to put a number on the modernist influence. In
1905, one French intellectual at the heart of the fray estimated the number
of progressive priests at around fifteen thousand. To which Loisy replied in
1909–with perhaps a better vantage point–that there were not more than
fifteen hundred. From the opposite camp, a certain Franon quipped that the
most influential modernists would fit comfortably on two sofas. Sabatier, an
insider, probably gives the most accurate notion:
Modernism is neither a party nor a school of thought: it is a tendency. It would be a delicate
task indeed to determine the characteristic signs by which its adherents might be recognized,
they are so different one from another! Beside the exegete, the historian, the scholar, there
stands the pure and simple democrat. Beside the poet, the humble worker-priest. And yet, in
spite of all their differences of milieu, of concern, of vocation, they recognize each other.
There is no registry of members; they do not wear a badge; nevertheless, they find one
another; they come together and are but one heart and one soul.[177]
St. Pius X deplored the extension of the crisis, evoking its seamless
ranks and, more precisely, the large number of sailors, navigators, and, sad
to say, perhaps even captains, who had put their trust in profane novelties
and in the lying science of the times and so capsized rather than sailing into
their home port.

2. The Decree Lamentabili

Loisy’s manifestos were grave enough to call for a pontifical document
listing and condemning their errors. Word spread about a new Syllabus
analogous to that issued by Pope Pius IX. In France lay the epicenter of the
cataclysm; from France would come the initiative for a response. Already in
October 1903, the theologians Letourneau and Pouvier presented to
Cardinal Richard of Paris, for submission to the Holy Office, a report
containing thirty-three propositions drawn from Loisy’s two principal
works. In the same year, Rome put the majority of his writings on the
Index. In the note accompanying the declaration, Cardinal Merry del Val
used exactly the same order of condemnation which Lamentabili would
follow four years later, suggesting that the Vatican already possessed a
preliminary draft, although the Parisian report remains its principal source,
with twenty of the decree’s sixty-five propositions reproduced verbatim
from the original. Fifty of the propositions are from Loisy, the rest from
Tyrrell and LeRoy.
The purpose of the decree is explained in a preamble: to protect
Catholics from the grave errors spreading among them and endeavoring in
the name of history to prepare the way for the progress of dogma.
Lamentabili is in fact a list of condemned propositions. The last of them
gives a taste of the whole: “Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true
science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to
say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.”[178] The decree follows the
logical order of condemning first the general errors on Catholic doctrine
and the magisterium of the Church before dealing with more particular
questions. It goes on to treat of Holy Scripture and the Person of Jesus
Christ, as well as the origin and nature of our most fundamental dogmas.
All of the errors cited have certain principles in common, namely, that
biblical criticism is above sanction, Revelation is purely natural and
subjective, and dogma is evolving and individual.
The most noteworthy condemnations, entirely without precedent in the
history of the magisterium, are those dealing with the historicity of the
Gospels, particularly the Gospel according to St. John. Lamentabili defends
the three pillars on which all of Holy Scripture is founded: its divine
inspiration, together with its absolute inerrancy and its historicity. It was no
simple task in these complex matters to find precisely the mot juste, capable
of pinpointing the error without infringing on what must remain open to
opinion. The decree met the challenge with rare felicity, saying what needed
to be said and nothing more. By its clarity and discretion, it offers the
Catholic exegete light and direction, as well as encouragement. Rome did
not issue a categorical condemnation of historical exegesis. What is targeted
is a certain independent exegesis which would dismiss the supernatural
realm, the magisterium of the Church, and dogma in general. The Church is
the divinely appointed guardian of the divine Revelation which is the Holy
Bible, and she cannot suffer it to be snatched from her hands in the name of
science.

3. The Encyclical Pascendi

As soon as the decree of the Holy Office, Lamentabili, was labeled a
new “Syllabus of Errors,” did not symmetry call for an encyclical to echo
Quanta Cura? Rome was well aware of the need for a firm and direct attack
in order to thwart the progress of an international movement of growing
proportions. The project for the encyclical had been launched as early as
April 1907, since the Pope began speaking of the modernist assault as the
sum and the essential poison of all heresies, using the same turns of phrase
as would the future encyclical, published in September of that year.[179]
One of the distinctive traits of this pontifical letter is first to expose at
length, in a masterly presentation of modernism, the error it intends to
proscribe. It reveals modernism as a methodical system founded on very
precise principles, not a formless mass of disparate theories as the
heresiarchs would have had us believe.
Under cover of critique, scientific progress, and civilization, the
modernists worked to undermine reason and religion. They preached the
total destruction of all truth under the pretext that truth evolves with man,
through man, and in man. Man is the maker of truth. It was the old error of
the sophists redefined as progress for a terminally lost cause. By denying
that anything could ever be true or real, they denied the reality of God and
the authority of His spokesman, the Church. Here was indeed radical
apostasy or, as the Pope expressed it, “the synthesis of all heresies.” Armed
with the divine Word, St. Pius X took on the modernist assault, responding
that only the truth can set free and that it would be necessary to restore all
things in Christ. His first duty was to tear away the mask from his
adversary. Since every modernist is the meeting place and the mixing pot,
so to speak, of several different characters–namely, the philosopher, the
believer, the theologian, the historian, the critic, the apologist, and the
reformer–the holy Pope began by forcing the apocalyptic seven-headed
monster into the light:
The modernist philosopher is ignorantist (things are unknowable) and
egological (all truth comes from the depths of our own being). Truth is
revolutionist, ever evolving, just like the subject from which it is
drawn.
The believer, unlike the philosopher, is certain that God really does
exist independently of man. His certitude is based on a kind of
heartfelt reality, thanks to which man can touch the very reality of
God. This experience is perfectly real and even superior to all rational
experience.
Modernist theology is faithful to its principles: faith and dogma, the
body of religion and the sacraments, are all the fruit of a perception of
God present within man, responsible for thinking his faith. The Holy
Scriptures are a scrapbook of experiences lived by the first Jews and
the first Apostles of Christianity. The Church is the fruit of the
collective consciousness.
The modernist historian is guided in all things by his philosophy–an
agnostic philosophy, of course, which means the historian’s working
principle is to set aside everything supernatural to rediscover the “pure
Gospel.” The original human element of the Gospel narrative was
subjected to the double law of transfiguration and deformation by the
primitive community, which embellished the raw history in writing the
four “mythical” Gospels.
The critic comes along next, charged with accommodating to this
mythical conception the scriptural documents, classed according to the
needs from which they emerge and according to the laws of
immanence and vital evolution.
Apologetics for the modernist is a defense of immanentism. His goal is
to lead the non-believer toward a personal experience of Catholicism,
the only true foundation of the Faith. He invites men to enter into this
Church-Kingdom of God, picking and choosing among dogmas and
rites those forms which seem to suit them best.
The reformer claims to dust away nineteen hundred years of
conformism to rediscover the freshness of the Apostolic Church. He
would reform the teaching in seminaries, purify catechisms and
 popular devotions, adapt ecclesiastical governments to modern
democracy, and do away with Communion fasts and priestly celibacy.

The text so accurately reverse-engineered the infernal modernist

machine that the heretics knew it would be impossible for them to dispute it
directly; consequently, they insinuated that the analysis was purely
theoretical, for no modernist had ever taught the whole of the so-called
modernist doctrine. A savage anonymous pamphlet, The Modernist Agenda,
[180] appeared in Italy on the heels of the encyclical, proving that it had
indeed touched a nerve. Ultimately, the only criticism which the heretics
could make against the Pope was his Catholic faith. Loisy was quick to
accuse the Pope’s theologians of falsehood, but soon after he admitted:
The circumstances required the encyclical of Pius X. The pontiff was correct in declaring
that he could not keep silence without betraying the deposit of traditional doctrine. Things had
come to a point where his silence would have been an enormous concession, the implicit
recognition of the fundamental principle of modernism: the possibility, the necessity, the
legitimacy of an evolution in the way ecclesiastical dogmas are understood, including that of
papal infallibility and authority, as well as the conditions under which that authority can be
exercised.…The encyclical Pascendi is only the total, ineluctably logical expression of the
teaching received in the Church since the end of the thirteenth century.[181]
He had admirable lucidity, although the essentials of Church doctrine
were indeed present from the beginning, whatever the apostate may have
imagined. It is interesting to see Loisy giving a lesson in traditionalism to
the popes and bishops: “Depositum custodi–Remain faithful to the deposit
of faith”! Such is in fact the essential function of the Vicar of Christ and the
Princes of the Church. Such is exactly what St. Pius X accomplished when
he drew the line in matters of faith, and when he tore away the mask of the
modernist apostasy. Truly, the encyclical of September 8, 1907, was a
glorious repeat of September 9, 325, when the Council of Nicea delivered
its mortal blow to Arianism.

4. The Anti-Modernist Oath

If modernism had only been a heresy, even a generalized heresy like
Arianism, the Roman condemnations would need not have gone further.
The obstinate heretics would have stepped out of the Catholic ranks to
found their own movement, just as they had always done. Modernism, on
the contrary, was confident in its own righteousness and so determined to
reform the Church from within. The wolves in sheep’s clothing obstinately
remained within the fold in hopes of converting it into a den of wolves.
Modernism is more than heresy and more than apostasy; it is a fifth column.
Pascendi speaks of the simulated multitude of authors hiding behind
pseudonyms, the better to hoodwink unsuspecting readers. We cannot
overstate this point: a modernist is not only an apostate, he is a dyed-in-the-
wool traitor. Treachery and deceit are integral to the very system of
modernism. The bona fide modernist is the one who can affirm his personal
faith from the pulpit and then contradict that faith in his writings as a
scholar and an historian.
The leaders of the movement had been quick to adopt a policy of
dissimulation. Using the old sophism that the end justifies the means,
Tyrrell judged that a lie could sometimes be the guardian of the truth. Loisy
was without pity for his colleague across the Channel, decrying a cynicism
revolting even to Tyrrell’s friends.[182] And yet Loisy himself had long
since played the hypocrite to his conscience. He used to evoke the great
equivocation weighing upon his personal situation ever since he had made
the decision to remain at his post in the Church without admitting her
doctrines.[183] The Turmel affair left its mark on the movement as the most
glaring example of the tactic: the author produced some sixty-five writings
under fourteen different pseudonyms. It set off a resounding scandal, as the
modernist crisis reached its peak. Turmel was a learned priest busy
preparing a History of the Dogma of the Papacy when he was suddenly
unmasked as the personality behind the pseudonyms “Dupin” and
“Hertzog,” both of whom had already used the same scholarly material to
attack the dogma of the Trinity and Catholic Mariology. Turmel was only
playing the famous game by which the Faith can say yes and science, no.
[184] Incidents of the kind gave the modernist movement a particular moral
cast. Can we be surprised if God left men who had deliberately denied the
evidence of daylight in order to spend their adult lives under the sign of
counterfeit and deception in their blindness? Would it be rash judgment to
apply to them the words of the psalmist: “Iniquity has lied to itself”?
The Italians were not to be outperformed in verbal prestidigitation.
Minocchi was a master of prudence for satisfying the guardians of
orthodoxy, but he knew how to slip pointed reflections into his works apt to
engender doubt in the reader’s mind about the old theology. Another
modernist, Semeria, formed an eloquent synthesis of all the new ideas. He
pushed his expressions to the outer edge of orthodoxy, never stepping over
a certain line beyond which his congregation would incur the wrath of
Rome–all the while admitting among friends his general disregard for the
outer shell of dogma.[185] If such men stayed in the Church, it was because
they did not feel justified in scandalizing the people with useless apostasies;
on the contrary, they considered it their duty to remain in the fold and
surreptitiously convert their fellows to their own religious ideal.
St. Pius X denounced their behavior with vehemence in his Motu
Proprio Sacrorum Antistitum of September 1, 1910, three years after the
appearance of Pascendi: “Indeed, they [the modernists] have not ceased to
recruit new adepts and group them together in a clandestine league, through
them infusing into the veins of Christian society the venom of their
opinions by publishing books and journals anonymously or under false
names.” The Pope included after the motu proprio a special oath against
modernism. The text was formulated with a precision leaving no room for
equivocation. Each of the fundamental modernist errors had to be reproved
formally and the oath signed personally by every member of the clergy
charged with the care of souls.
This profession of faith recognizes first and foremost that God can be
known and consequently His existence proven by the natural light of
reason, as a cause is known in its effects; that the external proofs of
Revelation, above all miracles and prophecies, are trustworthy signs of the
divine origin of the Christian religion and eminently proportioned to the
understanding of all times and all men; that the Church was instituted
immediately and directly by the historical Christ during His life among us.
The oath rejects absolutely the heretical supposition of the evolution of
dogma as understood by modernists, as well as the modernist notion of
Tradition. It professed that faith is a veritable assent of the intelligence to a
truth received from the exterior–an assent by which we believe to be true,
on God’s sole authority, of an absolute veracity, all that has been said,
attested, and revealed by the personal God, our Creator and our Master.
Obviously, such an act on the part of the holy Pope was ill-received by
the opposition, which attacked the barbarity of this country curate with the
mind of an unlettered Venetian gondolier, pushing the bark of Peter along
with a pole. Whatever their invective, the pole of the gondolier doubled as a
formidable harpoon! The incorrigible suffered ipso facto excommunication,
which put a quick end to the clandestine agitating of the heresiarchs…until
better days should dawn. With the advantage of hindsight, we might smile
at the optimism of contemporary historians as they muse: “Could there be a
new modernist crisis?” and respond: “A generalized modernist crisis,
comparable to the crisis of the years 1895-1910, seems to us, thank God,
highly improbable.”[186]

5. The Positive Outcome

St. Paul exclaimed in the first century that “heresies must arise.” How
could heresy, a poison to the Faith, constitute a kind of necessity? How
could error and darkness possibly serve the cause of truth and light? In the
sense that their obscurity throws the light of truth into even greater relief.
The shock of heresy has always stimulated the progress of Catholic dogma
and theological endeavor, and always toward a refinement of concepts,
drawing out and rendering explicit what previously had been only implicit.
This was the service rendered by modernism. It gave an occasion for
theological and scientific progress in the tightly interwoven disciplines of
Christian philosophy, biblical criticism, and the development of dogma.
The first debate to which modernism gave rise was that of the relation
between philosophy and the faith of the Church. The Catholic Faith is
undergirded by a philosophy. Heretics know this better than we do,
proclaiming by the mouth of Bucer: “Tolle Thomam et dissipabo
Ecclesiam!–Take away St. Thomas and I will dismantle the Church!” The
modernist crisis was concrete proof that the seven-horned monster would
shrivel like a balloon once its philosophical casing was punctured, proof
positive that the Church is dependent upon a certain philosophy. Our
question now is to understand the extent to which this is true. It would be
false to say that dogma and the Faith are essentially dependent on a
philosophy in the technical sense, since the Faith is of a higher order. We do
not ask a catechumen to earn his master’s degree in Thomistic philosophy,
nor do we ask a Kantian Protestant to convert twice in order to have the
Thomistic faith and the Catholic faith. It is true that the Church in her
dogma makes use of notions which are strictly speaking philosophical, such
as that of person, substance, essence, nature, three and one; but there is no
need to be a scholar to understand these terms. When the Church uses
philosophical terms in her dogma, it is because they also have their place in
man’s natural faculty of reason. All that the Church requires is a philosophy
compatible with common sense, a philosophy that defends reason and truth
against the modernist folly of absurdity and ignorantism. Is the Church
asking too much when she expects philosophers to defend reason and its
object?
We have already alluded to the second debate, which set “pure” critical
scholars against pontifical decisions such as Leo XIII’s Providentissimus or
Lamentabili and Pascendi of St. Pius X. The study of Revelation involves
two different disciplines: an initial, purely apologetic study, followed by a
theological analysis.[187] It is true that, in the beginning, “pure” critique
plays a role in establishing the fact of Revelation, miracles, and the
admirable propagation and conservation of the Church–in other words, the
preambula fidei, the proofs of the rational character of the Faith. In fact,
only history is able to provide these external motives of credibility.
However, in establishing the content and the sense of Revelation and
tracing the history of dogmas, a purely historical critique, though an
excellent subsidiary discipline, is not sufficient unto itself when it lacks all
reference to theology. The principles governing “pure” critique and those
governing Catholic critique are fundamentally different: the death of Christ
on the cross, for example, is a fact of ordinary certitude for historians. For
the Catholic, it is a defined truth of the Faith, a supernatural truth revealed
by God. “Pure” critique could never command an assent of divine faith
under pain of eternal damnation, as does the magisterium of the Church.
Yet we hear the voice of “pure” critique proclaiming its objectivity and
freedom from the prejudice blinding Christian scholars. The truth is not so
rosy. The foundation of “pure” critique is “pure” philosophy, which is to
say, modern philosophy, radically skeptical, ignorantist, and egological; one
might well ask if doubt can give rise to anything other than doubt.
Moreover, critique itself is highly compromised by its own prejudices. This
supposedly impartial critique feigns ignorance of the divine authorship of
the Bible and so runs the risk of missing the meaning entirely or falsifying
the message. Furthermore, the facts are there to prove that an emancipated
critique is never neutral. It is the same old story: the rejection of submission
inevitably provokes a reaction. From the outset, all traditional theses are
considered suspect; every bold hypothesis is automatically probable; the
most venerable documents of Christianity are treated with a distrust and a
disdain to which profane texts are not subjected.[188] In spite of its
pretensions to scientific objectivity, modernist critique is imbued with a
rationalist bias, and all its effort goes to produce an empty Revelation,
gutted of historical divine intervention.
 The final debate sparked by the crisis goes to the very heart of
theology: it concerns dogmatic evolution–or rather, dogmatic development.
Dogma is not a kind of modeling clay, variable according to cultures and
customs. The doctrine of faith revealed by God is not a philosophical
invention waiting for the final touches of human genius; it is a divine
deposit confided to the Spouse of Christ to be guarded faithfully and
defined infallibly.[189] Conceding nothing to the modernist notion of an
indefinitely plastic dogma, we can nonetheless observe that dogma does
admit of diverse expressions, according to the modes of human language.
Dogmatic facts express things seen by the Apostles, such as Christ’s death
and resurrection, and Mary’s divine maternity. Next, the most general
affirmations employ human images beneath which are hidden the dogmatic
message, easily understood by all. Such is the case with the verse of the
Creed, “He is seated at the right hand of the Father,” naturally evoking
Christ’s judiciary power. Finally, certain dogmas employ universal
philosophical notions, such as that of person, substance, nature,
transubstantiation, consubstantiality, the two wills of Christ, the unity of the
divine intelligence and of the operations of God ad extra, and so on. When
definitions, under the infallible seal of the Holy Ghost, allude to the
universal categories of being, they attain the highest possible expression of
the divine mystery in function of being, stretching the human mind to the
limit of its comprehension. Dogmatic formulation is perfect and is not
waiting for an ultimate completion since these definitions are unchangeable
both in their meaning and in their form.
One point remains to be clarified. How can we reconcile the fact that
dogma is essentially an immutable revealed deposit with its expansion over
the course of the centuries? Could there be contradiction between these two
realities, between the immutability and the development of dogma?
Certainly not, and here again we concede nothing to the modernist heresy of
a symbolic, infinitely variable dogma. It is because it is a revealed deposit,
immutable because God is immutable, that the only possible development is
one perfectly homogeneous with what was said before, such that never has
the Church given a definition of dogma that she has later been called to
revise. It is precisely because dogma is a deposit revealed to men, limited,
imperfect beings, that men can over the course of ages uncover and
elucidate the riches of this treasure. St. Vincent of Lerins expressed this
truth in his famous work: “Therefore, let there be growth…and all possible
progress in understanding, knowledge and wisdom…but only within proper
limits, that is, in the same doctrine, in the same meaning, and in the same
purport–eodem sensu eademque sententia.”[190]
This homogeneity, this essential immutability of dogma, is one of the
marks of the veracity of the ecclesiastical magisterium, as Bossuet so
eloquently testified:
God willed that the truth come to us carrier to carrier and hand to hand without any
appearance of innovation. Thus we are able to recognize what has always been believed and
consequently what should always be believed. It is, so to speak, in this always that appears the
force of the truth and of the promise, and we lose it entirely as soon as we find an interruption
at any point.[191]
What truths in the deposit of Revelation are susceptible of
development? We need to distinguish the truths closest and most integral to
the edifice of the Faith from those more distant. The first, because they are
immediately necessary to our salvation, have always been explicitly set
forth from the beginning by the magisterium. Such, for example, are the
mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the life of the
world to come, and the divine sanctions for our actions. The only
development which they can have undergone over the course of the
centuries is a precision of their formulation. On the other hand, implicit
truths, less directly connected to the mysteries of salvation, can be believed
simply in general at first, and then more explicitly. Thus, the belief in the
teaching power of the Church contains the faith in the infallibility of the
pope; the belief in the holiness of Mary implicitly contains the belief in the
Immaculate Conception.[192] In short, these various theological
clarifications shed all the necessary light upon the progress of dogma,
rooted in the progressive understanding of man, and also upon its stability,
rooted in the very stability of God. We should be grateful to Providence for
having permitted the modernist crisis, for it served as the occasion for
giving greater precision to the thought of the Church on these fundamental
questions.
✜✜✜
The modernist crisis was beneficial in a number of ways. Perhaps the
most handsome fruit of the crisis will have been to see a great pope in
action. Faithful to his motto of restoring all things in Christ, St. Pius X
treated the crisis with an iron fist and also, where needed, with kid gloves,
to uproot and to plant, to separate the good grain from the weeds in the
fields of the Church and of theology. The Pope indicated precisely what was
needed to defeat the seven-horned monster howling its Non serviam in the
face of reason and religion. In order to save them both, this leader of men
prescribed the study of Thomistic philosophy in the seminaries and
universities which had once been the very seedbeds of modernist
infiltration. He also drew clear limits beyond which the historical Christian
sciences could not step and, in order to do this, re-established biblical
studies with its headquarters in Rome. St. Pius X demonstrated, in the first
years of the twentieth century, exactly how the Church should react to the
modernism of the age and of all time. He still speaks to the Church, even
from the grave: his body, discovered incorrupt in 1944 at the time of his
beatification, remains the silent witness of the incorruptibility of the
doctrine which he opposed to the modernist venom. In the Roman crisis we
are presently enduring, it is more urgent than ever that we grasp thoroughly
both modernism and the action of St. Pius X. We will never penetrate the
neo-modernist crisis if we do not thoroughly understand the modernist
crisis. We will never know how to apply the cure to neo-modernism if we
do not thoroughly appreciate the cure to modernism.
 CHAPTER 14: ASSESSMENT OF “CATHOLIC” MODERNISM
Before drawing to a close our study of modernism on Catholic terrain,
we need to assess the damages, as we did after our study of Protestant
modernism. Running down the list of key personalities will give us an idea
of the ground covered since the Protestants. Our next step will be to reunite
the fundamental principles common to both strains of modernism in an
effort to determine whether the “Catholic” version is a simple evolution of
ideas or an anti-Catholic revolution. We will end with a comparison
between Rome’s reaction and that of the Protestant authorities.

1. A Summary of the Authors

The philosophers Bergson and LeRoy give a new twist to modern
thought by taking the turnoff in the direction of irrationality, the future
homeland of the existentialism which appeared between the two world
wars. They never apostatize from the Kantian principle of pure critique but
transfer their focus to its evolutionary aspect. This they dub creative
evolution, a process in which all things–being, Creation, and the Creator–
are swept away in a perpetual flux, mortal to all essence or consistency.
Knowledge is for them but a myth: it is an emotion, a “creative sympathy”
welling up from the depths of the subconscious. In Bergson’s universe, all
things have their source in the personal self. The result is a disaster: Blondel
in his apologia of immanence defines truth as the mind’s conformity with
life; divinity, dogma, and the supernatural order become pure products of
man.
Loisy, the maestro of exegesis, is a practitioner of “pure” critique,
which means critique loosed from the shackles of Christian culture–a
culture steeped in realism and the supernatural. He magnanimously
shoulders the task of explaining the Gospel according to the postulates of
modern philosophy. More precisely, he takes up the cause of Kantianism
and becomes a fervent ignorantist and egologist. As an ignorantist, denying
the thing-in-itself, Loisy reduces the historical Christ to an absolute
minimum. As an egologist, he conjures up the “Christ of faith,” drawn from
the consciousness of the first disciples and the primitive community. These
two Christs are the respective founders of two different cycles: the pre-
Paschal cycle and the Paschal cycle, or the cycle of historical facts,
transmitted by the Gospel purged of all supernatural elements, and the cycle
of belief in the Resurrection of Christ as transmitted by the community
which founded the Church. Faced with the same Gospel-Church dichotomy
in Christ, Protestant critique was not long in choosing: it abandoned the
Church and retained only the Gospel. Loisy offers another solution, on the
Hegelian model. He prefers a fusion of contraries according to the law of
development and life proper to living beings. Thus, by his reckoning, the
two contrary Christs are ultimately one within the vital movement of
evolution animating the Church, her rites and her dogmas. He concludes
that, just as the Gospel was called into question and transformed, giving
place to the Church, so the Church of today is ready to undergo her own
radical transformation.
Tyrrell in England is like an incarnation of modernist theology at its
apex in the time of St. Pius X. This Jesuit priest, in his own masterpiece,
Through Scylla and Charybdis, explains how to navigate unharmed
between the twin shoals of Catholic dogmatism and philosophical
utilitarianism in a doctrine dovetailing perfectly with Bergson’s Creative
Evolution and Loisy’s The Gospel and the Church. Thus he would have us
steer the course of an essentially mystical, egological, and symbolist
Christianity. Revelation is a moving experience lived in the intimacy of the
consciousness. Religion is the fruit of our own mystical thirst to sense God
within us. With such a foundation, dogmatic formulae become mere
symbols of the individual experience of God in oneself, variable according
to the vast array of revelations. As with Strauss, Tyrrell’s Christ is the
divinization of all humanity, and the Church is the collective, living
consciousness of the People of God, sole possessor of infallibility. The
Church of his dreams is a school of charity, a way of life rather than a
system founded on a revelation or a precise doctrine. It would look more
like a Buddhist community than a society held together by a substantially
identical creed.

2. The Identity of Protestant

and “Catholic” Modernist Principles
The two strains of modernism are indeed distinct, but they are only
variations on a theme: the melody remains the same on all essential points.
The members of the “new” school make no secret about the source of their
devastating principles: they draw inspiration directly from Kant and Hegel.
They openly profess an anti-realist philosophy with its characteristic trilogy
of ignorantism, egology, and revolutionism.
 They are all more or less open about their ignorantist agnosticism. The
Bergsonians are explicit, denying the nature of things and the ability of the
intelligence to know the real:
Are there eternal and necessary truths? There may be some doubt. Axioms and categories,
forms of the understanding or of the sensibility: all are becoming, all are evolving; the human
spirit is plastic and can change its most intimate desires.[193] Let us push still further into the
hidden retreats of the soul. Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego
takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which
ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the
wells of consciousness at their mysterious tasks….[194] What is becoming, if not an unending
series of contradictories melding into one another…in the supra-logical depths?[195]
Such is the philosopher’s disdain for the intelligence. Loisy, loyal to
his formation in Kantian critique, grasps all of its ramifications for the
discipline of scriptural studies. He considers that the Faith presupposes
three postulates that are no longer valid in the light of modern science. The
theological postulate holds God and Creation to be unchanged and
unchangeable concepts–“whose authors had assuredly not foreseen
Darwin.”[196] The messianic postulate claims that Christ and the Church
had been foretold in the Old Testament. Finally, the ecclesiological
postulate declares that the Church with all her hierarchy, her sacraments,
and her dogmas had been directly instituted by Jesus Christ. Loisy longs to
help the Church adapt these three postulates to the laws of historical
development, much more satisfying than some tissue of miracles.
Tyrrell comes riding on the coattails of these intellectual mentors.
Even as a young man, he prayed like a skeptic: “Oh God, if there be a God;
save my soul, if I have a soul.”[197] Come into his own, the ideas are the
same: “What she [the Church] says is often absolutely wrong, but the truth
in whose defence she says it is revealed, and to that truth alone we owe
adhesion.”[198]
The modernists cast off their submission to the real and replace it with
egology, by which a captive intelligence is demoted to the level of
imagination and sympathy. Liberty is the measure of man’s action,
preparing the way for existentialist egolatry. Such is the egological basis
upon which Blondel then elaborates his immanent method:
There is one notion to which modern thought jealously clings as the condition for all
philosophizing, and that is the notion of immanence; in other words, the notion that nothing
can enter into man which does not first come from him and correspond in some way to a need
of expansion, and that for him there is no truth worthy of the name nor acceptable precept, be
it historical fact, or traditional teaching, or obligation added on from without, which is not in
some way autonomous and indigenous to himself.[199]
 Loisy draws all of religion from the same profession of egology:
The question at the heart of the religious problem of the present day…is to know whether or
not the universe is inert, empty, deaf, without soul or viscera; if the human consciousness is
able to find a truer, more real echo than within itself. There is no proof we might call
definitive, allowing us to give a yes or a no.[200]
Tyrrell applies the same philosophy to theology: Jesus was the first to
show that
Man is then no longer a servant or imitator of the Divine Will, but a son of God, a free and
original co-operator in the Divine work.…Now it is no longer from without, but from within,
that God reveals Himself as a mysterious, transcendent force.…For what is personality if not
that which is divine in man…?[201]
Permanent revolution is the hallmark of this philosophy of élan vital
and Creative Evolution–a philosophy devoid of all being, most notably the
Supreme Being:
The truth is that if language here were molded on the real, we should not say “The child
becomes the man,” but “There is becoming from the child to the man.”… “[B]ecoming” is a
subject. It comes to the front. It is the reality itself.[202] God thus defined, has nothing of the
already made.…I do not present this center [from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a
fireworks display] as a thing but as a continuity of shooting out.[203] For us, God is not, but
becomes. His becoming is our very progress.[204]
Bergson dares label his philosophy an “orthodox pantheism.” Loisy is
more revolutionary still since, in his view, historical evolution is the only
answer to the dilemma created by the critical exegesis of the Protestants and
the rigidity of the Catholics. He provides an ample exegesis of his own
thought in his famous red manifestos:
It is just the idea of development which is now needed, not to be created all at once, but
established from a better knowledge of the past.[205] Jesus had been much less the
representative of a doctrine than the initiator of a religious movement.[206] If we assume that
the truth, insofar as it is accessible to human reason, is something absolute; that Revelation
possesses this character, and dogma too has a share in it; that not only the object of knowledge
is eternal and immutable in itself but also the form which this knowledge has taken in human
history; then the assertions of the little book [The Gospel and the Church] are more than
audacious; they are absurd and impious.[207] The divinity of Christ is a dogma which grew up
in the Christian conscience. It existed only in germ in the notion of a Messiah, Son of God.
[208]
Tyrrell sings the same tune:
Official Catholicism is outmoded but we must not abandon it. Judaism was to live a risen and
glorified life in Christianity.…Well, may not history repeat itself?…May not Catholicism like
Judaism have to die in order that it may live again in greater and grander form? Has not every
organism got its limits of development after which it must decay, and be content to survive in
its progeny?[209]
 Clearly, then, the great figures of “Catholic” modernism are in perfect
harmony with Kant and his successors. Both schools possess the negative
duo of pure ignorantist critique and egological, vitalistic, revolutionist
knowledge, working in tandem to produce a seamless modernism in which
a deadly philosophy wreaks havoc with an orphan Revelation severed from
its historical roots.

3. Post-Protestant Variations on Modernism

The central theme of Protestant modernism is pure critique, starting
from a systematic rejection of all things and all facts, while the focus of
modernists from the Catholic camp is the idea of evolution, the perpetual
development proper to life and all living things. As philosophers, the latter
are even more radically anti-intellectual than Kant. Bergsonians not only
consider things-in-themselves to be unknowable but to be inexistent–better
yet, to be incapable of existence within a system of pure becoming. While
the Germans raise up altars to the goddess Reason and construct elaborate
mansions of empty ideas, Bergson prefers confinement within the dungeons
of his own consciousness, lit up by the lamps of subjective impressions.
Emotion replaces knowledge and reason; blind consciousness replaces the
intelligence. The Germans believe in the identity of the rational and the
real, the idea and the thing. Bergson, having denied things and the real
outside the self, is content to declare his supreme liberty with the equation
cogito-volo–to know is to will. He no longer defines the truth as Kant did,
as the conformity of thought with itself, but as the conformity of thought to
life.
In the domain of Revelation, the Protestants followed Strauss and
Harnack. They wiped away the Church and reduced the Gospel to a central
core purified of “mythical” accretions, notably miracles and prophecies.
Loisy, the indisputable leader of the modernists, bestows a new mission
upon exegesis: reconciling the bitter disputes among the various schools of
exegetical thought. He would join Catholicism, which gives primacy to the
Church over the Gospel, with Protestantism, which retains the Gospel to the
detriment of the Church. Where stronger men had failed, Loisy succeeded
in uniting two contraries by explaining that the Gospel and the Church were
in fact different yet mutually enriching stages in the movement of natural
evolution proper to living beings. They develop, adapt themselves to new
conditions of life, and finally die, to live on in their descendants, according
to the laws of life. Contradiction ceases to be an obstacle and become the
very sign of vital development–the sign of Christianity’s wealth and its
divine origin.
Tyrrell, the movement’s theologian, is on the whole very close to his
German predecessors. As with Schleiermacher, the constant focus is
mysticism and the consciousness, ultimate foundation of Revelation and
religion. What separates the two innovators is perhaps Tyrrell’s systematic
approach and his wealth of expression and lively imagery. Thus, dogma is
not dry wood but a vehicle to be adapted to the life of every believer.
Tyrrell’s democratic, enlightened views on the Church were destined to
leave their mark on later generations of modernists. For example, he
defined the Church as the collective consciousness of the People of God,
sole possessor of infallibility. The Catholic Church is the best of all the
religious institutions because she is more alive. However, she must not fail
to transform, just as an outmoded Judaism once transformed itself into the
Catholic Church. The mission incumbent upon “Catholic” modernists is to
reform the Church from within and prepare her final conversion, even over
her dead body. What religion do they strive then to establish? The Tyrrellian
vision of the Church of tomorrow paves the way for the philanthropic
dream of Teilhard’s Omega Point. Thus, the original element provided by
Tyrrell and his philosophical and exegetical masters is primarily their focus
on evolution and perpetual revolution extended to every domain:
philosophical, exegetical, and theological.

4. Evolution or Revolution for Christian Culture?

In spite of the significant variations between “Catholic” and Protestant
modernism, the two remain in logical continuity. For this reason, we have
maintained the common epithet of modernism for both. What does their
kinship imply for reason, truth, and ecumenism?
For a realist, truth is always something concrete, particular, exclusive,
and, consequently, immutable, whether it be a question of principle or of the
essences of things. For a modernist, truth and reason are set free and
reduced to vague mystical sentiments. LeRoy waxes poetic rather than
rational on the subject: “Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of
the soul. Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream….Distinctions
fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their
mysterious task….”[210]
 As for Loisy, does he admit even the possibility of necessary eternal
truths? We may well doubt it, given the definition he provides:
We believe that the truth is life, therefore movement and growth rather than end-point. Any
system, the moment we close it off and so raise it to the level of an absolute, by the very fact
becomes error. The truth is that the good of man is no more immutable than man himself. It
evolves with him, in him, through him; and that does not prevent its being truth for him; it is
such, indeed, only on that condition.[211] The truth [referring here primarily to moral truth]
evolves with him [man], in him, and through him. You seem to believe that, in the religious
and moral order, the true and the false are absolute, well-defined categories. That is not quite
the case.[212]
Tyrrell was of the same opinion:
For there it is always and necessarily we ourselves who speak to ourselves; who (aided no
doubt by the immanent God) work out truth for ourselves.[213] What sort of truth is
guaranteed to [religious revelations] by the “seal of the spirit”?…[A] truth which is directly
practical, preferential, approximative, and only indirectly speculative.[214]
Tyrrell has given us the very definition of egological truth: The mind’s
conformity with itself.
Truth defined as the product of the human consciousness becomes a
deadly contagion. How could it be otherwise? Truth is opened wide to
contradiction; better yet, according to Bergson’s view of truth, contradiction
is promoted to the honor of supreme law of discourse and reigns as the
basis of all reality. Loisy’s law of transformation is inextricably bound up
with contradiction as well: God is and is not distinct from the world; the
soul is immortal and it is not; Christ is God but not at first. Such a
conception throws the door wide open to pantheism, an infection common
to every one of the masters of modernism, whether they admit it or not.
Bergson openly confesses an “orthodox pantheism,” but none of the
protagonists in our story is exempt from the suspicion hanging like a
shadow over the entire movement. Loisy reeks of the disease: “God reveals
Himself in and through humanity. The conscious individual can be
considered nearly interchangeably either as the consciousness of God in the
world, by a sort of incarnation of God in humanity, or as the consciousness
of the world subsisting in God, by a sort of concentration of the universe in
man.”[215]
God is reduced to pure becoming, to the product of religious
sentiment, to a luxury item made in the image and likeness of man. Darwin
has changed forever the way we must conceive of God and of Creation.
[216] Tyrrell is no less explicit; for him, Jesus revealed that man is “no
longer a servant or imitator of the Divine Will, but a son of God” in whom
“God reveals Himself as a mysterious, transcendent force.”[217] Need we
prove how contrary are such ideas to human reason and the Faith? These
thinly veiled professions of pantheism, of real contradiction, and of an
indefinitely malleable truth can only result in grave error and utter
skepticism; an absurd Protestant fideism is the only way to keep from
losing your religion altogether.
Finally, modernism is in total opposition to Catholic culture in all that
concerns the unity of hearts and minds. In the Catholic vocabulary,
ecumenism is the effort of the faithful to adhere to the truths of the Faith in
the light of right reason and concrete facts. Modernist ecumenism takes off
the Catholic guardrails. Bergson begins by denying the existence of distinct
beings and natures, so that the only point of unity left within his system is
pure duration and the fact of becoming. Loisy then applies Bergson’s
doctrine to biblical criticism to help in the reconciliation of contraries,
announcing that history undergoes the vital development proper to all living
beings. According to him, “Jesus had been much less the representative of a
doctrine than the initiator of a religious movement. The movement he
inaugurated perpetuated itself according to the normal conditions of every
living human movement.”[218]
For Tyrrell, religious unity is a kind of philanthropic Buddhism. His
dream-Church is a school of divine charity. His truly “catholic” creed
would go something like this: “I put my trust in Buddha; I put my trust in
the doctrine [of Deliverance]; I put my trust in the Community.”[219]
“Catholicism is Christianized paganism or world-religion.…[T]his is…a
change from tight clothes to elastic.”[220] Jesus set in motion the auto-
divinization of the human consciousness: “In this sense Humanity…is a
mystical Christ, a collective Logos, a Word or Manifestation of the Father;
and every member of that society is in his measure a Christ or revealer in
whom God is made flesh and dwells in our midst.”[221]
Tyrrell’s Church of the future is the logical conclusion of his own
principles. Modernism, a product of Protestant “private judgment,” taken up
by Protestants in the name of pure critique and by Catholics in the name of
vital development, inevitably ends in the dissolution of all rational thought.
Once truth has been defined as the relation between thought and life, and
once becoming and pure contradiction have been established as the supreme
law of reality, the blind faith of the believer is left without defenses. The
only religious belief possible in such a system is pure fideism: I believe
because it is absurd. Finally, once religion comes entirely from man and is
defined as man’s consciousness of the intimate presence of God, religious
differences fall aside and give place to unbridled ecumenism adoring a
Humanity-God barely distinguishable from the believer. Modernism is the
religion of the human consciousness, source of all things: source of being,
source of truth, source of Revelation, and source of divinity itself deep
within the depths of man. It is not far from Eastern mysticism, founded on
imagination and sentiment. The believer floats along in a dream-world, with
his imagination for a rudder, surrounded by a fog which blurs the most
elementary distinctions and denies all access to reason.
We therefore propose to define modernism as that system aimed at
destroying the foundations of the Faith–not only historical Revelation but
also the human intelligence itself. Every modernist conceals first a
philosopher, followed by a critical exegete who finally mutates into a
theologian. Since the first cause communicates its action to all subsequent
causes, modernist critique and theology are rightly labeled ignorantist,
egological, and revolutionist, just like its philosophy. They saw off the legs
of the tripod of self-evident facts holding up Christian culture: the three
intuitions of being, Revelation as a fact, and the harmony between faith and
reason. Modernism takes shape before us as a sort of intellectual and moral
nirvana, professing a philosophy with no being, a Revelation with no
historical basis, and, ultimately, a theology without God.

5. The Reaction of the Authorities

We can confirm our theses with a practical example by comparing the
behavior of the Lutheran authorities faced with Protestant modernism and
the action of Pope St. Pius X faced with “Catholic” modernism. Wilhelm II
and the orthodox Lutheran authorities found themselves in a sticky situation
as they moved to remedy the chaos sown by radical theologians. They were
faced with a serious dilemma: either save the Lutheran Church by denying
the principle of private judgment or else destroy the Lutheran Church by
retaining the same individualistic private judgment. In practice, they
struggled more against sincere unbelief than against hypocritical unbelief,
more against the consequences than the principles, more against the open
scandals than the unhealthy doctrines. They worked only to salvage the
common creed as a visible link between confessions and to maintain a
semblance of order within the Churches. They knew deep down that they
had no credible doctrine and no legitimately instituted authority with which
to impose it.
The modernist cancer in its “Catholic” strain was also quickly
diagnosed as the mortal enemy of the Church. However, the Catholic
Church had the means of defense and the power to act which the Protestant
authorities lacked entirely. Not only was she centralized around the
monarchical government of the papacy, but she was also strong in her
dogmatic position. The Church professes an enlightened realism in the
matters of philosophy, Revelation, and dogma. Her doctrine is thus
eminently reasonable and true, and therefore strong and immutable. The
Catholic Church is the only religion in the world to claim to be the only true
religion and the only divinely instituted Church, with a faith compatible in
all things with reason, and whose act of faith is eminently reasonable. Hers
is not the blind faith of the Protestant believer who must invent the road
map as he goes, never quite sure of his bearings. The faith of the Catholic is
clearly marked out before him; it is the way indicated by the divinely
established authority, illuminating every curve in the road. He does not need
to invent his own path or his own religion, as though religion were
something new and individual for every wayfarer. Thus, the Church did not
have to grapple with the insoluble dilemma demanding the preservation of
existing structures alongside their sworn enemy, “private judgment.” She
did not have to accommodate absolute liberalism–liberty for all, in all
things–with its inevitable escort of anarchy and contradiction. All of her
members, under pain of a condemnable hypocrisy, profess the same
objective and eminently reasonable faith, and all have the duty to avoid
unbelief and deception.
The pope therefore has the power to chastise those who do not fulfill
their religious obligations and whose behavior threatens to cause scandal to
their neighbor. He has the power to make Catholics sign under oath
doctrinal formulae obliging in conscience under pain of eternal damnation.
For this reason, the appointed guardian of the Faith did not hesitate to
protect the flock by disciplinary measures adapted to the gravity of the
situation. He tore the mask from the modernists playing games with the
hierarchy. St. Pius X did not take a defensive position, which would have
been weakness, nor did he engage in dialogue with evil in view of reaching
a mutual understanding. When cancer began gnawing away at the very
foundations of the Church of Christ, it was not the time for parleys and
compromise; it was a question of life and death. There could be no
ecumenical understanding with the modernists and no half-measure with the
traitor lurking in the square. Pope Pius X did not dialogue or compromise
with the enemy; yet, at the same time, the holy Pope did take extreme care
to unmask the modernist with the greatest possible clarity, so that the good
might recognize him for what he was. In particular, the Pope made use of
the modernist crisis to reaffirm the fundamental principles of Christianity,
throwing into relief the very principles which modernism had targeted for
destruction.
 PART IV: NEO-MODERNISM
The years between the two world wars suffered a new wave in the
modernist assault, grave enough to merit a new condemnation by the great
Pope Pius XII. St. Pius X had uprooted the heresy with a firm hand, but it
spread again after his death. The resurgence of modernism had its own John
the Baptist, as Teilhard de Chardin rose up to herald the coming of a new
Messiah, a Super-Humanity destined to rule in place of Jesus Christ.
Teilhard de Chardin made his own all the principal theories of the
modernists who had preceded him and now seemed somehow to bear in his
person all the hopes and dreams of modern man. A new philosophy was
also gathering on the horizon, making ready to sweep away the philosophy
of ideas in favor of a cult of absurd individual existence.
Like latter-day Freuds, Heidegger and Sartre drew their listeners deep
down within their inner consciousness in an exaltation of the freedom and
the meaninglessness of life. Gone forever was the era of romanticism with
its anthem of noisy Wagnerian symphonies; the theme song of the new
intellectual movement, on the other hand, was a rhythm of the jungle, the
beat of the tom-tom and the incantation of the witch doctor for the warriors’
dance around the totem pole…or simply the unbridled rhythms of rock
music and its spin-offs. Onto the existentialist trunk de Lubac grafted his
personalist biblical theories and Rahner, the real theologian of Vatican II,
elaborated his anthropological theology.
Maritain delivers a harsh diagnosis in his scathing critique of neo-
modernist “scholars” and their immanent apostasy:
Let us not forget that they are victims of a certain pre-accepted philosophy, a Grand
Sophistry (we know Being, on condition that it is put in parentheses and abstracted out of
sight).…There is nothing left for the intellect to do but discourse on verisimilitudes, the cost of
which is borne by what takes place in human subjectivity. To affirm the existence of a
transcendent God becomes from this moment a nonsense. Divine transcendence is only the
mythical projection of a certain collective fear experienced by man at a given moment in his
history.…Everything that tastes of a world other than the world of man can only fall under the
head of the out-of-date if it is a question of the “background world” of poor philosophic
realists, or of the Myth if it is a question of the supernatural world of religions. This is the
intelligible heaven, the Denkmittel accepted as self-evident (that is to say, as demanded by the
age), and the taboos to which our most liberal (that is to say, the most conformist) theologians
and exegetes have submitted their thought. Poor “sophisticated” Christians, it is Socrates they
would need.[222]
As he published Humani Generis, an open condemnation of the false
opinions attacking the very foundations of the Faith, Pope Pius XII
admitted that if timely action had not been taken, stone would not have
been left upon stone.[223] The neo-modernist fever was so dangerous a
disease because it was so contagious; modernism under St. Pius X was a
mild hay fever in comparison. Neo-modernism was anything but a tempest
in a teapot, as subsequent events have confirmed. As we draw closer to the
contemporary Roman crisis, the harbingers of the malaise become more
intense and more precise. Indisputably, the protagonists of the era which we
are about to study are the authoritative sources for the pope of the new
millennium. Pope John Paul II was an existentialist in philosophy and has
drunk deeply at the tainted sources of the two comrades in arms, Teilhard de
Chardin and de Lubac. As for Rahner, he is a clue–if not the veritable code
breaker–to deciphering the complex encyclicals of Pope John Paul II and
his “threshold of hope.”
 CHAPTER 15: TEILHARD DE CHARDIN: THE PROPHET OF
THE COSMIC CHRIST
Strictly speaking, a synthesis of Teilhard de Chardin’s thought might
seem out of place here in our genealogy of modernist principles, for the
hero of the story is neither a philosopher, nor an exegete, nor even a
theologian, properly speaking. However, a neo-modernist family album
with no photos of Teilhard de Chardin would be incomplete and misleading,
for it would fail to evoke the movement’s popularity in worldly circles.
Modernism was but a shadow of its former self in 1927 when the first
Teilhardian publications began appearing; thirty years later, as their author
lay dying, the virus had infected every level of the hierarchy and left its
mark even on the upper echelon of intellectuals, before making a triumphal
entry into Rome. We can use the Teilhardian phenomenon as a kind of
thermometer. It is our reference point, the litmus test for distinguishing
between modernists and faithful Catholics. After a brief sketch of the
prophet and his vision, we will take a close look at the reasons, both
scientific and mystical, underlying his popularity, before closing with a
summary of his posthumous influence.

1. The Prophet and His Vision

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was born in the region of
Auvergne, in central France, a descendant of Voltaire through his mother.
Bremond, his literature professor and later his friend, describes Teilhard de
Chardin at the age of fourteen as a very intelligent boy, yet possessed of a
maddening calm. His eyes were dull and far away because he really was in
another world, absorbed by an all-consuming passion. This is the earliest
testimony we have of Teilhard de Chardin’s double personality: on the one
hand, the model student who became a Jesuit priest; on the other hand, the
visionary obsessed by his wild imagining, consumed by the dream of
creative evolution. Teilhard de Chardin’s psychological duality manifested
itself in his paradoxical attitudes. He would exult in lyric joy full of
romanticism at the idea of the atomic bomb, for him evocative not so much
of Judgment Day as of the fruitful womb of evolution. He would weep with
emotion before a jumble of rusty iron. He was in ecstasy at the sight of
matter–any matter. His passion for evolution is most likely the source of his
fascination with the bold progress of bioethics and with Mao Tse-Tung’s
revolution in China.
The irresistible attraction of biology and paleontology determined his
later studies, and henceforth all knowledge and experience became for him
further proof of the evolution of matter. The years 1916-18 mark a turning
point in his thought, which he called a second birth. The Catholic
intelligentsia in those years was in search of a trailblazer, a hero in the
clergy rank, and none would be so suited to the role as a Jesuit. Malachi
Martin has captured this atmosphere of expectation in his work The Jesuits:
A hero and a pioneer for Jesuits had to display certain characteristics: high intellectualism,
stature with powerful secular figures, a definite touch of poetry and mysticism, a streak of
persecution by men of lesser stature, a spirit of independence from Rome and of revolution for
the sake of principle, and worldly-wise associations that gave him “class” and a certain degree
of “star” quality–internationalism.[224]
Teilhard de Chardin was all this and more. He had a boundless faith in
his own ideas, with just a touch of independence and a dash of originality,
all of which together made him an extremely popular figure. Moreover, his
esoteric, mystifying language possessed that superior advantage of meaning
anything to anyone.[225] With unwavering conviction, he divinized the
progress of the world toward points unknown, the future of the Super-Man,
ineluctable evolution…and so was quickly hailed as the prophet of a new
age. So much for the secret to his ascendancy over the masses. Teilhard de
Chardin was not a profound intellectual; he was a visionary haunted by a
new messianism which was for him an obsession. He was not a theorist; he
was a populist. He was not a speculative scholar; he was a prophet, and a
prophet fully conscious of his mission: “He has the feeling that, in virtue of
his studies, his connections, and his qualifications, too, he has a sort of
scientifico-religious mission in partibus infidelium.”[226]
His vision of the world and of religion was irresistibly attractive to
modern thought because it offered a universal explanation which was not
without a touch of genius. He presented a remarkably coherent synthesis,
both grandiose and audacious. For Teilhard de Chardin, absolutely
everything, natural and supernatural, comes from matter in perpetual
evolution as all things tend toward a point of convergence. His system is
neatly exposed in two of his books, The Phenomenon of Man and The
Divine Milieu, which we need to summarize briefly.[227]
In The Phenomenon of Man, which treats of the genesis of the human
race from its origin in the cosmos, Teilhard de Chardin set out as a simple
scientist, drawing conclusions based on sense appearances alone–on
phenomena.[228] As a biologist, his starting point was biological
evolutionism, a scientific hypothesis which posits a common origin for all
living things. More precisely, man evolved from the simplest mono-cellular
amoeba, which in turn emerged from inert matter. From this point of
departure he went on to deduce a general “Law of Consciousness and
Complexity.” This law establishes that, in the chain of living beings, an
organism’s degree of vital consciousness corresponds, in plants, to its
degree of nervous complexity and, in animals, to its degree of cerebral
complexity. Man, the sole being endowed with the power of reflection,
represents the highest level of consciousness. However, the law of
consciousness and complexity is not limited to living beings alone;
minerals, too, which we tend to consider as lifeless, nonetheless have their
share of consciousness, dubbed by Teilhard “psychic energy.”
With these guiding principles, he felt equal to expounding upon the
formation of the created universe, or the “cosmogenesis.” Thus the universe
was formed by a continuous progression in organic complexity,
corresponding to a progressive energetic intensity. The world was made in
three stages, separated by two leaps, that is, by two especially profound
transformations of energy. The first leap was the passage from non-living to
living beings. The second leap marks the passage from the most highly
developed beings to man. Is man the final stage of evolution? Will human
brains physically merge to produce a new kind of brain even more
complex? Teilhard did not think so, for man already possesses in himself
the perfection of thought and reflection. However, biological evolution will
continue on another plane, toward a convergence of all human souls into a
union of humanity as a whole. Thus, human thought will continue to tend
biologically toward a greater socialization; more precisely, it will gradually
unite itself into a perfect community of thought and love. Its final stage will
draw mankind together in a Super-Soul, a personal being, prior to all others
souls, uniting yet never absorbing them. This final stage of evolution, which
Teilhard de Chardin names the “Omega Point,” will be endowed with the
qualities proper to God Himself. Then, after this consummation of
biological evolution, the day will come when the convergence of souls will
demand humanity’s collective flight from matter and absolute reunion in the
Omega Point: otherwise known as the end of the world.
 The Phenomenon of Man was intended as a purely natural, scientific
work. The Divine Milieu, on the contrary, is the work of a Christian and
presupposes the truths of the Faith. This second volume follows a dynamic
parallel to the first and aims primarily at identifying the Omega Point with
the Incarnation of Christ. It is Teilhard de Chardin’s great mystical work,
and it, too, had a very definite appeal. “In our universe…in which each soul
goes to God, in our Lord, all that is sensible, in its turn, exists for the soul”;
it follows that all reality is sacred: Christ is the end even of the natural
evolution of beings; evolution is holy.[229]
All things are subject to Christ’s power of attraction by way of
consummation. Teilhard de Chardin writes that the Incarnation turned the
whole world into a sacrament. He compares the world to the sacramental
species:
O God…that I may not succumb to the temptation to curse the universe and Him who made
it, teach me to adore it by seeing You concealed within it. O Lord, repeat to me the great
liberating words, the words which at once reveal and operate: Hoc est corpus meum. In truth,
the huge and dark Thing, the phantom, the storm–if we want it to be so, is You! Ego sum,
nolite timere. The things in our life which terrify us, the things that threw You Yourself into
agony in the Garden, are, ultimately, only the Species or Appearance, the matter of one and the
same Sacrament.[230]
The Incarnation also constitutes the Word of God as the physical and
biological center of the natural evolution of the planet. Accordingly,
Teilhard de Chardin reinterprets the doctrine of St. Paul concerning the
formation of the Mystical Body of Christ, transposing the mystical union of
the elect and the Head of the Church in terms of an evolution toward an
entirely natural and physical whole. Just as “holy matter” engendered all
men by a vital evolution, so all men engender Christ by a progressive
evolution: the cosmogenesis becomes Christogenesis, the formation of the
total Christ understood by Teilhard as a biological and physical whole. He
is not referring here to the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth but to a
“third ‘nature’ of Christ (neither human nor divine but cosmic).” In order
that He might become the Alpha and the Omega, Christ will be
“‘immensified’ to meet the demands of our new Space-Time, without
thereby losing His personality or human dimension.”[231]
Teilhard de Chardin’s Christ is still in formation; He will only reach
His definitive existence when the world reaches the Omega Point. Teilhard
de Chardin’s Christ is the essential mover behind a hominization leading
toward an ultrahominization: “the cosmic drift moves ‘in the direction of an
incredible “mono-molecular state,” so to speak, in which…each ego is
destined to attain its climax in a sort of mysterious super-ego.’…[O]nly
such an association can bring out the form of the future man, in which
humanity will achieve complete fulfillment of itself.”[232] Teilhard de
Chardin explains that this “integration” will yield a final, syncretist religion
which will represent the general convergence of all religions into a
universal Christ satisfying to all parties; such, in his view, is the only
possible conversion to the World and the only conceivable form for the
religion of the future.[233]
From their first appearance in print, Teilhard de Chardin’s audacious
theses fell under harsh criticism and his Roman superiors forbade him to
write further. His local superiors sheltered him, however. The avant-garde
intellectuals circulated his clandestine manuscripts, which had become all
the more attractive for their being forbidden. He was exiled to Peking where
he was obliged to spend the duration of the Second World War, only
returning to Europe in 1945. Five years later, Pius XII condemned his
theological deviations in Humani Generis. Teilhard de Chardin’s superior,
Janssens, toyed with the idea of expelling him but was seriously afraid of a
revolt in the Society of Jesus were he to do so; he finally gave him total
freedom of movement by exiling him to the United States in 1951. There,
thanks to his enticing ideas and–need we insist–his shrewdness, Teilhard de
Chardin was able to pursue his research until his death in 1955.
In this way, during the fifteen years before the Council, his admirers
were able to publish and market his books one after the other, compiling a
remarkable library which contradicted more or less systematically every
single orthodox position. In reality, neither his person nor his ideas were
ever seriously threatened, since he was continually shrouded by the veil of
modesty provided by powerful allies.[234] His works dripping with
modernism were never condemned in his lifetime, and a simple monitum,
which is far less serious than being placed on the Index, issued in 1962
declared his posthumously published works to be “full of ambiguity, or
rather of grave errors, which offend Catholic doctrine.” This absence of any
condemnation is indicative of the sickness already gripping the Church but
also, it must be said, of the wiliness of his friends in shielding this latter-day
Precursor of the Church of the Future.

2. The Convergence of Modernism and Science

 To what do we owe the Teilhardian phenomenon? Whatever else may
be said, the principal reason for which the international press crowned him
with laurels and bore him aloft their shoulders was the fact that here was a
scientist, and a priest and a Jesuit to boot, attacking the dogma of Creation
and of original sin, and obliging the Faith to pay homage to science. Ever
since Siger and Luther, ever since Descartes and modern philosophy, faith
and science have been considered autonomous, each master in its own
domain. However, since science is a rigorous discipline whose progress
renders immense services to humanity, modern man, who had already
washed his hands of metaphysics, saw no reason to burden himself further
with a troublesome God receding ever deeper into the realms of myth.
Modernism was born of this death struggle between the Catholic Faith and
a “science” in apparent contradiction to dogma. Teilhard de Chardin’s neo-
modernism was the product of a similar stand-off. Society was all a-buzz at
that time with the theory of a scientific evolution of species. Spencer,
Lamarck, and finally Darwin had devoted their labor to propagating this
scientific hypothesis on the continent.
At this juncture, Teilhard de Chardin appeared on the scene. He saw
the old Church backed into a corner by modern science and stepped forward
to propose a solution. His ambition was not so much to become the apostle
of the old Church as the founder of a new one. He was to take the idea of
evolution as the basis of this new religion, which he considered to be
already taking shape in the heart of modern man. Ultimately, then, the true
founder of Teilhard’s new cult was neither Yahweh nor Christ, but Charles
Darwin. Teilhard de Chardin traveled far and wide in defense of his vision
of divine evolution, digging up Piltdown Man and Peking Man as evidence.
These scientific discoveries, which brought him glory, were proven to be
frauds and so ultimately worked his downfall. Nonetheless, the fatal
problem with the theory was not its adoption of a scientific hypothesis,
however disputable. The problem was above all Teilhard de Chardin’s
planting Darwinian evolution in a field which is not its own, namely
theology. There lies the original sin of Teilhardianism: wanting to use a
Chinese lexicon for translating Arabic–skipping from one category to
another; wanting to translate the results of scientific experiments
(biological, geological, etc.) into a philosophical and theological language–
as though the red of the rosebud or the evolution of a grain of wheat could
serve to define an eternal truth or a dogma of the Faith!
 St. Thomas had his reasons for saying that a false idea about the nature
of Creation always implies a false idea about God, for Creation is the only
rational path leading to knowledge of Him. Teilhardian “creation” is the
polar opposite of the biblical account of Genesis. Teilhard de Chardin
constructed his entire theological system on this new concept of the genesis
of the world from a radical evolution of “spiritual” matter. Thus, the cosmos
unfolded from an original “holy matter” by successive degrees stretched out
over billions of years. Matter is the stuff the world is made of, in which “the
greater presupposes the less; in which, by Evolution, something substantial
is purified and truly passes from the material pole to the spiritual pole of the
World.”[235] The dogmas of Creation and of the existence of God the
Creator and, indirectly, the dogma of original sin are all sacrificed on the
altar of Evolution, which is the only category admitted by Teilhardian
thought, in the words of his friend and admirer Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The evolutionary origins of Teilhard de Chardin’s universe may take
their inspiration from Darwin but the endpoint of that revolution is vintage
Teilhard. At a given moment in time, men–homo sapiens–suddenly
appeared on various points of the globe.[236] The appearance of mankind
on earth marks the beginning of human History and of the ascent toward a
perfect unity of all individuals: History’s Omega Point. Here we touch the
very essence of Humanity’s magnificent process of gestation; for this
continual evolution will terminate in an apotheosis of Humanity as a whole
suddenly transformed into a Super-Man, mysterious but undeniable. Hegel
and Strauss had already formulated the same doctrine, as we have seen, and
it was revived by Loisy and Tyrrell. Why this pressing need to capitalize
“man” by extracting his individual existence and only retaining his pure,
ideal essence? Because the concrete individual, Peter or Paul taken
separately, is limited, and one need not have faith in original sin to grasp
that he is fallen. On the other hand, the Super-Man, the ideal Man, is
exempt from original sin; presenting such a Man as an omnipotent savior
suddenly appears more realistic. Salvation by the Super-Man, Teilhard de
Chardin’s dream redemption, is called hominization, the union of all men
into a universal fraternity toward a future and collective salvation.
Obviously, such a view of the cosmos entails an utter rejection of the
Catholic Faith. Creation, the soul, evil, original sin, the resurrection of the
body, and heaven are only the first round of victims; Teilhardian evolution
quickly makes a mockery of the entire catechism. The most sacred notions
are retained but emptied of their original meaning and transposed into the
key of “genesis.” Teilhard de Chardin’s system is remarkably consistent, but
it is also a litany of grave heresies against faith and reason. For him, all
reality unfolds by physical necessity. Biological, historical, and “Christic”
evolution are an organic whole. Creation, sin, Redemption, and the
Resurrection necessarily flow into each other. Cosmogenesis and the
Omega Point scarcely leave room for supernature, which, according to
Teilhard de Chardin, was the fabrication of St. Augustine: “Don’t mention
that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the
supernatural.”[237] There is no room for God and His freedom, either, since
He had to create the world in order to be God: “I see in the World a
mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute being
Himself.”[238] Behold the quintessence of pantheism according to which
the world proceeds by necessary emanation and is as divine and as
necessary as God Himself.

3. The Convergence of Modernism and Gnosticism

We have just pointed out the undeniable traces of gnosticism in
Teilhard de Chardin’s writings. His first essays are more discreet, but his
writing, if not his thought, ripened with age, is more compromising. A few
examples are in order:
…I failed to understand that as God “metamorphosed” the World from the depths of matter
to the peaks of Spirit, so in addition the World must inevitably and to the same degree
“endomorphize” God. As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is
revealed to us, he in some way “transforms himself” as he incorporates us.[239] I do not hold
the “anti-pantheistic” position you attribute to me. On the contrary, I am essentially gnostic by
thought and by temperament; all my life has been spent crying that there is but one true
“pantheism of union” (Deus omnia in omnibus) (a pan-Christism, as Blondel would say), as
opposed to the pseudopantheism of dissolution (Deus omnia).–As such, I have no sympathy
whatsoever for biblical Creationism (except to the extent that it establishes the possibility of
union). Otherwise, I find the idea of biblical Creation rather childish and anthropomorphic.
[240] If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in
Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to
believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness)–that,
when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe…I
surrender myself to an ill defined faith in a world that is one and infallible–wherever it may
leave me.[241]
Rapidly, then, we will consider the relation between modernism and
gnosticism, and their mutual implication, since gnosticism certainly seems
to be a recurring theme among intellectuals enamored of modern ideas. Are
there but vague and incidental harmonies between the two, or does there
exist a veritable cause and effect relationship? That is the question which
we will tackle in the following paragraphs.
Historically, there have only been two forms of life and thought: the
“supernatural” of the flesh and the supernatural of the spirit. [242] What
history reveals about religious systems is easily corroborated by reason.
Religion, the bond between man and God, has two possible expressions:
either man acknowledges an exterior God who reveals Himself to him, or
he refuses that God. If he accepts, that religion is none other than the
Catholic religion, which alone has received the revelation of God made
man. It holds an optimistic view of the world as molded by God, “the
Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”; evil does exist, but the fault
is with the creatures of God who have sinned and fallen from grace. Since
he is a fallen creature, man needs a Savior to raise him up to God. On the
other hand, if man does not acknowledge his Creator, he has to invent
“God” in his heart, thus making “God” in his image. Such a “God” is the
creature of man; He is man becoming aware of himself. All things are
contained within man who, by progressive evolution, becomes “God” by
his own strength. The religion in which man divinizes and adores himself is
thus a rejection of original sin and the refusal of the Savior. Such is the
essence of modernism.
This division of beliefs and of all culture into two antagonistic
positions reflects the whole of human history. The first man succumbed to
the same temptation as Lucifer did by desiring to become a god. Ever since
original sin, the history of religions–history, period–is forever repeating
itself. The Persians followed Zoroaster and the Manichaean religion of two
gods, one of good and one of evil; the Buddhists followed the Hindus and
their pantheistic philosophy (the world is God), striving to attain the
“perfection” of nothingness which they call nirvana–extinction–by an effort
of the personal consciousness and of the spirit alone.[243] In the third
century, the Manichaean gnosis took up the same pantheistic themes by
teaching the exact opposite of Christian doctrine. Three interrelated
principles give coherence to the gnostic system: the devaluation of the
cosmos; the mystical flight into the beyond; the means of this mystical
flight, namely, gnosis or esoteric knowledge. The Gnostics flatly rejected
any notion of a universal original sin or of the need for a redeemer.[244] Far
from being fallen creatures, we are divine beings who, without any fault of
our own, have been cast into a cruel, foreign, and chaotic universe. From
their doctrine of Creation as an evil the Gnostics deducted that man ought to
free himself from this world in order to divinize himself by means of an
“exodus” or a mystical voyage. Since the only rational path leading to God
was closed to him–namely, Creation as a good–man had to invent a gnostic
path, the discovery of the “sacred” which would allow him to raise himself
up to the level of a divinity.
Gnostic belief is a cat with nine lives. History and theology here teach
the same lesson on the common origin of all heresies. Gnosticism is but the
human form of the sin of Lucifer and his angels; one heresy after another
has quite naturally spread its roots down into the same soil. The temptation
of the immanent God, by which man makes God in his own image, has
been circulating for more than two thousand years. It passed successively
from Buddha and Confucius in the sixth century before Christ, to the
Pharisaic cabal, to the Manichaeism of the second and third centuries, and
on to Brahmanism. It reappeared in millenarianism and then in Catharism in
the thirteenth century, and popped up again in the seventeenth century with
Jakob Böhme and Baruch Spinoza.[245] Curiously, we see a recrudescence
of the same gnostic, immanentist temptations in the eighteenth century, the
century of Freemasonry and of the Deist philosophers–whom we ought
simply to call atheists and be done with it. The latter-day magi are legion:
Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot’s Encyclopedists, Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche
and Marx. They are plain-speaking men in their description of the “murder
of God,” Hegel’s “speculative Good Friday” and Nietzsche’s “God is dead.”
We have already seen how deeply the Protestant modernists of the
nineteenth century were imbued with the same tendencies, particularly
Schleiermacher and Strauss. The Catholic modernists of the early twentieth
century were contaminated by similar noxious ideas. Bergson and Le Roy,
Hébert and Loisy, Blondel and Tyrrell each professed with more or less
nuance their faith in a God whose birthplace is in the depths of the human
consciousness.
Thus, when Teilhard de Chardin began his career as a thinker in the
post modernist period, he had only to dip into the riches of his predecessors
and refine the same old themes. He may also have gone digging in the
theosophist movement of Mme Blavatsky, born shortly after Darwin.[246]
He never attempted to camouflage the Manichaean tendencies of this
doctrine.[247] In fact, Teilhard de Chardin’s synthesis is remarkable for the
new degree of cohesion it gave to gnostic thought. The masters of the
movement had always had difficulty bringing the two ends together in one
system, that is, reconciling the fall of material Creation with earthly
salvation. Teilhard de Chardin deserves all the credit for uniting the two
extremes. He was the herald of the syncretist Church in which man achieves
his own salvation by attaining the Omega Point. Yet for this Good News of
salvation-by-self to make sense, it had to be presented under the auspices of
a Darwinian Creation-by-self. Teilhard de Chardin was better able than
either the Manichaeans or the Germans to describe in detail the intimate
relation between Creation-by-self and salvation-by-self, thanks to the
unceasing process of evolution. If atoms gathered themselves into
molecules and molecules into living beings of all kinds, why could not
humanity gather itself, all on its own, into the New Jerusalem? The
Jerusalem of the Apocalypse is the Mystical Body of Christ, the “Super-
Man” who is taking shape before our very eyes by the efforts of man alone,
through the exploits of technology and the emergence of superpowers. This
“super-evolution” takes its place in cosmic history as a continuation of the
Darwinian evolution of organic forms.
Gnosticism had always existed as an occult phenomenon, kept alive in
Freemasonry and various sects, but it was finally received into polite
society under the auspices of the young but already powerful New Age
movement. To give the reader an idea of the pantheistic, Hegelian,
Teilhardian, and–why not say the word–Luciferian influence of this
movement, suffice it to quote the profession of faith of one journalist,
advocate of the “New Age of Aquarius”:
The universe as a whole is a living, conscious spiritual being, of which we are all a part.
This Consciousness–we may call it “God,” or whatever name suits us–is inhabited by aspects
of itself, that is, by conscious beings. The universe is but one vibration, everywhere the same:
Love! Founded in Love, each consciousness wills to be generated, as so many vibrative
aspects; as so many shadows; as so many points of light. Human beings created themselves in
order to experience love, knowledge, matter, and action. We pass through a series of
incarnated and disincarnated lives which will lead us toward an ultimate fusion with the
Unique Consciousness, which is the identity underlying all that exists in the universe and
which is the origin and the destiny of all separate beings. We must prepare the future of
humanity, the New Man, a being of whom we cannot yet have the slightest notion, just as we
cannot imagine the originality of the collective human Consciousness. The mission of every
one of us, as people of the New Age, is to lead all human beings capable of being receptive
back to the state of consciousness that was man’s before the Fall. Little by little, this new
consciousness will infiltrate all the daily activities of men and the individual human cells will
become more and more aware of what is happening. The transformation will then accelerate
exponentially.[248]
4. The Disciples and Heirs of Teilhard de Chardin.
Teilhard de Chardin is long since dead and buried, and most of his
works with him. Teilhardianism, on the other hand, is alive and well. Not
only has Teilhard de Chardin been received with open arms; he is ruler of
all he sees, reigning as an absolute monarch in influential ecclesiastical
circles. His first books distilled their poison in homeopathic doses; his later
works are thoroughly doused with it. His first publications were passed
from hand to hand between close friends. When he was attacked, his friends
all chimed in to declare the innocence of this martyr to the cause. They took
the occasion to mock his opponents and infuse a little more Teilhardian
evolutionism into the veins of unsuspecting readers. De Lubac was his
greatest protector both before and after the warning from Rome, although
he consistently denied being a Teilhardian. We have already mentioned
Balthasar, who also had a close look at the teachings of his friend. Blondel,
in 1919, was scandalized by certain exaggerations in Teilhard de Chardin’s
work, namely an evocation of Christ’s action on the world which Blondel
found too naturalistic and physical; nonetheless, he maintained a
tremendous admiration for this friend of his friends: “I also share (and I
have always shared) all of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas and inclinations
concerning the Christological problem.”[249] Which brings us to the next
generation.
Ratzinger praised Teilhard de Chardin for having rethought the
relations between man and Christ in the context of the modern world. He
did not balk at associating the Teilhardian dream with the Christology of St.
Paul:
From here onwards faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which
dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam,
one single body–the man to come. It will see in him the movement to that future of man in
which he is completely “socialized,” incorporated in one single being…Christ, the last
man….For–let me repeat–that man is most man, indeed the true man, who is most unlimited
[ent-schränkt], who not only has contact with the infinite–the infinite being!–but is one with
him: Jesus Christ. In him “hominization” has truly reached its goal.[250]
Pope Paul VI also manifested a friendship for this herald of a new age.
During a conversation with Fr. Boyer, one of Teilhard de Chardin’s most
bitter enemies, the Pope besought the theologian to rehabilitate both
Teilhard de Chardin and de Lubac. Boyer thus found himself, under
pontifical pressure, obliged to write to de Lubac to inform him of
 the great esteem he [the Pope] has for you and for your writings. At the same time, he
expressed, although not without reservations, a judgment on Father Teilhard that would not
have displeased you.–My reflections then led me to think that we must hear at the Congress a
presentation that is sympathetic to the thought of Father Teilhard de Chardin on our theme (De
Deo).[251]
The future Pope John Paul II had long since been familiar with
Teilhard de Chardin since, according to the experts, Teilhard is the author
he cites most frequently, alongside de Lubac. Like the late Pope, Teilhard
de Chardin thought that evolution is a worthy explanation in religious
matters, yielding what is known as the historicism of dogma. The Pope also
shared his eschatological vision and applied it in particular to the year 2000.
He also expressed belief in a collective salvation of humanity.[252] His
admiration for Teilhard de Chardin was at least as strong as that of Paul VI.
In 1981, for the centenary of Teilhard de Chardin’s birth, John Paul II sent a
letter to the Catholic Institute of Paris, which
manifested an attitude of the Holy See which was very favorable to [Teilhard], thus dispelling
fears spread by certain extraordinarily unintelligent and aggressive theologians, and praising
“the wonderful repercussions of his research and investigations as well as the marked
influence of his personality and the richness of his thought.” Teilhard de Chardin is described
as a man seized by Christ in the depths of his being, ever anxious to hold in high regard both
faith and the answer of reason, thereby containing almost by anticipation, John Paul II’s
appeal: “Be not afraid; open, open wide the doors to Christ, those immense fields of culture, of
civilization, of development.”[253]
✜✜✜
The theology of Teilhard de Chardin is in a direct line with the
pantheistic modernism of Schleiermacher, Loisy, and Tyrrell. It vaunts the
same disdain for reason.[254] It sacrifices the most fundamental dogmas of
the Catholic Faith: original sin, God, and the Savior. His theology burns
incense to the myths of Evolution and of Man and to universal salvation by
man and for man. The evidence of Teilhard de Chardin’s unorthodoxy is
blinding when we stand his writings next to those of the enemies of the
Church who have had a field day adapting the expressions of the
paleontologist Jesuit. Certain friends of Teilhard de Chardin have not
scrupled at defining his work with brutal clarity:
Teilhard de Chardin committed the sin of Lucifer, the same of which Rome had accused the
Masons: in the phenomenon of “hominisation,” man takes the first rank. When the
consciousness reaches its apogee–the Omega Point, as Teilhard called it–man becomes such as
we desire him to be: free in his flesh and in his mind. Thus Teilhard raised man upon the altar;
adoring man, he could no longer adore God.[255]
 Was Teilhard de Chardin really a Freemason who had sold his soul to
the devil, zealous to destroy that he might rebuild on the ruins? Certainly
not. There was nothing practical about him. Did he consciously serve the
anti-Church in order to destroy the kingdom of Christ from within? The
evidence is against it. However, his audacious course through the minefield
of evolution did more to forward the cause of the enemies of the Church
than anything an outsider could have attempted. No one else possessed
Teilhard de Chardin’s genius for instilling “pure” science and religious
revolutionism with the modernist poison. There is no denying the fact that
his system seems tailor-made to serve the ends of modernists and
Freemasons alike: indeed, the Teilhardian revision of Christian dogma
would be the choicest means of transforming the Church and integrating
her–or rather disintegrating her–into a universal Super-Church.
 CHAPTER 16: HEIDEGGER’S EGOLOGICAL
EXISTENTIALISM
The years of chaos following the great defeat of 1918 effected a
profound transformation in German philosophical culture. The Kantian
tradition, based on excessive optimism and rationalism, was no longer
satisfying to the German mind, which had rejected once and for all the
Hegelianism of pure essences. Only exclusively scientific doctrines
managed to survive. Philosophers found themselves obliged to investigate
entirely new pathways in their quest for absolute certitude. They decided to
take up the chase where Descartes had left off, in search of a reliable
method for finally attaining things in themselves by stepping outside of the
immanent cogito. Could it be that German philosophy had at long last
abandoned its own dearest principle of radical immanentism: the
enthronement of the individual consciousness divorced from external
reality? Sad to say, existentialism, the product of these latter-day German
upheavals, brought no improvement whatsoever. Here again we find the
same classic philosophical threesome of ignorantism, egology, and
revolutionism. The only difference between the various modern systems is
in their relative starting points and dominant philosophical principles.
Kantians put the stress on ignorantism, blossoming from a refusal of
essences and from a divorce between phenomena and things-in-themselves.
Bergsonians took creative evolution as their starting point, supposing that
everything mutates into everything. Existentialists, on the other hand–and
the neo-modernists with them–began with personal introspection, both
immanentist and egological: they inaugurated the phenomenological
method.

1. The Existentialist Movement

The term existentialism is not in itself proper to a particular school of
philosophy. Whoever understands philosophy to be a universal wisdom
striving to attain the foundation of all existent realities understands the
universality of the term “existentialist.” In this wider sense, Socrates, St.
Augustine, and–to an even greater extent–St. Thomas were eminently
existentialist. However, this epithet is reserved historically to the twentieth-
century philosophical reaction against German idealism and essentialism.
The first existentialist was Kierkegaard. Well before the phenomenology of
Husserl and of Heidegger (two philosophers whom historians easily mistake
for the true fathers of the movement), the Danish minister Kierkegaard was
decrying the modern day evil of pantheism for its cold indifference to
individual anguish. A horde of authors then followed his lead, all striving to
shake off the same yoke of abstract ideas. They worked against the old
utopian vision of a “best of all possible worlds,” which would have every
detail of the universe determined in advance like sheet music. Husserl
brought his own method to this new philosophy, a method which he called
phenomenology because it is only concerned with “facts of consciousness”:
the impressions and thoughts of the subject. Next came Heidegger and
Jaspers in Germany, and Marcel, Sartre, and Camus in France, to name only
the most famous.
It is no easy task to give a clear and concise definition of the
movement since there were as many forms of existentialism as there were
existentialist authors. The school split into different groups. The moralists,
like Fr. Wojtyla–the future John Paul II–followed Max Scheler, while the
personalists (Maritain, for one) rallied around Mounier. The movement has
sometimes been defined as that philosophy which gives precedence to
existence rather than to essence, or as the philosophy concerned with the
thoughts and feelings of the conscious subject. However, every author has a
different notion of what these terms signify. At least they all agree on one
point: existentialism is the philosophy of the concrete and of that
phenomenon which is human existence. It is also true to describe this
school of thought as the attempt to philosophize as an actor rather than as a
spectator. Whereas Aristotle assumed the impersonal role of an admiring
scholar before a world of marvels, Kierkegaard could only think in function
of his personal problems as resolved by a deliberate, “real-life” choice.
Existentialism thus appeared as a much more “human” humanism than
anything developed by Hegel. It was committed, passionate, and full of life;
it was a flesh and blood philosophy, which is what made it so popular.
According to the existentialist vision, philosophy is a biography; it is a
session with the psychiatrist; it is an autopsy of the soul in all the
tragicomedy of existence. For this reason, many existentialist authors turned
toward fiction or drama (Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre) rather than
toward the treatise (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). Only a novel allows an
author to present the explosion of original existence in all its unique and
temporal reality. Thus, existentialist writings began as philosophical essays
but soon moved quite naturally toward purely literary works, often along
the lines of a private diary.
Finally, existentialism presented itself as a means of salvation–even to
such confirmed atheists as Heidegger and Sartre. According to them, man
should live life and possess an authentic existence by making entirely
personal choices, which alone are able to free him from every form of
totalitarianism, be it social, political, or religious. By refusing to conform to
external constraints and by taking in hand his own destiny, man perfects
himself and works his salvation. Of all the tenets of existentialism, this last
is certainly the most profound.
After this brief sketch of the movement, we might propose an
approximate definition of existentialism: it is the descriptive philosophy of
personal human existence entirely free in its destiny.

2. Phenomenological Egology
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), professor at Freiburg-in-Breisgau,
refused a prestigious chair at the University of Berlin in order to devote his
life to a subtle and complex research. To be precise, he sought to elaborate
the principles of an absolutely certain knowledge, as defined by him in
1931 in his Cartesian Meditations. His phenomenological method,
supposedly original and a source of liberation, is in fact a return to
Descartes: a search for the Northwest Passage between the inside of man
and his outside, from the immanent to the real. Husserl cast doubt upon all
knowledge–Descartes’s fundamental cogito included–and found himself
alone with pure consciousness. Now, because consciousness is always
consciousness of something, that something must exist. Eureka! Like
Bergson in France, Husserl believed his musings had brought him at last to
the fundamental truth, source of all that is true. Man is conscious of his own
personal thoughts and impressions, which are the “facts of consciousness”
already described at length by Schleiermacher. Husserl’s discovery of the
whole world within the depths of the consciousness–purely reflexive
thought–is a return to Kant’s “knowledge of phenomena”; it is
Schleiermacher’s subjective experience of God within the self; it is
Bergsonian experience welling up from the individual consciousness. This
latter-day reincarnation of egology could not bring the mind of man any
closer to the real but only to “facts of consciousness,” simple projections of
the self. It contained no criteria for distinguishing reality from dreams or
being from imagining. In the Husserlian fairy tale, the shadow of a groom,
armed with the shadow of a brush, stands forever grooming the shadow of a
horse! Husserl’s new method, so touted as the guide to lead man at last out
of the interior prison of the cogito, had no veritable originality and certainly
no power of liberation.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who succeeded Husserl at the same
university, followed in the footsteps of the master by his exclusive interest
in the “facts of consciousness.” Heidegger took on the essential
philosophical question: What is being? The question gave a name to
Heidegger’s system: existentialism. How did Heidegger conceive of being?
Did he finally manage to step beyond “facts of consciousness?” No, alas.
For every one of the existentialists, the world in itself is an absurd chaos.
The only living world is the world for self: the world as present to the gaze
of the human consciousness, receiving its meaning and coming into
existence only in reference to man. Existentialist thinkers described their
doctrine as akin to the common experience of awaking a sleeping world
simply by one’s presence. The existentialist outside-world, seemingly dead,
is more than mere nothingness, but it has no meaning in itself and
ultimately disappears as another living world dawns on the horizon of our
consciousness. In spite of its encouraging label, existentialist philosophy is
permanently severed from existence because of its fundamental and
exclusive attachment to Kantian, Husserlian phenomena. “If no Dasein
[human being] exists,” declared Heidegger, “no world is ‘there’
either.”[256] “In its ultimate signification, humanism…refers to any
philosophical doctrine which explains and evaluates being as a whole based
on man and in view of man.”[257] “I am the being by whom there is [es
gibt] being. Being belongs to us; it can be present only by us.”[258] Sartre
thought the same: “The upsurge of a For-itself” (or consciousness) is what
makes there be a world.[259] Merleau-Ponty was more radical: “I am the
absolute source. My existence does not come from my antecedents, from
my physical and social entourage; it goes toward them and sustains
them.”[260]
The fundamental existentialist principle is indeed the cogito: “I think,
therefore I am.” Being is thought, and thought creates being. Our
philosophers do not stop there but move a step further into absolute
egology. Not only does being obey consciousness but the consciousness
obeys free will. Existence and liberty are completely identical. In their
jargon, to exist is to go beyond oneself; it is to invent oneself freely, to
create one’s own essence and create the world. “I must be free. I must be
self-impelled, and able to say: ‘I am because I will; I am my own
beginning.’”[261]
The veritable existence, the veritable creation, comes with being free;
it comes with being a man in the full sense of the word. Freedom will never
be the lot of conformists, who have alienated their identity. They can only
say, “One does,” and never, “I do.” Men who have abdicated their liberty
have reduced themselves to the rank of objects; they are nothing at all, for
they have no authentic existence. To the existentialist, liberty means
becoming, changing; it means responsibility and true human existence,
outside of which all is static, inhuman, and dead. For him, the genuine man
is not only created free: he is freedom. Thus, in Sartre’s play The Flies,
Orestes retorts to Zeus:
You should not have made me free.…No sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours.
…And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders. I
shall not return under your law; I am doomed to have no other law but mine.…For I, Zeus, am
a man, and every man must find out his own way.[262]
Existentialists consider absolute liberty–which is the whole of man–as
a rival to God. To admit that God exists is to lose liberty and become
alienated from oneself; moreover, it merits a man the dishonorable title of
“bastard.” The most radical existentialists thus opted for liberty and denied
God. Yet the liberty they chose is not a rosy one: it is an irrational instinct,
without ideal, or guide, or goal.[263] Existentialist existence is tragic; it is
man, who never asked to be born, thrown into an absurd, pointless concrete
situation. It is man condemned to liberty; condemned to living without
standard or measure of good and evil; condemned to choose his destiny,
fully aware that his destiny leads nowhere. Understandably then, the most
revealing sentiment inspired by existence is Nausea, the title of one of
Sartre’s novels.
In existentialism, everything is topsy-turvy: being, intelligence, and
will suddenly become identical.[264] It is the paroxysm of voluntarism, the
cogito-volo–“I will, I think, it is!” Nothing can resist this will of iron, as our
philosophers knead and mold reality. Existentialist philosophy is radically
anthropomorphic and perfectly solipsistic: all things come from the
individual self. It is the ultimate and most logically satisfying capitulation
before the age-old temptation to immanence. The Greek sophist Protagoras
was the first officially to auto-decree himself the measure of all things; he
passed the torch to Kant, who rendered thought and morality absolutely
autonomous; Bergson in turn traced all reality back to the subconscious.
The existentialists in turn finally announced: “I am the absolute source.”
Man is henceforth a self-appointed absolute, building upon the ruins of the
Absolute.

3. Existentialist Ignorantism
For a realist, things are because they have a certain nature and as such
can be the object of rational knowledge. This reality is something the three-
year-old takes for granted when he reaches the inquisitive stage: “What’s
that, Daddy? What’s that?” Yet ever since Kant and Hegel, with the
complicity of Bergson, idealists of every stripe have persisted in denying
the mind access to being, its proper object. They consistently oblige the
mind to feed upon subjective dreams and “facts of consciousness.” Why?
For two reasons, upon which we have already touched in our discussion of
Kantian agnosticism. They deny that things in themselves have a certain
nature; they claim that to know does not mean to be informed by reality but
on the contrary to inform reality–or rather deform it. The existentialists,
who for their name and pretensions are often labeled realists, had in fact
accepted the same old idealist preconceptions.
As to the first point, the existentialist system embodies the denial of
essences more strongly than idealism ever did. This denial of essences
makes up the second major principle of existentialism: existence precedes
essence. Man firstly is; only secondarily is he this or that. Man creates his
own essence and the entire universe with it. The system goes even further
and claims that existence can still exist when deprived of its essence.
Affirming such a thing is like saying the race runs, sight sees, and wine can
hold itself in place without the cooperation of a wine glass. It amounts to
saying that there is no essence at all either in things or in man. Yet, if Peter
does not have a human nature and if the poplar does not possess the essence
of a tree, how can I have a rational knowledge of either one? For
existentialists, then, knowledge is as unstable as reality. For this reason,
existentialism cannot endure any kind of eternal truth. “Newton’s laws, the
principle of contradiction, any truth whatever–these are true only as long as
Dasein [human existence] is.” Truth is valid only within the temporal limits
of existence. “Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will
there be any after Dasein is no more.”[265] Existentialism is a crusade
against intellectual oppression: for them, reason, though glorified for
centuries, is in fact the most striking contradiction in all of human thought.
[266] Socrates burned incense to reason; the task at hand is to dethrone it
once and for all.
As to the second point, existentialists were again the slavish imitators
of Kantian idealists. According to them, reason cannot be informed by the
nature of concrete being. They build an impassible barrier between reality
and reason, such that reason is nourished not on reality but only on a man’s
own ideas as constructed by reason itself or by simple consciousness.
Kantian brains do not think reality; they think their thoughts alone. It is as
though someone were to offer a German appetite mere thoughts of sausage
and sauerkraut with no real sausage nor any real sauerkraut following
behind–not even a little pint of beer to hoodwink his stomach. The
existentialist school of thought is equally anti-realist since it, too, reaches
simple appearances and phenomena, and never concrete being. Within their
system, we remain prisoners of the Kantian distinction between the
phenomenon we know (the appearance) and the noumenon we don’t know
(the thing-in-itself). Sartre openly expressed his debt to Kant: “Modern
thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to a
series of appearances which manifest it.…[T]he being of the existent is
exactly what it appears….[O]ur theory of the phenomenon has replaced the
reality of the thing by the objectivity of the phenomenon.”[267]
For Heidegger, the human consciousness is able to transform raw
objects so as to give them meaning.[268] Thus, man is fundamentally
defined not by his faculty to reason but by his freedom severed from reason.
Existentialists understand freedom as a spontaneous irrational instinct,
perfectly absurd and outside the realm of the rational. Their position is
beyond ignorantism; it is absurdity. After a conscientious reading of Sartre’s
defining work, Being and Nothingness, the only possible conclusion is non-
comprehension. The author would be the first to answer that, indeed, there
is nothing to understand because everything in it is absurd. Yet ought we to
be satisfied with absurdity as the last word in philosophy? How could such
a theory of the absurd even claim to be a philosophy at all?

4. Existentialist Revolutionism
The third principle of existentialism is that the present moment is
creative. Since all is pure existence and there are no stable essences, it
follows that beings are devoid of identity or permanence; they are incapable
of the width, breadth, or depth which would allow them to emerge from the
present moment of a universe in perpetual flux. It is at every moment that
man must choose, assess himself anew, and surpass himself, for such is to
exist. Existence is not a state; it is an act which creates the essence of man
and keeps the world in suspense as he gives it existence. A human being
who fully identifies himself with the present moment knows he is
permanently threatened with nonexistence in all that he is, thinks, and does.
Man is but a situation. Each one of our acts throws the meaning of the
world and man’s place in the universe back into question. Man is
responsible for his own making or unmaking, but, in addition, upon his
personal choice hangs the existence of all things and of the world itself. A
universal responsibility bears upon each human act. Moreover, this
necessity to choose oneself is constantly repeated. Each moment is at once
creative and eschatological: man stands in the place of God the Father as
depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, with a wave of the hand
creating or annihilating a universe.
For Sartre, being is one with the event and the situation. For Bergson,
being is duration. For Heidegger, being is time. Thus, for all of them, being,
and with it the essence of all things, is pure becoming. The existentialist
vision of a radically changeable and relative human nature would bear its
noxious fruit in the situation ethics of Rahner’s existentialism.[269] As with
Hegel, being is identical to nothingness; being does exist, but it vanishes
into the event since, ultimately, it is not.[270] For Heidegger, the faithful
echo of Nietzsche, becoming is being. All is flux. “We are at the dawn of
the most enormous transformation of the earth, time and history. We are in
the night; we await the day.”[271]
Heidegger also follows Nietzsche in his interpretation of the death of
God. All that is supra-sensible–essences and all things static–is dead, and
has been replaced by the will to power, which is dynamic. Being as
imagined by Plato, or Moses, or the Church–Being as Substance; Being as
Immobility; Being as Identity–has been surpassed. Being is now recognized
as Becoming.[272]
Christian Revelation, bestowed once and for all in the fullness of an
immutable deposit, to endure until the end of time, is absurd. For
Heidegger, the Incarnate Word, who claimed to affix the flux of history
upon His Cross by choosing a place and a time for saving humanity, is
simply non-being.
The neo-modernists took to the existentialist line of thought. The
Protestant exegete Ricœur, who was to have so great an influence on
progressive thought, opposed the “He comes” of Scripture to the “He is” of
Greek thought, for we must open ourselves up to the new Creation. The
theologian Rahner declared that Christianity is the religion of the future and
of a future which is the absolute. As such, it only fully grasps its object in
the form of a not yet. The neo-modernists were close behind, modeling God
after the image and likeness of man: for Congar, human activity is the
action of God; in Chenu’s mind, the divine is the self-liberation of man; in
the words of Laurentin, God is not yet.[273]
✜✜✜
The existentialist starting point is egological immanentism. Nothing
deserves to exist except my consciousness and what is within, and my
consciousness is none other than my freedom. Hence the equation: “I will, I
think, it is.” Upon this egological foundation, existentialist philosophy
constructs a denial of the essences of things, their intelligibility and
stability, and so finds itself renewing the idealist conclusions it had meant to
oppose. Nothing is knowable except the conscious self, which is the
creative principle and the end of all that is. All things are in permanent
evolution. Of all philosophical trends, this one is probably the most anti-
intellectual and the most revolutionary since it draws all thought from man,
whereas the others at least began with things. Perhaps this school of thought
owed more to Bergson than it would have liked to admit, for he was the
great modernist mentor by his emphasis on the role of the consciousness
and of intuitive sympathy. Moreover, the evident variation of the different
groups within existentialism does not drown out their common melody. Just
as for the idealists Kant and Hegel, their fundamental preoccupation seems
to have been not so much philosophical as theological–or rather,
atheological. Sartre had at least the courtesy to admit that atheism was the
principle and motive behind his philosophy: “Existentialism is nothing else
but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic
position.”[274] His admission illustrates once again the basic, ineluctable
choice dividing ideas, beings, and men: either submit oneself to being,
facts, and reason–and ultimately to God–through a healthy philosophy and
belief; or else free oneself from being, facts, and reason so as the better to
free oneself from God. In making their choice, Heidegger and his
companions founded the existentialist philosophy of absurdity and absolute
license; in the last analysis, they succeeded in founding the philosophy of
nothingness.
 CHAPTER 17: SPIRITUAL EXEGESIS ACCORDING TO DE
LUBAC
If Teilhard de Chardin was neo-modernism’s prophet and mystic, his
friend Fr. Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) was the leader of the movement and
its mastermind. Teilhard de Chardin was the man of action, the soldier on
the front lines; de Lubac was the brains of the operation, the cool-headed
strategist. Possessed by an all-consuming vision, Teilhard de Chardin
advanced fearlessly into his baptism of fire; tucked away in the general
headquarters, de Lubac sent forth his men and calculated the risks. Times
indeed had changed, and a storm was brewing over the movement, with
ominous rumblings foreshadowing the Roman thunderbolts soon to come
hammering down on the followers of Teilhard de Chardin. De Lubac spent
the better part of his time teaching and writing at a safe distance from the
polemics, adroitly managing to avoid censorship. A brilliant mind and an
accomplished writer, his culture was universal; yet his preference went to
historical and patristic criticism all the more readily for his aversion to
scholastic theology. He succeeded in forming a veritable school of thought
among the Jesuits of Fourvière, his residence while teaching at the Jesuit
Faculty of Theology in Lyons.
To get a better idea of de Lubac’s contribution to neo-modernism in the
realm of Scripture studies, we first need briefly to introduce him, then to
discuss Bultmann’s historico-critical method as understood by de Lubac and
as adapted by him into his own “spiritual” medieval exegesis.

1. The Man and His Doctrine

Born in Cambrai in 1896, Henri de Lubac entered the Jesuits in 1913
but was called to active duty the following year. Ordained in 1927, he
taught at Lyons from 1935 to 1950. He spent World War II fighting in the
ranks of the Resistance. He was suspected of neo-modernism after
publishing Supernatural[275] in 1946 and was obliged to moderate his zeal
in a Parisian exile before finally returning to Fourvière. It was at Fourvière
in 1960 that he was publicly rehabilitated, when Pope John XXIII appointed
him as a theologian for the preparation of the upcoming Council–although
de Lubac in his new post initially complained of feeling as trapped as a
hostage under close surveillance. However, the eclipse was but momentary,
and he soon vigorously took up his role at the Council, earning the
admiration of numerous disciples including two future popes, Montini and
Wojtyla.[276] The latter, after he had become Pope John Paul II, made de
Lubac a cardinal in 1983, certainly in view of “the long and faithful service
which this theologian gave, using the best of Catholic tradition in his
meditation on Scripture, the Church, and the modern world [his Gaudium et
Spes].” [277] He died in 1991, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest
theologians of the twentieth century.
De Lubac pursued his scholastic and theological studies in England
during the troubled years before and after the war. He was a man of letters
and vast culture, characterized above all by his capacity to welcome and
integrate into his thinking the most diverse intellectual currents. His studies
as a professor and a writer led him to treat a wide variety of subjects, but his
real area of expertise was historical inquiry. He was the impetus behind an
exegetical movement of return to patristic sources that crystallized into the
ressourcement[278] and which remained a defining tendency not only in his
works on Scripture but also in his dogmatic writings such as Catholicism
(1938). With Daniélou, he founded a workshop of patristic and scriptural
studies at Fourvière that began publishing Christian Sources[279] as early
as 1940. Members of the workshop formed a group of thinkers bound
together by the discreet but enthusiastic figure of Fr. de Lubac; this high-
powered team included the future Cardinals Daniélou and Urs von
Balthasar (a brilliant translator of de Lubac’s writings into German) and
Fathers Fessard and Bouillard (later implicated in the Roman
condemnations).[280] De Lubac’s ideas also exercised a strong influence on
a number of friends already in high places, notably the personalist Mounier
(of the publication Esprit), the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, and the
Dominicans Chenu and Congar.
In the realm of theology, de Lubac’s specialty was the history of
dogma, yielding Corpus Mysticum and History and Spirit,[281] a book on
Origen. He redefined certain key notions such as the supernatural,
apologetics, and dogma, calling his doctrine a return to St. Thomas and so
setting himself apart from certain Thomistic commentators. His general
tendency gave precedence to mystical theology rather than to scholasticism,
which he considered too rational.[282] This mystical bent led him to extend
the supernatural into the domain of the purely natural, an innovation
explored in his controversial book Supernatural. In the same mystical line,
he exalted faith to the detriment of reason, sharply criticizing the idea that
dogma is a speculative truth to be believed as opposed to be lived, and
attacking intellectual, exterior apologetics.[283] The ground covered by his
writings is a tribute to the universality of his studies and his interest in
everyone and everything. True to its title, de Lubac’s Catholicism reaches
out to the whole world and would establish a dialogue with all men, be they
believers, non-Catholics, or even atheists–as in his book The Drama of
Atheistic Humanism.[284] With the same intent, de Lubac consecrated a
number of his works to heterodox authors, drawing them into debate.
Besides the atheists, he “dialogued” with Pico della Mirandola, Joachim of
Floris, and Proudhon, and wrote three books on Buddhism which helped to
confirm his own conviction of the originality and unicity of the “Christian
Event in the complex immensity [of] the spiritual history of our
humanity.”[285] The same ambition to welcome one and all made him the
pre-Vatican II champion of religious liberty and inter-religious dialogue.
In our day, de Lubac may well be acclaimed as the theologian of
Ressourcement and one of the pioneers of Vatican II, forever uniting love
for the Church with love for humanity;[286] under Pius XII, he enjoyed no
such benign glow of general approval. He was considered the leader of the
“new theology,” that is, of neo-modernism. A later chapter will recount the
details of his disgrace before the Rome of Pacelli, but we can already point
out a number of his theological opinions worthy of high suspicion. The
study of de Lubac’s work leads one to wonder if he ever assimilated the
fundamental principles of a healthy philosophy and was not, on the
contrary, one of that breed of masters who has never been a disciple. He
was more learned than wise, more curious than athirst for truth, more of a
scholar and a researcher than a man enamored of the great principles. His
biographers attest to his longing, as a student, for a renaissance of the
medieval theology of St. Augustine and St. Thomas against the reign of
Suarez. In reality, de Lubac received his heady notions of Thomism from
such doubtful authors as Rousselot and Maréchal, famous for their claim to
have discovered a philosophical lineage between Kant and St. Thomas.
The root of the evil is that the young de Lubac plunged himself into
forbidden books despite Rome’s explicit directives, aided and abetted by
over-indulgent superiors. He loved to read Laberthonnière, along with
Blondel’s Action and Letter on Apologetics.[287] He did not have a mind
for systematic studies; he was by turns a writer, a simple historian of
dogma, as he called himself, or else a self-taught historian–a risky trade, as
we have already observed in our introduction to “Catholic” modernism. He
also took it upon himself to teach the history of religions, which discipline
may be at the origin of the dogmatic relativism which his writings
occasionally betray.[288] He looked upon Buddhism as the greatest
spiritual event in the history of Christianity itself.[289]
We might well ask if this contact with world religions was not also at
the origin of his theory of universal salvation.[290] Above all, it is
disturbing and woeful to observe that this man, held up as an example of
religious obedience, was on occasion guilty of the most blatant disregard
for pontifical directives. Not only did he see fit to publish in later years
certain writings on the supernatural which he had been forbidden to
circulate under Pius XII, he also encouraged a belief in religious liberty,
formally condemned by all of the popes since Gregory XVI. Worst of all, he
wrote two more books in defense of Teilhard de Chardin after the monitum
had been issued against him. De Lubac established himself as the most
zealous of Teilhard de Chardin’s protectors and also the most astute, with
his book The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin,[291] published in 1962; the
Roman monitum came on its heels in guise of a riposte. This book has been
accused–apparently with reason–of being a work not of history but of
prestidigitation, for it reveals not the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin as the
title promised but, on the contrary, the ideas which de Lubac intended his
readers to form about him.[292] The indictment is all the more astonishing
for its falling upon an author supposedly expert in the field of historical
studies. Under the shelter of so powerful a theologian, Teilhard de
Chardin’s doctrine was able to grow and spread without condemnation until
his own death, undermining the naïve minds of young scholastics too eager
for the sensational. Cardinal Siri once described Fr. de Lubac’s entire body
of work as “evasive” because it effectively denies all the first principles of
philosophy.
At the beginning of his career, de Lubac had been fascinated by the
obscure Blondel, whose sensibility was so like his own. The contact of the
two men established a veritable symbiosis of thought between them, as de
Lubac and Blondel came to share the same ideas, the same friends, and the
same enemies. In reality, what they had most in common was the same
doubt, the same lack of intellectual vigor, and the same inferiority complex
before modern man, infected with skepticism and subjectivism. They
chased after the same mirage of reconciling a pseudo-philosophy with the
Faith. They cried out in chorus the same notion of truth, entirely travestied.
They defined it as the mind’s correspondence with life, hence infinitely
progressive and infinitely variable. De Lubac did not stop there. For if truth
is life, and if Tradition ought to transmit the truth, logically Tradition ought
to be living or ought not to be. In other words, the past, because it is past, is
not true because it does not live at the present moment. Behold one of de
Lubac’s master discoveries, worthy of the best of the modernists–the art of
emptying a Catholic expression of all its meaning while giving it a new and
ambiguous signification. He explains that the river of Tradition cannot
reach all the way to us if its bed is not perpetually cleared of old silt and
sand.[293] What precisely is this living Tradition? It is the code-name for
de Lubac’s dogmatic relativism and its automatic rejection of all dogma
received from without in any set form.[294]
In Fr. Flick’s account of the Boyer-de Lubac duel over Tradition, we
read that, according to de Lubac, “the ulterior beliefs of the Church need
not necessarily be logically tied to what she has always explicitly believed
starting in the first centuries.”[295] De Lubac’s “living Tradition,” which he
found in Blondel, is a throwback to Loisy’s “law of life” by which the
Church is deformed and transformed to become its own most perfect
contradiction. De Lubac’s intellectual heirs, Ratzinger and John Paul II,
avidly took to his theory. Once modernism had finally triumphed in St.
Peter’s Square, living Tradition became one with the conciliar Church, with
no necessary link to any transmission of past Revelation. Living Tradition
today labels as false the truth of yesterday, and truth today what was then
falsehood. Living Tradition is remarkably convenient, allowing theologians
to discount at will twenty centuries of constant and consistent magisterium,
and label the infallible condemnation of religious freedom, as well as the
anti-modernistic decisions at the beginning of this century, especially the
decisions of the Biblical Commission, as “provisional dispositions.”[296] It
justifies the excommunication of the few bishops who actually do remain
faithful to Tradition.[297] The neo-modernists can take a legitimate pride in
this stroke of genius that kills two birds with one stone: protecting
modernism and dealing the death blow to apostolic Tradition, both in the
name of living Tradition!
In strictly theological matters, the Blondel-de Lubac symbiosis yielded
the theory of a supernature considered as a necessary perfection of nature,
and whose absence would be no less than a denaturing of nature. The
supernatural is “absolutely impossible and absolutely necessary to
man.”[298] De Lubac, like his friend, claimed that God could not have
created pure nature without ordaining it toward the supernatural.[299] In
other words, man is of himself supernatural and necessarily divinized. The
border between God and man becomes hazy. Such a notion leads quite
logically into the cosmic pantheism of the Teilhardian strain. De Lubac
returned to this idea in his discussion of the supreme development of human
nature: “By revealing the Father and by being revealed by Him, Christ
completes the revelation of man to himself.…It is through Christ that the
person reaches maturity, that man emerges definitively from the
universe....”[300] Cardinal Siri had good reason to wonder what might be
hidden behind this mystical gibberish. According to the Cardinal, de
Lubac’s expression could signify only one of two things: either that Christ
is only a man, or that man is divine.[301]
In fact, de Lubac’s theory would re-emerge as Rahner’s theology of
auto-divinized man. The bottom line of such a “supernature” is the
elimination of the Church’s role as mediator between God and man. Outside
the Church, salvation! De Lubac has for good cause been dubbed the
pioneer of contemporary “Catholic theology.” Neither Karl Rahner, nor his
ingenuous disciple Hans Küng, nor certainly Hans Urs von Balthasar,
would have been anything at all had not de Lubac forged the way.[302]
Thus ideologically encumbered but duly armed with his studies in
Scripture and patristic exegesis, de Lubac stepped into the arena. He was of
that volatile mixed breed specifically targeted by St. Pius X:
The philosopher leads the way, the historian follows, and then in due order come the
internal and textual critics. And since it is characteristic of the primary cause to communicate
its virtue to causes which are secondary, it is quite clear that the criticism with which We are
concerned is not any kind of criticism, but that which is rightly called agnostic, immanentist,
and evolutionist criticism. Hence anyone who adopts it and employs it…places himself in
opposition to Catholic teaching.[303]

2. Bultmann’s Existentialist Exegesis

Modernist exegesis, which took up where the Protestants had left off,
worked on the assumption that the Gospel was written in several stages: the
eye-witness testimony of the Apostles, then the reflections of the primitive
community, and finally a series of subsequent embellishments. For Loisy,
the mythical Christ was the Jesus of faith, while the historical Jesus was
reduced to his simplest human expression. This method, eventually dubbed
historico-critical, placed a screen–the primitive community–between the
events of the Gospel and ourselves. Every single Gospel critic of the
modernist ilk shared this basic trait, which reappeared during the neo-
modernist era in the form of Fr. de Lubac’s spiritual exegesis, originally
inspired by Bultmann.
Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) founded the Formgeschichte (Form
Criticism or Form History) movement around 1920 to investigate the
historical formation of the Gospels. He claimed that each Gospel is a
mosaic of diverse fragments waiting to be categorized according to their
corresponding literary genres.[304] The various fragments appear as the
Gospel is replaced in its Sitz in Leben–life-context. For example, Bultmann
distinguishes the discourses of Jesus (logia), the miracle accounts (tales),
the anecdotes (legends), the paradigms (models), the episodes from the life
of Jesus (also legendary), the myths, and the accounts of the Passion. The
Formgeschichte scalpel cuts the Gospel into a thousand pieces: this
particular cure by Christ is a “miracle account,” corresponding perfectly to
the genre typical of the primitive community and therefore unauthentic; this
word of Jesus is a “framed expression” needing to be isolated from the
various commentaries which over time have come to surround it. Thus
Bultmann managed to conclude that the essential portion of the Gospels
should be attributed to the creative genius of the primitive community. He
admitted that practically nothing can be known for certain about the life and
personality of Jesus because the extremely fragmentary Christian sources in
our possession are riddled with legendary material, never having aimed at
realism, and because we have no other sources to tell us of Jesus. All that
has been written concerning Jesus for the last 150 years is mere fiction.
[305] However, Dibelius, one of Bultmann’s rivals, divided the genres in a
different way–a divergence rather damaging to the credibility of a
supposedly “scientific” form of critique.
This artificial cutting and pasting of the sacred texts was not
Bultmann’s only prejudice: the imminent expectation of the end of the
world prevented Christ’s contemporaries from writing an historical work for
the benefit of future generations; the primitive collectivity more or less
created the Gospel ex nihilo; the authors of the synoptic Gospels were
compilers, not writers; their work of compilation was performed after the
year 70, which left forty years for the notorious mythical and legendary
accounts to proliferate. Obviously, the mighty rationalist scarecrow is
lurking behind these artificial hypotheses. Like Bultmann, modern man
cannot accept belief in angels and demons any more than in miracles and
the Last Judgment.[306] What moved Bultmann to invent this chain of
gratuitous hypotheses? He was adamant to deny the historical facts brought
down to us by the most ancient tradition. Apparently, Bultmann and his
fellows, with their “scientific” approach to critique, succumbed to the same
blind fideism to which they so vehemently objected in their Catholic
adversaries.
It is interesting to note that modern exegesis is the fruit of a
philosophy, namely, of modern philosophy and, even more precisely, of
existentialism. Bultmann owes his exegesis to Heidegger, the master.
According to Heidegger, being belongs to us, such that the sole being who
is definitively is man–his life, his individuality, his personal history. Within
the existentialist schema, Jesus is not the only Savior of the human race; on
the contrary, each man saves himself by becoming aware of his immanent
divinity. Loyal to the existentialist world view, Bultmann localized “God”–
or rather, faith–in the depths of the believer, just as Schleiermacher had
earlier done in his religion of the heart. He eliminated a priori the fact that
Jesus is the author of salvation. He crossed out the history of salvation with
a single stroke of his pen–audacious and self-assured as the most proven
scholar, yet without having so much as studied primitive Christianity. His
work is a throwback to Kant and Hegel, who made God in their own image.
With Bultmann, we have gone back to square one of critique. Ultimately,
Bultmann’s Form History contains nothing particularly new; it is only the
scientific codification of the Kantian-Hegelian exegesis of the Super-Man
as interpreted by Strauss.
De Lubac was not as radical as Bultmann in his conclusions. His was a
watered-down existentialism, in line with Mounier’s French personalism.
Moreover, between the two world wars, Bultmann’s purely critical method
was castigated for being overly archaeological and static; his reading of
texts was too analytical and tended to hide the forest behind the trees; his
critical attitude obscured the spirituality present in the Bible. For this
reason, de Lubac undertook an interpretation of the Gospel which would be
no longer of the past but of the future; no longer dry and critical but
enriching and spiritual. Is this to say that he started afresh and left
Protestant critique behind him? Not at all, since the historico-critical
method popular at Fourvière was meant as a complement to “scientific
exegesis.” The cry of freedom had not echoed out in vain. Fifteen centuries
of Christian interpretation (henceforth judged to be redundant and
superfluous, if not false) were blithely relegated to the past.[307] The popes
were free to write encyclical upon encyclical in condemnation of the latter-
day modernist avatars, detractors of inerrancy–all was in vain. Leo XIII and
St. Pius X waged war upon Loisy’s exegesis; Benedict XV and Pius XII
valiantly attacked the supposed “literary genres” and the false spiritual
exegesis. Despite their labors, our Jesuit and his loyal circle were far from
rejecting the Protestant critical method. On the contrary, the Protestant
method formed an integral part of their new exegesis: “Thus we need both
the learned, in order to help us read Scripture historically, and the spiritual
men (who ought to be ‘men of the Church’) in order to help us arrive at a
deeper spiritual understanding of it. If the former deliver us from our
ignorance, the latter alone have the gift of discernment, which preserves us
from interpretations that are dangerous to the Faith.”[308]
De Lubac’s German collaborator, Hans Urs von Balthasar, understood
him in this sense, for in his own writing he speaks of a “radical reflection
undertaken upon the meaning of Holy Scripture; a reflection which goes
beyond the past solutions of compromise. Such a reflection is already under
way and in a very dynamic manner in France, guided by certain young
thinkers such as Henri de Lubac. It consists in navigating between the
Scylla of critique and the Charybdis of a simple theological
traditionalism.”[309]
It is upon the negative foundation of the historico-critical method that
de Lubac meant to base his doctrine of the four senses of Scripture–a
doctrine which led him to his original contribution, “spiritual exegesis.”

3. Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac

Between 1950 and 1966, de Lubac was busy compiling his
monumental work in four volumes, Medieval Exegesis, scouring the
writings of the Fathers and the medieval theologians for the various senses
of Scripture.[310] In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new spiritual
exegesis. Here is how the scholar defined his work and his new method:
I admired the marvelous synthesis of the whole Christian Faith, thought, and spirituality
contained in the so-called doctrine of the “four senses” grasped as it welled forth. I was happy
working to do justice in that way to one of the central elements of the Catholic tradition, so
grossly unappreciated in modern times and nevertheless still the bearer of promises for
renewal.…In a more general way, I liked thus discovering on all sides the historical
 symbolism, and the symbolic history, that already characterize our Gospels and about which
one can say that they are one of the consubstantial characteristics of our Faith.[311]
The endeavor was not so innocent as it might seem. De Lubac speaks
of the Fathers of the Church, of symbolism, and of Tradition: all perfectly
orthodox terms which he cleverly denatures into something perfectly
modernist, worthy of the best of Loisy and Bultmann. As for his study of
the Fathers, it was with his friend Daniélou that de Lubac first produced the
Christian Sources, which were to serve as the arsenal of the new exegesis.
The collection was intended to demonstrate the presence in the writings of
the Fathers of a certain number of categories which are precisely the
categories of contemporary thought, supposedly suppressed under the
regime of scholastic theology.[312] De Lubac did indeed return to the
patristic traditions but with a peculiar tendency to pick and choose. He was
particularly fond of Origen, for example–notorious for his questionable
theology. Of all the Fathers, Origen had the greatest tendency to strain an
allegorical interpretation almost to the point of absurdity. He likewise
proposed a certain number of adventurous theories which the modernists
were more than happy to erect into dogmas: man did not commit original
sin–he is a fallen angel; hell is not eternal for anyone, even for Lucifer; all
men will ultimately be saved. Origen also left to posterity a great number of
ambiguous texts in which symbolism and hidden meaning have precedence
over clear exposition; by contrast, the other medieval doctors–notably, St.
Thomas–are assuredly not open to such a variety of interpretations. It
suddenly becomes clear why Origen was the golden child of Christian
Sources, which dedicated thirty-seven volumes to his writing, as opposed to
a paltry four devoted to honoring St. Jerome, the father of exegesis. Could it
be that patristic theology had become a simple pretext for burying
scholasticism and the traditional magisterium, the more freely to chase after
the vagaries of modern thought and jump aboard every passing ship,
whatever the flag?[313]
While supposedly reviving our patristic heritage, de Lubac was in fact
skillfully preparing his audience to accept modernist symbolism through his
original interpretation of the “spiritual sense” of the Fathers. Theologians,
following St. Thomas, explain that, while man can refer his words to
realities, God alone can refer present realities to future realities because He
alone has power over both. For this reason, Holy Scripture, the only book
authored by God, can receive a double interpretation. What can this double
interpretation include? It comprises the thing described by the words, as
does all human language. In addition, the thing itself can signify or
prefigure something that will exist in the future. In any case, the words of
the Bible only describe a single reality, which reality may in turn be a type
or figure of another, future reality.[314] In other words, a given expression
has a unique referent; there can be no ambiguity in the Bible since God
detests the double-tongued. De Lubac, on the contrary, ascribed to the
Fathers of the Church the belief that a single word could have two meanings
and could refer to two separate realities, one human and the other spiritual.
This is no subtle distinction; it is heterodoxy pure and simple! It amounts to
saying that the words of the Bible can have a double meaning, or multiple
meanings, or even–why not?–contradictory meanings. Such a theory was
tailor-made for the notion of “living Tradition”; the harvest of “spiritual
interpretations” suddenly abounded within this ever-expanding field of
textual meaning.[315]
Once again, we find de Lubac wielding his magic “meaning” wand. He
had a very particular conception of Tradition and no good was bound to
come from his applying it to Scripture. De Lubac’s “living Tradition” is a
variable interpretation growing progressively richer and fuller, for a
scriptural text naturally depends upon the author but also, and more
importantly, upon the reader. Moreover, the course a text will follow
depends very much upon readings and re-readings. The text enters into
dialogue with the reader and interacts with him. The reader must enter into
a creative dynamism, for he only understands a text when he begins to
understand himself in its light. The meaning of the text no longer coincides
with what the author originally meant to say.[316] This creativity of living
Tradition is a descendant of romanticism à la Schleiermacher, for whom
interpreting means understanding an author better than he understood
himself. Living scriptural Tradition conveniently forgets that Revelation
ended with the death of the last Apostle and that Church teaching is
immutable; all is left to a private judgment of readings as “enriching in the
spirit.” But in which Spirit? In the Spirit of God or the spirit of Luther?
Once again, de Lubac’s work gives the distinct impression of a clever
sleight of hand, spiriting the most innocuous terms over to his side of
meaning. Ever so adroitly, this intellectual mentor of popes and bishops
placed back into circulation the forbidden scriptural theories of the most
notorious modernists: Strauss, Schleiermacher, Loisy, and Bultmann.
 ✜✜✜
Spiritual Exegesis, also known as charismatic exegesis, born of
existentialism, never escapes from the rut of its denatured philosophy in
spite of all its spiritual accoutrements. It is ignorantist, for it treats of myth
but never of historical events. It is egological, for a reading is only valid
inasmuch as it comes from the reader and not from the text. Finally, it is
radically revolutionist on account of the infinite variability of a text’s
meaning as each reader pulls a different interpretation from Scripture’s
inexhaustible treasure trove. The old thesis of an exegesis fixed and firm in
its dogmatism had once yielded the place to its antithesis, the historico-
critical method. Today, these two mutually exclusive theses have both
melded into their synthesis, the new spiritual exegesis, which at last attains
the meaning. Such is the New Age inaugurated by de Lubac and his neo-
modernist disciples. Such, also, is the model which conciliar Rome has
proposed for all reading.[317]
 CHAPTER 18: RAHNER’S “ANTHROPOLOGICAL
INVERSION”
Just as in the earlier phases of modernism, the chorus of neo-
modernists can be seen gathering around a leader, the conductor of the
symphony of the day. Kant the philosopher had been the brains behind the
whole of Protestant modernism. Loisy the biblical critic earned his rank as
the world leader of “Catholic” modernism. To the theologian Karl Rahner
goes the title of Prince of the New Theology, and with good reason. This
German Jesuit, future professor of Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger, drank
at the sources of the purest existentialism because he sat at the feet of
Heidegger in Freiburg-in-Breisgau and was proud to claim him as his one
and only master. Moreover, Rahner’s doctoral thesis, published in 1939,
was an attempt to reconcile Heidegger and St. Thomas.
From philosophy, Rahner went on to theology. He considered it
incumbent upon him to work the best of German existentialism into his
dogma courses at the universities of Innsbruck, Salzburg, Pullach, Munich,
and Münster. Heidegger might well dismiss such a project of “existentialist
theology” as a contradiction in terms; Rahner was determined to forge
ahead with his attempt to combine the uncombinable, with the help of his
friends Otto, Heiler, and Van der Leeuw. Meanwhile, he also drank in the
teaching of Daniélou and de Lubac on biblical questions and the Church
Fathers. Despite clashes with the Holy Office over his writings, he was
appointed Cardinal Koenig’s theologian at the Council.[318] In 1965 he
founded the progressive magazine Concilium, and was made a member of
the International Theology Commission in Rome from 1969 to 1974. He
died at Innsbruck in 1984, amidst the praise of his loyal friends, including
Pope John Paul II. This is because Rahner, a true workaholic, had surpassed
his masters by producing the most comprehensive (four thousand titles!)
and structured synthesis of the New Theology. On this point at least his
friends and enemies agree. Despite the diversity of sources that Rahner
draws on, his system is remarkable for its coherence. Where exactly the
coherence comes from remains to be seen, given that its author intended his
theology to represent the definitive union of thinkers as divergent as St.
Thomas, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Maréchal. The answer to this
question will give us the reason why Rahner’s synthesis comes off as the
ultimate in modernism. Many have crowned him as the greatest theologian
of the twentieth century or “novus praeceptor Germaniae” (“Germany’s
new teacher”); we believe he would be better labeled as the man who
launched a new age in the Church.[319]
We shall here firstly expose the nature and consequences of Rahner’s
philosophy, his “anthropological inversion” or “turning towards man,” the
last word in modernism, before going on to criticize the system. Since we
hold Rahner to represent the apogee of modernism and the main key to
understanding Vatican II and John Paul II, we shall beg the reader’s
indulgence if the following pages, which seem crucial to us, make for
difficult reading.

1. The Sources of Rahner’s Philosophy

Before attempting to follow Rahner’s meandering theology, we must
first establish the precise nature of the philosophy which he took as the
foundation and keystone of his whole dogmatic system. Rahner does not
hide his sources. They are Kant and Heidegger but also Hegel, even if
Rahner remains a little more discrete about Hegel’s contribution. Rahner
leans also on his Belgian colleague, Fr. Maréchal, in his attempt to build
bridges between Kant and St. Thomas, thus beginning with immanentism
and ending in realism. Rahner explains the process in his Innsbruck
doctoral thesis, Spirit in the World.[320] The thesis was rejected by
Rahner’s instructor but was published soon after.[321] The inspiration of all
three German authors is already visible in Rahner’s early work.
In his treatment of the process of knowing, St. Thomas explains that
the thing known is received according to the capacity of the knower. This is
the principle which Rahner would invoke to justify his venture into
Kantianism. Rahner adopted Kant’s transcendental method whereby
knowledge has two sources, both the known object and the process of
knowing. The matter of knowledge comes from the object; the form of
knowledge, on the contrary, comes from the knower, or the knowing
subject. Henceforth, reality is ruled by thinking and not thinking by reality;
henceforth, thought bestows upon knowledge an essential structure, with
the result that we can no longer know the factual reality or being of a thing
but only its appearance, or the phenomenon. Kant is here stating the double
principle of immanentism and egology. To unify the various levels of
knowledge, sensation, intellection, and reason, Kant appeals to their
common foundation, which brings him back to Descartes’s “cogito” (“I
think”)–“Ich denke überhaupt” (“I just think”)–“cogito,” but emptied out of
any object of thought.
However, Kant’s system is not fully satisfactory because it stops
halfway down the egological slope. How can Kant speak of any object of
consciousness which would be other than the consciousness itself? How can
he preserve truth when the form and matter of knowledge are not united?
Behold Hegel’s objection to Kant, and Hegel is right, because once one
starts out from the “cogito” everything must be an unfolding of the
conscious “I.” The object becomes the subject; the thing known is
represented before itself so as to produce knowledge. This reflexive process
of presentation–of consciousness unfolding–is truth. Hegel is the great
advocate of the principle of consciousness, turning in an egological circle:
thought emerges from the consciousness to meet with an object which is,
finally, nothing other than the exteriorization or outward projection of the
same consciousness. The process comes full circle with a glorification of
the will at the expense of mind and being, which is the principle of “cogito-
volo”: “I think, I will, it is.” Tied to this egology is a certain principle of
projection which reduces being to a mere emanation and presentation of the
consciousness. For Hegel, being is simply appearance–“Sein-Schein.” For
Heidegger, being is but an exhibition inside the theater of consciousness,
and man is where being dwells and manifests itself. Man could be defined
as the theater in which being makes its premier performance. Hence Rahner
leans rather to the side of Heidegger than of Kant.
On the other hand, Heidegger absolutely refused any appeal to a
beyond. In Heidegger’s world of “facts of consciousness” successively
presented in the theater of human history and consciousness, there is no
place for a divine Absolute towering above the horizon of man’s time and
space. Rahner, however, wished to found a philosophy open to God and
hence capable of undergirding a theology. He therefore had to part ways
with Heidegger’s existentialism and catch up with Hegel. Man is the place
where being dwells and the theater of Revelation (Heidegger); he is also
where dwells the Absolute (Hegel) and that Absolute is God (Rahner).
Hegel’s system allows for a double dialectic. We are already familiar with
the first, his dynamic dialectic: a three-step waltz in which opposite
extremes (thesis and antithesis) meet and finally unite (synthesis),
according to the trinomial being-nothingness-becoming. This dynamic
dialectic terminates in one of the two poles of Hegel’s second dialectic,
which is static. The static or metaphysical dialectic, our main interest for
the moment, comprises two correlative and complementary poles: God and
the world, or the infinite and the finite, or Being and appearance. Thus, the
climax of Hegel’s dynamic dialectical evolution comes when the infinite
finally becomes aware of itself. This awareness can only arise from a
contrast with the finite. The self-awareness of the infinite explains the
emergence of the finite, a simple mediator for revealing the infinite to itself.
Just as sound needs a resonating body before it can hear its own echo and
just as the magnetic energy of thunder needs the earth’s neutral pole to
make the lightning flash, so the Absolute needs a mirror in which to be
reflected and thus know itself. Hegel therefore defined the finite as the
infinite alienated from itself and becoming another, thereby becoming
capable of revealing itself to itself and of digesting the richness of its own
infinite substance. The finite is the thought and activity of man as a spirit
who thus permits the Absolute God to exist.
We might ask where Hegel could possibly have come up with such a
dialectic intended to bridge the immeasurable gap between Creation and its
Author. Hegel himself explained that the Christian Revelation of God’s
Incarnation, reconciliation of the finite with the infinite, is what led him to
his discovery of the reflexive energy of cosmic infinitude. According to the
Christian Faith, the Holy Trinity (i.e. God turned inward) brought about the
Incarnation (the finite, or the self-alienated Infinite), permitting the
manifestation and communication of His own Word (God turned outward).
Hegel transposed the Incarnation to echo his own philosophy: Being in
Itself needs being outside Itself to become Being for Itself. Pure Reality
needs finite reality to become aware of Itself. However, did Hegel really see
the finite world as truly distinct from the infinite God? In fact, not at all.
The two contraries are distinct, but they are also inseparable since the
Infinite necessarily draws forth the finite for the Infinite’s own self-
revelation. This aspect alone suffices to throw a pantheistic cast over
Hegel’s dialectic. Graver yet, according to Hegel the two poles are merely
preparatory stages in a movement toward their final union, which will at
last be a step beyond the categories of finite and infinite. Truth to tell, the
Awareness, Concept, Image, and Echo which the Absolute acquires of Itself
through the finite are worth more than either the Absolute or the finite taken
on their own. Historians of philosophy concur in defining the Hegelian
dialectic as the most radical and logical pantheism ever conceived by the
human mind.
On this basis, Rahner concocted a skillful blend of modern
philosophers, all the while invoking St. Thomas. He began with Heidegger.
St. Thomas had explained the circle of knowledge as a double movement
advancing from the concrete thing to its abstract essence and then returning
to the concrete sensible–abstraction, conversion, return. Rahner began with
this realist circle of knowledge but ended up with the immanentist circle: “I
think–I will–it is.” From the outset, sensation and intellection are identical
within the dialectic because sensation emanates from the finite spirit as its
projection, and is part of the same over-all movement of thought.[322] To
make matters worse, Rahner engaged in “phenomenological reduction,” by
which being and being known are one and the same reality: “the intellect
and the known and the knowing are the same.”[323] “Being in its in-itself is
being-known.”[324] “[T]he known is always the being of the
knower….”[325] “Knowing is the subjectivity of being itself.”[326]
The philosophers who went before had to deal with the “problem of
the bridge” to carry them across the abyss between the mind and reality. For
Rahner, the problem is inverted: how is it possible to distinguish the
knowing subject from the object known? The Jesuit forged ahead ever
deeper, bringing his philosophy full circle with the absolute voluntarism of
the cogito-volo.[327] If spirit is to be defined as the full possession of
oneself and of one’s creative power over oneself, then it is perfectly defined
as liberty and will.[328] Man then is to be defined as liberty and as
imitation of “the power of God’s free love, which in itself is luminous and
creative and is fundamentally a love for himself that engenders being.”[329]
After confining himself to the egological circle of the existentialists,
Rahner turned to follow the Hegelians in their climb upward toward the
Absolute…or rather downward to the Absolute deep within man. The only
way to break out of the egological circle closing around one like a prison is
by knowledge of the infinite: if the finite reality exists, it demands or
“presupposes” [“Vorgriff”] by negation the existence of an infinite, which is
Absolute. It is only logical: for Rahner, man is a capacity and an infinite
space never filled. He comes forth as a question. Now, every question
requires a proportionate answer, and the answer corresponding to an infinite
question can only be God. And this question, this infinite expectation, must
be real because it is inconceivable that it be only possible.[330] “If man
really is a subject, that is, a transcendent, responsible, and free being…,
then basically this has already been said that man is a being oriented
towards God.”[331] “[T]here is no knowledge of God which is purely
natural….”[332] “Man is ‘quodammodo omnia’ (in a certain way
everything)” insofar as he knows “Absolute Being” by his “pre-
apprehension.”[333] “Every knowledge of another by man is a mode of his
self-knowledge, of his ‘subjectivity’; the two are not merely extrinsically
synchronized but intrinsic moments of the one human knowing. Now this
holds also for man’s knowledge of God.”[334]
After our lightning tour of the various philosophical contributions to
Rahner’s thought, it is clear that his greatest debt is to Hegel. Without this
key to understanding Rahner, his system would appear merely labyrinthine;
it would be difficult to make heads or tails of his incomprehensible
doctrine. However, seen in the light of Hegelianism, everything suddenly
starts to make sense. Henceforward, Rahner’s man-centered theology
becomes wholly comprehensible, for it follows Hegel with an implacable
logic. Everything becomes clear and even quite simple. Rahner is Catholic
theology transposed into the key of Hegel, with Teilhard de Chardin’s
biology as the variation on cosmic evolution and Heidegger’s historicism
chiming in as theology.

2. “The Anthropological Inversion”

In the period between the world wars, man lost the sense of God.
Rahner was haunted by a desire to save the men of his time and all
mankind. For apostolic reasons, he wished to set up a theology which
would intimately re-unite God with His creatures and at the same time give
due credit to modern philosophy. He longed to propose an all-encompassing
Christianity by working the world and God into his theological universe.
What he produced was a vast movement, a tightly soldered chain, leading
from the Trinity to Christ and from Christ to man and the world, before the
final return of all things to God. The central link in this chain and the center
of Rahner’s theology is man, which is why Rahner gave it the name of
“anthropological inversion” or man-centered turning.[335] It is a movement
in three principal phases: the Trinitarian phase, the descending Christology,
and the ascending Christology.
Rahner began his study of God with the Trinity of the Divine Persons
instead of with the unity of God. Why? According to existentialism, to be is
to appear and to be revealed, such that God is unthinkable unless He appear
in history. Here we see where Rahner was influenced by the Protestant Karl
Barth. For Barth, the Trinity is the mystery of salvation and of God’s
communicating Himself to man; this self-communication of God is divine
Revelation, and Revelation is only perfect when the revealer identifies
himself with the content revealed. Since the Son is the Person doing the
revealing in history, a Revelation identical to the Revealer demands the
Incarnation of the Word.[336]
Armed with this weapon, Rahner established the fundamental axiom of
his entire theological system: “The ‘economic’ Trinity [God for us in
history] is the ‘immanent’ Trinity [God in His eternal self] and
conversely.”[337] In the mind of Rahner, God is Trinity only when He is in
communication with creation by the missions of the Word and the Holy
Ghost. Accordingly, the eternal processions within the Trinity are identical
with the missions of the second and third divine Persons upon earth.[338]
The divine Persons are not distinct from their mode of communication,
[339] and for Rahner, they seem to have no existence prior to such
communication. The Son is the Father communicated; He is God
historically extroverted in the world. Likewise for the Holy Ghost. The
Trinity represents, so to speak, the Godward aspect of the two absolute
communications of God which are the hypostatic union and the grace which
leads to glory.[340] “The Trinity is a mystery whose paradoxical character
is preluded in the paradoxical character of man’s existence.”[341] By strict
logic, we can infer from Rahner’s words that God is Triune by His own free
choice since His existence as Trinity is dependent on His free creation of
man.
In his Christology, our Jesuit carefully followed Hegel’s dialectic.
God, to be revealed to Himself, must utter His Word, which is God
alienated, yielding the dialectic: God–Incarnate Word–God revealed to
Himself. The same axiom which Rahner applied to the Trinity he next
applied to descending Christology. If the immanent Trinity equals the
historical, economic Trinity, then, by strict logic, the Eternal Word equals
the economic Word and conversely.[342] Just as the Trinity must
communicate Itself to be constituted Trinity, so if God is to manifest
Himself to Himself by becoming the Word, then He must become man.
Rahner exposed his thought in a series of texts which built upon one
another toward a theological climax: the Incarnation was necessary; it was a
change within God; it was a true conversion, an alienation, and even a
transubstantiation. The Son’s procession from the Father is identical with
the Incarnation, which implies that the Eternal Word is not prior to the
Incarnate Word. The Son is above all else the Father’s self-communication
to the world in such a way that He is radically to be found there, in that Son.
[343] Rahner emphasized the words from the Prelude to St. John’s Gospel:
“The Word became flesh.” What is this “becoming” of God made man?
There was a true change within God when the Word became flesh, which is
none other than the conversion of God into man, for if humanity is the
means by which God shows Himself and lives amongst us, then it is not
something added onto the Word from the outside. This humanity is the
Word; it is the result of God uttering Himself.[344] “God’s self-expression
outwards and outside himself” is as Word and as man; “[t]his man [Jesus
Christ] is precisely as man the self-expression of God in his self-emptying,
because God expresses precisely himself if he empties himself….”[345]
“The Incarnation is an annihilation and at the same time a conversion of
God into man.”[346] The Incarnation “is precisely the self-emptying of
God, his becoming, the kenosis and genesis of God himself.”[347] Rahner
clearly considered that the godhead becomes humanity just as the bread of
the Eucharist becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ.[348]
So much for Rahner’s descending Christology of the Word made flesh,
following the logic of his historical Trinity. The links of the chain are
unbroken from Eternal Word to Incarnate Word to human nature. The
descending Christology is in turn the basis of Rahner’s ascending
Christology: the mystery of grace and of man’s salvation. Once again,
Rahner remained faithful to the Hegelian pattern. After the Infinite has
poured itself into the finite and identified itself therewith, we embark on the
voyage home as the finite melts back into the supreme Infinite. The point of
convergence of these two movements is primarily the cosmos as it strives
toward infinitude. Here Karl Rahner meets Teilhard de Chardin, beginning
as he did with an evolving world which becomes man because matter
becomes spirit and spirit little by little becomes God. [349] For Rahner, “the
discontinuity and essential difference between matter, life, consciousness,
and spirit by no means excludes evolution if it is true that there is
becoming; if becoming is or can be in the true sense an active self-
transcendence; if self-transcendence likewise is or can be at least an
entitative self-transcendence.”[350] Creation gravitates toward its summit
which is the hypostatic union, which is of the same order as the relationship
between God and creatures.[351]
If the history of the cosmos is always and basically a history of the human spirit…then
immediacy to God in God’s self-communication to spiritual creatures, and in them to the
whole cosmos, is the appropriate end of this development.[352] The saviour…is a man who
just like us receives in his spiritual, human, and finite subjectivity the self-communication of
God in grace which we assert of all men, and therefore of the cosmos, as the climax of the
development in which the world comes to itself absolutely and comes to the immediacy of
God absolutely.[353]
From Creation in general, Rahner moves on to human nature, the
necessary meeting-point between God and matter since man is the bridge
between created and Uncreated and between matter and spirit. It is in
human nature that the Word emptied Himself and begot Himself; the same
human nature is what opens man to the divine. Rahner says two things:
firstly, that man shares in the essence of the Word; secondly, that he can be
defined as the capacity to become Word and as the exteriorization of God.
Firstly, the Word is perfectly defined as man.
For “what” he is as the self-expression of the Logos and “what” we are is the same.…And
the fact that he in his reality says exactly what we are renders the content of our essence and of
our history redeemed, and opens it into the freedom of God.[354] [T]he incarnate Logos has
been called the abbreviated Word of God. The abbreviation, the cipher of God himself, is man,
that is, the Son of Man and the men who exist ultimately because there was to be a Son of
Man.[355] [T]he Incarnation of God is the unique and highest instance of the actualization of
the essence of human reality, which consists in this: that man is insofar as he abandons himself
to the absolute mystery whom we call God.[356]
Secondly, man is defined as a possibility of God. For Rahner, the
Creator-creature relationship is structured like a question-and-answer
because each calls for and implies the other. Man appears as the
configuration, or counter image, or temporal symmetry of God; today, we
would say man is God’s photographic negative. Man is the temporal
“place” of God, or rather God’s ex-sistence.[357] For this reason, “the
primary definition of man is the non-God who can become God’s self-
exteriorization and possible brother of Christ.”[358] “When God wants to
be what is not God, man comes to be.”[359] Ultimately, Rahner identified
nature with supernature by a proof in three stages: (1) a state of pure nature
is inconceivable; (2) a non-historical state of man is impossible; (3) an
historical state of man always implies his ordination toward the beatific
vision, and finally toward the Incarnation.[360] In this way, nature is
already grace insofar as man is the beginning of the divine self-
communication. “In what we call grace and the immediate vision of God,
God is really an intrinsic, constitutive principle of man,”[361] and “man is a
being of transcendence towards the holy and absolutely real mystery.”[362]
Men, as creatures, “must be understood as the possibility of being able to be
assumed, of being the material for a possible history of God [when He]
establishes them from out of nothing in their own non-divine reality as the
grammar of God’s possible self-expression.”[363]
Rahner’s tendency to identify the human and divine natures with one
another in this way logically leads to identity between the natural and
supernatural orders and between theology and anthropology. Two different
texts form a suggestive summary of Rahner’s thinking:
If God himself is man and remains so for all eternity; if therefore all theology is eternally
anthropology; if it is forbidden to man to think little of himself because he would then be
thinking little of God; and if this God remains the insoluble mystery, then man is for all
eternity the expression of the mystery of God which participates for all eternity in the mystery
of its ground.[364] Because [the hypostatic union] is the union of the real essence of God and
of man in God’s personal self-expression in his eternal Logos, for this reason Christology is
the beginning and the end of anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical
actualization is for all eternity theology.[365]
Thus Rahner’s descending and ascending Christologies move in
perfect symmetry. The infinite must exteriorize itself and alienate itself by
casting itself into the finite, ultimately to emerge as the self-aware infinite,
according to Hegel’s pattern as revised by Teilhard de Chardin. As with
Hegel, Rahner’s evolutionary system links together without a break matter–
spirit–capacity of human nature–supernature–natural desire for the
Incarnation.[366] In brief, just as God needs history to establish His
threeness, just as the Word cannot be Word unless He is incarnate, so God
needs the world in order to be God. When it comes to applying Hegel’s
dialectic, one has to admit that Rahner is ruthlessly logical.

3. Applications of the “Anthropological Inversion”

Up to this point, Rahner has explained the relationship between God
and the world in terms of the Hegelian dialectic of opposite poles of
attraction allowing contraries to be united in a superior harmony. The same
philosophy of an awareness opening onto the infinite goes on to provide the
rest of theology with theses which have now become classic in modern
theology. Identifying nature with grace and man with God, for example,
were two staples of the theology that has since become the power driving
ecumenism. “Now God and the grace of Christ are present as the secret
essence of every reality we can choose....Consequently, anyone who,
though still far from any revelation explicitly formulated in words, accepts
his existence in patient silence…is saying yes to Christ even if he does not
know it.…Anyone who accepts his humanity fully, and all the more so of
course the humanity of others, has accepted the Son of Man because in him
God has accepted man,”[367] since Christ united himself to every man
through his Incarnation. “[T]he grace given in view of Christ is precisely
the condition for saving oneself by appropriating God’s salvation
freely.”[368] From this blurring of the natural and supernatural orders there
flows a whole series of consequences which we will consider in detail:
natural Revelation, the explosion of the Church into a multitude of creeds,
universal salvation, unbounded ecumenism, and situation ethics.
Faithful to existentialism, Rahner bases religion on a personal and
inward experience of God, magnified by successive revelations of being.
Thus public Revelation must yield precedence to personal Revelation.
To become a true theologian in his Church, no man should take the faith of his parents
seriously.[369] The fact that Christ lived, died, and rose again at a particular time and in a
particular place in history certainly lends clarity and a tangible and concrete character to
Church piety, but it is also a weakness because it will always be a fact limited in time and
space.[370] Of course, the primary experience of God…is only thinkable as an experience of
God inseparable from the transcendence of man, as the horizon of that transcendence.[371]
The divine causation of the a priori horizon of our knowledge and freedom must be
characterized as a specific and original mode of revelation, indeed even as the mode upon
which all other revelation is based.[372]
The ramifications for ecclesiology are obvious. Any belief, whatever
its creed, is able to save man because what matters is inner feeling: “Any
piety in sincere conformity with conscience is able to save, upheld by grace,
and is in a certain sense already Christian, but anonymously.” An atheist
can perfectly well be saved, as an anonymous Christian, even if he
explicitly refuses to be associated in any way with the visible and
hierarchical Church.[373] Such a way of seeing things radically modifies
our understanding of the Church. For Rahner, the People of God is not a
“ghetto Church.” Yet, when the boundaries of Christ’s Church are burst so
wide, of what further use is the Roman Catholic Church? “The Church is
not so much the exclusive community of candidates for salvation, as the
historical and social vanguard of that…hidden reality.”[374] Next, within
the Church herself, the very concept of authority is called into question. If
Church authorities act on Church members, they must never forget that the
Church is made up of persons whose dignity consists in their inalienable
liberty. Since the Church exists to bring her members to a personal meeting
with God in charity, then they must be left free to follow the workings of
the charismatic spirit, which are always present. The duty of the authority is
to offer to individuals directly inspired by God the means to express within
the Church a sane and orderly public opinion.[375] Reading these texts, we
can understand why Rahner’s most original contribution to Vatican II was
collegiality, the democratization of the Church.
As for egological morality, the simple fact of becoming aware of the
greatness of God automatically ensures salvation. Even an atheist can
perfectly well be saved as an anonymous Christian. However, “salvation for
the atheist” is problematic, particularly for the existentialist in Rahner who
would believe that ultimately there is no such thing as the subconscious:
how can Rahner hold that the pagan who utters blasphemy against the name
of Jesus Christ still has faith in the same Jesus Christ?[376] How can a
pagan subconsciously accept God when he consciously denies Him?
Rahner’s solution, faithful to Kant’s transcendentalism, was to divide in two
the internal forum of the conscience. There is, on the one hand, a clearly
known object of the consciousness, yet there is also an underlying structure
to the consciousness which is automatically open to grace, for it is the
proper theater of God’s Self-Revelation. The depths of the being in which
God communicates Himself will never be sounded, and therefore a man is
capable of openly denying God and at the same time radically loving Him.
[377] This division of the consciousness is the basis for his distinction
between venial sin, grave sin, and mortal sin–a triple distinction unknown
to pre-Vatican II catechisms. “Mortal sin” is a fault which implicates the
person absolutely and in his very foundations but which can never be truly
recognizable. Hence the radical impossibility of ever truly reforming a
fundamental option gone awry. Hence, too, the impossibility of ever
knowing absolutely whether or not such an attempt to reform has been
successful. “We never know with ultimate certainty whether we really are
sinners.”[378] Nobody can know if what seems really to be a sin is
absolutely a sin in the internal forum of the conscience. Vagueness and lack
of definition are the hallmark of existentialist morals.[379]
A systematic moral ignorance reigns over the conscience as conceived
by Rahner; but, ultimately, he advocated an alternative to this systematic
ignorance, and that is radical impeccability. For, in the last analysis,
Rahner’s system renders it impossible for man to refuse God once and for
all because the subject would then cease to exist.[380]

4. Criticism of Rahner’s System

Tyrrell, as a child, supposedly reveled in dismantling his toys and
piecing them back together again, a foreshadowing of his theological
labors. Rahner, on the other hand, became the master of that game which
takes place inside the mind and excludes all outside realities. As a faithful
existentialist, he based everything exclusively on human consciousness,
which alone exists and which alone is the absolute source of all things.
There exists nothing beyond the domain of the consciousness, which
bestows existence and veracity on all it sees. For Rahner, the will dictates
all thought, and thought makes and unmakes reality like soft putty in the
hands of a child. Radical existentialist that he was, Rahner identified being
with knowledge and freedom–cogito, volo–raising human consciousness to
a state of equality with God and attributing to it God’s creative power. We
have already described this principle as the original sin of introverted
existentialism.[381] Muddling through theology with these fundamentally
egological principles, the original sin of all modern thought, Rahner
succeeded in equating God with pure spirit: that is, equating Him with a
vacuous consciousness and the vacuum of the consciousness. He mistook
the truth, which is the good of the mind, for freedom freed from all
restraints, which is the absence of being and good. Once again, we can see
Heidegger’s nihilism raising its ugly head and Rahner escaping it only by
stretching the logic of its principles.
However, these principles of egological philosophy are not
intellectually satisfying. With these principles, Rahner’s system stands or
falls; his world-view must be accepted totally or rejected totally. His
brilliant synthesis is the work of an unbounded genius but with a fatal flaw:
his brilliant connection of ideas fails to reflect a connection of realities.
Rahner’s work is like a castle, magnificent and well-built, but a castle in the
sky: the stuff Don Quixote’s dreams were made of. It crumbles when
confronted with reality, when compared with the metaphysics of being,
when brought under the light of the true Faith. Deep cracks riddle the
structure of Rahner’s fortress. The underlying metaphysics holding the
system together is itself flawed. The principles which make up its strength
are also its weakness.
 These principles are nothing new; we have already hashed and
rehashed them in previous chapters. Kant’s transcendentalism is willfully
ignorant and deliberately leaves a doubt hanging over the relationship
between man and God. The philosophy of consciousness is viscerally
egological. Rahner never stepped out of the reductionist circle of
immanentism: I want–I think–it exists! From within the egological prison,
there is no proving exterior reality or being, and still less Absolute Being,
for an idea can only beget an idea, a painted coat-rack can only sustain a
painted coat. Last but not least, Rahner adopted the dialectical method of
Hegel by which all things evolve from the Great Whole through the cosmos
back to the Whole. Unfortunately for Rahner, this sort of method, uniting
contraries in order to supersede them, leads to flat contradiction. The
Hegelian Absolute is the Infinite, but it is also the finite, such that the
Infinite becomes the finite and the finite transcends its own bounds to
become the Absolute Infinite. It means that the Infinite enters into relation
with Itself by means of a creature, and that the Unchanging has changed to
become aware of Itself and so attain perfection. It means that the More has
the power to become the less, and that the Infinite has passed over into
another and taken it on as other. It means that Being is fundamentally
fissured and that the Unconditioned has a condition to fulfill: namely, to
create man in order more fully to become God, for “without the world, God
is not God.”[382]
Rahner’s theology rises like a charmed serpent from modern
metaphysics, tight and powerful, but its unity is deceptive. Rahner claimed
Heidegger as his sole mentor. In fact, he was first and foremost Hegelian
and only afterwards Heideggerian. His system is very eclectic, with all of
the inherent drawbacks: lack of organization, contradictory viewpoints,
gaps between segments artificially pieced together. Now Hegel and
Heidegger–not to mention St. Thomas–really did have widely divergent
philosophies. Rahner departed most radically from Heidegger when he took
the anthropocentric turnoff, identifying theology and philosophy in an
attempt to introduce God into the system. Heidegger could not conceive of
any revelation independent of one’s consciousness. On the contrary, any
genuine existentialist is trapped forever in the prison of the self-sufficient
human consciousness. Philosophy should not address the problem of God,
all the while respecting the particular genius of theology. To pull out of this
rut driving straight toward the death of theology, Rahner was obliged to
have recourse to an unhoped-for means; if he did so, it was by sheer will
power and contrary to the direction of his principles.[383]
Rahner was not faithful to his master Heidegger in philosophy; he was
no more faithful to Catholicism. Rahner’s metaphysics takes its starting
point in the human consciousness, deducing from it firstly being and then
man as mediator for God. Now this is the exact opposite of Thomism. So
how can Rahner quote St. Thomas on every page of his philosophy and
deduce from it the exact opposite of Thomism? What might have been
excused as the author’s misreading can be no such thing when we see him
attacking the very foundations of realism and systematically invoking St.
Thomas to prove the opposite of Thomism. What holds true for philosophy
holds just as true for theology. Rahner admits with hesitation that he is an
amateur theologian and that he has never seriously studied the key treatises
of Thomism on God.
And yet he was much worse than just an amateur theologian; he was a
wolf in sheep’s clothing, cloaking himself in Thomism in order to justify
the most corrosive anti-Thomism. How could Rahner set himself up as a
Catholic theologian when he explained the fundamental mysteries of our
Faith as a sort of pantheism, thereby denying the most elementary
distinctions? We can understand why Fr. Fabro, full of Italian vehemence,
spares no invective to castigate the enemy. He accuses Rahner of being a
systematic distorter, a Kantizer, crashing around amongst Thomistic theses
like a deaf man at a musical concert. He defines Rahner as a confused
mystifier churning out meaningless prose in a barbaric, hallucinatory style.
Fabro dubs him the standard-bearer of immanent Christianity and the pirate
of contemporary theology.[384] That is why Cardinal Siri pronounces a
severe judgment on Rahner, for his thought is the way not of truth but of
error, as all of the principles, criteria, and foundations of the Faith are
systematically called in question.[385]
We have already pointed out the confusion of God with man and of
nature with grace at the source of all Rahner’s theology. Actually, an even
more fundamental motivation behind his theology is ecumenism. Rahner
starts out from the praiseworthy but unreal desire to wish to save all men.
His reasoning is simple but fallacious: since God is almighty and wishes to
save all men, then God indeed saves all men. The mere realization of God’s
majesty automatically brings salvation. Every man alive is an anonymous
Christian even if he explicitly refuses to be associated in any way with the
visible and hierarchical Church; outside the Church, salvation! The
kingdom of God on earth is all mankind, such that all men are saved. That
is why, “If hell exists, it is empty.”[386] The People of God is not the
“ghetto Church”; it is the broader Church, “subsisting in” but not confined
to the Catholic Church.[387] This thesis of universal salvation leads directly
into a new notion of the apostolate, paralyzing the missionary effort by
rendering it obsolete, and this for two reasons. Firstly, if we identify nature
with grace, surely this means that all men are in the state of grace. If grace
equals nature, then every man who has a human nature also has the state of
grace and is living in grace whether he is aware of it or not. Secondly, every
man can be Christ’s brother and hence a Christian, such that a man
deliberately anti-Christian can still be Christian. What could now be the use
of crossing oceans and shedding one’s blood to render explicit what all men
already possess implicitly: the certainty of eternal salvation? Yves Congar
put it in a nutshell: “Today nobody can claim that any need to save souls
from hell is what accounts for the missions. God saves them without their
knowing the Gospel. Otherwise we should all leave for China.”[388] The
missionary effort becomes the demissionary effort, the dismissal of the
missions. And if every man is an implicit Christian, vocations will become
revocations, the revoking of apostolic zeal!

5. Rahner’s Theology: The Ultimate in Modernism

Rahner claimed that the only way to speak of God in a secularized,
man-centered society is to draw religion out of man himself. The effort to
found just such a man-centered theology is the whole thrust of his book The
Anthropological Inversion. Rahner’s theology would supplant traditional
theology, which defined exactly how God is united to man by constructing,
as it were, a great suspension bridge buttressed on God’s transcendence and
the supernatural Redemption of mankind by Christ. On the contrary,
Rahner’s theology does not come down from above, as God reveals Himself
to man, but rather rises from below, as man stretches beyond his limits and
naturally aligns himself with God.
The Hegelian system is intrinsically pantheistic; only with difficulty
could Rahner avoid the same accusation. His, of course, is not the obvious
kind of pantheism, blatantly identifying God with the world. Instead it is
Hegelian pantheism which, without suppressing the finite, nevertheless
absorbs it and preserves it as a stage intrinsic to the formation of the Great
Whole, since the Hegelian Absolute is not the infinite God but the present
synthesis of infinite and finite. Certain of Rahner’s texts are gravely
compromising:
When we say against pantheism that God and the world are different, this statement is
radically misunderstood if it is interpreted in a dualistic way. The difference between God and
the world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from
himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.
[389] We are facing the single reality, the inconceivably lofty mystery deciding my fate and
that of the world…because it presupposes the very fate of God and hence that of the world.
[390] [I]n this self-communication God…does not originally cause and produce something
different from himself in the creature, but rather…he communicates his own divine reality and
makes it a constitutive element in the fulfillment of the creature.[391] [T]his very own reality
of [God’s], which he can no longer undo as something which has been surpassed, must exist
on our side as our own real salvation, that is, on this side of the difference between God and
creatures.[392]
Then again, the simple attempt to prove the real existence of God in an
egological philosophy of consciousness is necessarily fallacious. It is in no
way surprising to see even a colleague as radical as Kasper looking askance
at such a venture as being uncomfortably close to pantheistic gnosticism.
[393]
Nor is the notion of evolution at the heart of Rahner’s system apt to
remove the suspicion of pantheism hanging over it. According to Rahner,
God evolves from indeterminate to determinate by a process of theogenesis,
cosmogenesis, and anthropogenesis all rolled into one, in the history of the
world and of God. Mankind is God developed to His fullest potential, and
God becomes one with the world. Behold the paradigm of unity, wiping out
all division between nature and grace, Church and world, faith and reason,
God and creature, in a promotion of religious syncretism, since salvation
comes from the human consciousness. Rahner considers man and world as
one reality ordered to a supernatural end because “God and the grace of
Christ are in everything, like the secret essence of every reality.”[394] “By
the fact that the Word of God became man, humanity has already in
advance become ontologically the real sanctification of individual men by
grace and also the people of the children of God.”[395] “Whoever totally
accepts his own humanity (and of course his neighbor’s humanity too), has
accepted the Son of man since, in Him, God has accepted man.”[396] We
have here a major confusion of nature and grace, taken up by all of the
spokesmen of the new theology, and issuing logically in pantheism.
We have already pointed out that from the confusion between the
natural and supernatural orders flows a true avalanche of consequences:
natural Revelation, pluralism of creeds, universal salvation, the anonymous
Christian, hell empty, the bursting of the Roman “ghetto Church,” unlimited
ecumenism. However, the contradiction between sane Catholic thinking and
Hegelian theology is most acute when we come to the study of the Trinity
and of Christ, taken theologically or philosophically. Monism,
monophysitism, Nestorianism, modalism, ontologism, idealism,
immanentism, Pelagianism, pantheism: every possible error finds a home in
Rahner’s system.[397] For him, the Trinity, grace, the Incarnation–the basic
Christian mysteries–are incomprehensible without reference to man. Nor
did he stop there. He attacked the very notion of God’s liberty by claiming
that the Incarnation and the gift of grace were not free divine initiatives.
Fabro highlights a number of aspects of Rahner’s Hegelian pantheism: the
confusion between intellection and sensation, man’s self-birth, and man’s
non-existence except as universal Man. These are not new ideas because
Teilhard de Chardin was saying in effect the same thing. The creed of the
New Age is no different.[398]
Rahner’s system can be seen as the ripe fruit of modernism going back
many centuries, and it comes as no surprise that it is the point where all
heresies meet together. Is it going too far to state that Rahner takes the
destructive principles of modernism as far as they can go? Has he not
brought forth a work which, though masterful as a logical construction, is
nevertheless the very opposite of the Christian vision of God and the world?
Rahner represents the ultimate in the corruption of divine wisdom and
hence in human folly in the strictest sense. The coherence of his system is
far superior to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s Christic evolution because the
Frenchman merely lost himself in the fog of a mystical biology, lacking as
he was any precise metaphysical principles. Rahner, on the contrary, pushes
his theological edifice as far as it will go, propped up on modern
philosophy. His theology is the logical fruit of modern philosophy and
exegesis, already emptied of their proper object. Rahner provides the proof
ad absurdum that theology depends on sane metaphysics. His system
represents the ultimate in modernism–the omega point of a science gone
wrong and finally self-destructive. Fabro hits the nail on the head:
Without a transcendent God, Creator of the world and of man, there is no “I” existing as the
impregnable center of liberty. Without the Man-God, Redeemer and Sanctifier, immanent in
history as true man and transcendent in eternity as true God, in the words of the Council of
Chalcedonia, there is no hope of salvation. Indeed, without metaphysics there can be no
theology.[399]
 ✜✜✜
After this overview, it should be clear to anybody that Rahner was an
architect of genius in the construction of an impregnable bunker. All the
delicate points of theology, both dogmatic and moral, are drawn by a sort of
enchantment out of the egological consciousness dancing to the tune of the
Hegelian waltz. Seen in a different light, Rahner’s theological construct is
not the theology of tradition but of treason. It is indeed an inversion. He
named it the anthropological inversion, but he would have done well to call
it the narcissistic inversion, the adoration of self. It is an inversion not
unlike the sin of the angels. It is perhaps the most perfect philosophical and
theological expression here below of the sin of Lucifer, wanting to become
like God and letting out his cry of revolt. As far as bunkers go, Rahner has
with his intellectual synthesis dug out a cave with no beauty, life, or being.
It is exactly the reverse of Christian culture based on God, on Jesus Christ,
and in the end on being.
CHAPTER 19: THE CONDEMNATION OF NEO-MODERNISM
BY POPE PIUS XII
Although his clandestine writings circulated freely, Teilhard de
Chardin had always been a target for his Roman superiors, who kept him on
a short leash. His writings were infinitely varied and widely disseminated
by his friends, particularly in France where they exercised a considerable
influence. As Teilhard de Chardin and his new superior general, Fr.
Janssens, were just beginning to understand each other, Pius XII was
turning his attention to the bitterly debated questions of evolution and
anthropology, and was regarding with suspicion the views of the Society of
Jesus in general and of Teilhard de Chardin in particular.
In his 1946 allocution to the Jesuit Fathers, which resounded like an
explosion, the Pope issued a severe judgment on “the new theology, which
must evolve just as everything evolves, as it progresses without ever being
fixed once and for all.…If we were to embrace such opinions, what would
become of the immutable dogmas of the Catholic Church? What would
become of the unity and stability of the Faith?”[400] Pope Pius XII
considered the situation to be extremely grave and imposed measures
accordingly. Fr. Spiazza described the Pope’s reaction: “I remember the
Pope saying to me, several months after the publication of Humani Generis,
when I alluded to it during an audience: ‘If we had not acted when we did,
nothing would have been left standing.’”[401]
The philosopher Maritain described with eloquence the breadth of the
imminent apostasy: “the neo-modernist fever, very contagious, at least in
circles described as ‘intellectual,’ compared to which the modernism of
Pius X’s time was only a modest hay fever.”[402]

1. “Where Is the New Theology Taking Us?”

In 1946, the Pope was not the only one conscious of the heresy.
Certain loyal, blue-blooded Dominicans had already surrounded the neo-
modernist lair at Fourvière and launched an offensive whose climax came
with the remarkable intervention of a Roman theologian, Fr. Reginald
Garrigou-Lagrange.
Fr. Labourdette, in the Revue Thomiste (May-August 1946) published
“Theology and Its Sources,”[403] a critical study on the development of
theology. In it he attacked certain books of the new collections Sources
Chrétiennes and Théologie, sponsored by de Lubac and Daniélou of the
Jesuit institute of Fourvière, with the collaboration of some of their friends,
Fathers Bouillard and Fessard. The Dominican taxed them with expressing:
a theological relativism by which our concepts about God vary with the
ages and the different cultures; a truth which is essentially dependent upon
subjective experience; an undue reliance on modern irrational philosophers,
either existentialist or Hegelian[404]; the defense of symbolism in exegesis
as opposed to a scholastic rationalism considered insufficiently vibrant; a
disdain for rigid Thomistic speculation, rendered false today by its very
rigidity. All of the authors incriminated in the article were among the chorus
of Thomism’s denigrators, accusing it of being inapt to tackle contemporary
difficulties. According to them, Scholastic theology had run its course, and
it was to modern philosophers that the Faith must now turn to inaugurate a
theology adapted to a new era.
The review Recherches de Science Religieuse[405] returned fire in an
article by the same name, “Theology and Its Sources.” This anonymous
response (which implicated de facto the four incriminated Jesuits) slid into
ad hominem arguments. It attacked the form of the criticism without
addressing the heart of the problem: Labourdette, an unsettled and
suspicious mind, insisted on seeing evil where there was no ill intention.
[406] The Dominican was allowed to reply, and he again brought forward
the real issues at stake. What remains of immutable dogma if words never
refer to eternal truths? By considering St. Thomas as an outdated
philosopher, do they mean to deny the existence of eternal truths? Do they
mean to deny any definitive acquisition of truth? Would not systematically
casting doubt on all theology be equivalent to returning to the physics of
Archimedes? Clearly, this debate between the two most prestigious
religious orders touched upon questions vital to Christian culture: the value
of truth and of theology as a science.
Also in 1946, writing from Rome, the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange
took up the same theme in an article of Angelicum. He raised the alarm in a
tone which his enemies immediately berated as intemperate and excessively
vehement, unworthy of a theologian of his international standing. Garrigou-
Lagrange’s attack targeted three contemporary theologians, Bouillard, de
Lubac and Teilhard de Chardin (Rahner emerged upon the scene too late to
be implicated under Pius XII), demanding: “Where is the new theology
taking us?”[407] Bouillard claimed that, “When the spirit evolves, an
immutable truth can only subsist thanks to a simultaneous and correlative
evolution of all the notions, maintaining the same relation between them. A
theology which would not be current would be a false theology.” From
there Bouillard reasoned that, because it is Aristotelian, the theology of St.
Thomas is no longer current and is therefore false. In so doing, Bouillard
took up Blondel’s expression by which truth is defined as “the mind’s
conformity with [human] life.” Now, to affirm such a thing is to admit that
two theologies can be at the same time true and contradictory. Garrigou
responded that an error, be it ever so subtle, on first notions and first
principles would have incalculable consequences. How is it possible to
speak of “immutable truth” if terms are essentially unstable? We may as
well suggest that iron grapples could hold in place the waves of the sea.
How can we maintain, for example, that the Real Presence of the Body of
Christ in the Eucharist requires transubstantiation if all of these notions are
essentially unstable? How can we maintain that the particular judgment
after death is irrevocable for eternity if such a theology is no longer current?
Finally, how can we maintain that all of these propositions are immutably
true if the very notion of truth is changeable?
Secondly, Garrigou hammered the modern notion of the supernatural.
De Lubac was the second theologian to be castigated by the Dominican, this
time for having written in his book Supernatural: “Nothing in St. Thomas
indicates the distinction which certain Thomistic theologians would later
formulate, between ‘God, Author of the natural order’ and ‘God, Author of
the supernatural order.’”[408] And yet, the Dominican riposted, such an
idea not only contradicts a number of passages in St. Thomas but
undermines his pronuntiata maiora–his major theses–and if these are
uncertain, what indeed could be the value of a theology which constantly
has recourse to them? St. Pius X had warned professors to beware of the
slightest deviation from Aquinas in matters of metaphysics. A slight error
concerning the principles can have catastrophic consequences. The same
holds doubly true for the science of the supernatural. Deny the distinction
between nature and supernature and you have undermined Redemption
itself and the necessity of the Church for salvation. You have implied that
man is naturally divinized, which leads in good logic to pantheism–all
things are God, God is all things.
Finally, Garrigou attacked the anonymous writings which had been
circulating widely since 1934, so unleashing his criticism of Teilhard de
Chardin. He took exception in particular to the Teilhardian creed contained
in How I Believe.[409] The danger lay not only in Teilhard de Chardin’s
rather audacious mode of exposition; more fundamentally, his writings
tended to vitiate the very nature of theology. Far from developing the object
of the faith contained in Revelation and interpreted by the Church,
Teilhardian “theology” is in fact biology embellished by the most fantastical
ravings, reminiscent of Hegelian evolutionism. The starting point of
Teilhardian cosmotheology is the hypothesis of the material evolution of the
world extended to the spiritual order. The supernatural world is in total
evolution toward the final coming of Christ. Original sin is in itself spiritual
and intemporal, for it only affects the soul. It matters little whether it took
place in the beginning of human history or during the course of the ages.
Having thus dismissed original sin, the field is open for an attack on the
Incarnation of the Word, rendered perfectly useless if Adam did not sin.
Moreover, the Incarnation for Teilhard de Chardin is but a phase in the
universal evolution. Where does this universal evolution lead? Teilhard de
Chardin explains that its endpoint is the syncretist religion of a universal
Christ: “A general convergence of religions toward a universal Christ who,
ultimately, satisfies every one of them; to my mind, such is the only
possible conversion of the world and the only imaginable form for a
Religion of the future.”[410] In a striking synthesis, Garrigou had
uncovered the seeping contagion of neo-modernism. He laments it bitterly:
We do not consider that the writers just described have abandoned the doctrine of St. Thomas;
they have never adhered to it, having never really understood it. The observation is painful and
worrisome. How could such a manner of teaching form anything but skeptics? Indeed, they
propose no viable alternative to the doctrine of St. Thomas. Where is the new theology taking
us? Where but down the path of skepticism, fantasy, and heresy?[411]
Four years later, the supreme authority would take up again the points
already addressed by the eminent Dominican and castigate the same
theologians for the same noxious errors.

2. Humani Generis
The modernists have more than one trick up their sleeve. A favorite
game consists in their way of greeting a papal encyclical launched as a clear
condemnation of their views; they welcome it with profuse commentaries,
adding their own subtle spin until the entire document suddenly seems to
condone them. Pascendi of St. Pius X was no exception, according to the
testimony of one Protestant minister: “I have never seen anything so strange
as the letter in which Fonsegrive, an Americanist and a modernist, draws
the fine thread of his discourse through the eyes of a whole series of needles
in a complex justification of the Pope and the modernists both: it is even
sadder than it is strange.”[412] For others, encyclicals may come and go,
but the Church remains.[413] It should therefore come as no surprise to see
the same reactions under Pius XII. Thus, the encyclical on Holy Scripture,
Divino Afflante Spiritu, was interpreted as recommending avant-garde
scientific exegesis even though, a few years later, Humani Generis flatly
condemned the neo-modernists and their criticism. Can we trust the
integrity of critics who pit Pius XII against Pius XII?
The Encyclical Humani Generis, in its introduction, establishes the
seriousness of the danger, assessing the false opinions threatening to
destroy the foundations of Catholic doctrine. Thus, the present evil consists
in the various movements of contemporary thought: pantheistic evolution,
atheistic existentialism, fideism, and historicism or evolving dogma. The
thought follows the same trend from Hegel all the way to Sartre: it is the
philosophy which identifies being with becoming and denies any
metaphysical stability. The reason these currents of thought have exercised
such an influence on the theologians of the day is the same as in the time of
St. Pius X: the love of novelty and an imprudent irenism whose only unity
is built on the ruins of truth. After this entry into the heart of the subject, the
encyclical comprises three parts, divided according to the three sciences
intimately tied to dogma.
The first science relative to dogma is, of course, theology. The Pope
reaffirms the teaching power of the Church, sole interpreter and guardian of
the deposit of faith, in a categorical rejection of dogmatic relativism, as
though dogmatic formulae could be adapted to modern tastes. Next, he
defends Holy Scripture: it is inspired, infallible in all its parts, including
those passages which do not touch on the Faith. The Pope illustrates his
meaning in a veritable Syllabus of modern errors:
It is now doubted that human reason, without divine revelation and the help of divine
grace, can, by arguments drawn from the created universe, prove the existence of a personal
God; it is denied that the world had a beginning; it is argued that the creation of the world is
necessary, since it proceeds from the necessary liberality of divine love; it is denied that God
has eternal and infallible foreknowledge of the free actions of men–all this in contradiction to
the decrees of the [First] Vatican Council.
Some also question whether angels are personal beings, and whether matter and spirit differ
essentially. Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot
create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision. Nor is this
 all. Disregarding the Council of Trent, some pervert the very concept of original sin, along
with the concept of sin in general as an offense against God, as well as the idea of satisfaction
performed for us by Christ. Some even say that the doctrine of transubstantiation, based on an
antiquated philosophic notion of substance, should be so modified that the real presence of
Christ in the Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism, whereby the consecrated
species would be merely efficacious signs of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His
intimate union with the faithful members of His Mystical Body.
Some say they are not bound by the doctrine…based on the Sources of Revelation, which
teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same
thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in
order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility
of Christian Faith.[414]
The second discipline directly implicated in any question of dogma,
albeit with a merely instrumental role, is philosophy. After having blamed
the new Philosophies at the beginning of his encyclical, the Pope here takes
up the defense of that eternal philosophy which is Thomism:
While scorning our philosophy, they extol other Philosophies of all kinds, ancient and
modern, oriental and occidental, by which they seem to imply that any kind of philosophy or
theory, with a few additions and corrections if need be, can be reconciled with Catholic
dogma. No Catholic can doubt how false this is, especially where there is question of those
fictitious theories they call immanentism, or idealism or materialism, whether historic or
dialectic, or even existentialism, whether atheistic or simply the type that denies the validity of
the reason in the field of metaphysics.[415]
Finally, Pius XII comes to the third science indirectly associated with
dogma, namely natural science. His target here is Teilhard de Chardin and
his fantastic inventions. After pronouncing clear and balanced judgment on
the possibility of man’s bodily evolution from another living being–the
soul, of course, being directly created by God–he turns on those who would
proclaim such a theory as definitive. What the Pope condemns out of hand
is polygenism, the theory denying that the entire human race is descended
from Adam, since such a theory would be the ruin of the dogma of original
sin. He ends with a general condemnation of those who class the first
chapters of Genesis as mythology.
The Encyclical Humani Generis emerged as a third Syllabus, after Pius
XI’s Syllabus of Errors and Pius X’s Lamentabili, like these, rising up in
defense of the integrity of the Faith at a crucial juncture. Pius XII was
celebrated by the Catholic world as their vigilant leader who saw the danger
from afar, understood it for what it was, and prepared the defense
accordingly. Future generations have been able better to appreciate the
value and significance of Humani Generis, a veritable monument in the
history of thought. The basic message is simple: the magisterium is the
guardian and the interpreter of Divine Revelation. Any attempt to separate
oneself from this magisterium would be to follow in the footsteps of Luther;
and “Lutheranism has humanized and fragmented Christianity, reducing it
to a personal experience.”[416] Thus, in the Catholic ranks, the new sword
of Solomon, come to separate in all wisdom the light from the darkness,
was hailed with enthusiasm as the inauguration of an era of peace in that
truth which alone sets free.

3. The Jesuit Reaction

In the opposite camp, the reactions were rather varied, revealing the
true position of those concerned. Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyons,
under whose jurisdiction fell the representatives of the new theology, took a
very moderate stance. He concluded that the Pope had not intended to
discourage but only to preserve against dangerous deviations. He
recommended holding to an attitude of complete fraternal charity, avoiding
polemics and keeping in mind the merits of all those who had sincerely
pursued their research.[417]
In the light of subsequent events, we may regret that the individuals in
question were not pointed out by name; to do so would have put an end to
their theological careers as masters of the coming generations. Cardinal
Bea, the Pope’s confessor, had in fact protected the guilty parties. That is
one of the reasons why the warning to de Lubac fell on deaf ears, since he
did not consider himself as its target. “This [encyclical] seems to me, like
many other Church documents, to be very unilateral, which didn’t surprise
me: that’s to be expected from that form of document. But I didn’t see
anything in it that struck me.”[418]
De Lubac’s comrade Teilhard de Chardin reacted with his habitual
frankness. In his abundant correspondence, he reassured his friends:
For an encyclical entitled Humani Generis, it would be difficult to present a narrower view
of humanity.…The Thomist theologians in Rome, under whose persuasions the Pope had
acted, did not seem to realize that a way of thought that takes account of cosmogenesis is
infinitely more capable of expressing the Creation, the Redemption, the Incarnation, and the
Communion than Aristotelian Thomism.…The encyclical has a strong smell of
fundamentalism…I wonder whether a good psychoanalyst would not see in it the clear traces
of a specific religious perversion–the masochism and sadism of orthodoxy; the pleasure of
swallowing, and making others swallow, the truth under its crudest and stupidest forms. I am
resolved to continue quite simply along my own way in a direction which seems to me to point
exactly towards the dogmatic realism that Rome wants and is asking for.…[Humani Generis
represents] a large-scale fundamentalist offensive which doesn’t frighten me, but which
obliges us to take to the maquis and work more than ever underground.[419]
 There is no denying that Teilhard de Chardin spoke more frankly than
he acted!

4. The Dominican Reaction

With Humani Generis, the neo-modernist wave had been publicly
condemned, and the measures against it came in rapid succession. Five
Jesuits from Lyons had been struck by the condemnations, but certain
Dominicans were also implicated. Fathers Chenu and Congar saw their
works criticized and even put on the Index; however, the Roman authorities
were perfectly conscious of the duplicity of the new theologians, who
spread their theses discreetly but surely. Rome ordered Fr. Suarez, the
Master General of the order, to make an official visit of the French houses,
in order to examine the mentality and the doctrinal tendency of the students and to discern
what ideas the professors are spreading there…particularly in France. There is in fact…a
regrettable excess of the spirit of insubordination and disobedience toward the lawfully
constituted authority. A comportment of which certain religious seem nearly to boast. This
insubordination and this spirit of independence are particularly noticeable in those who have
acquired a certain reputation as “theologians” and a name in intellectual circles.…It is
necessary to understand their tactic: not to adopt a position openly contrary to the truth but to
mask the error behind glittering phrases and vague affirmations in order to avoid sanctions and
condemnations. Another artifice employed to keep from seeing their books in print: the use of
hand-typed manuscripts.[420]
In fact, Rome was so worried that it even considered dissolving the
Dominican order in France.
So Suarez visited the French district in 1954, mindful of the survival
plan upon which he had already determined. Wherever he went, he kept
saying that it was necessary to give an impression of discipline; after a few
months, everything would fall back into place. Otherwise, he warned them,
Rome might feel obliged to resort to extreme measures. This mode of
operating betrayed a great weakness on the part of the authorities, who did
not transmit the Holy See’s real motives of discontent. As was to be
expected, those incriminated became convinced that they were victims of an
error on the part of Rome and simply ducked their heads until the storm
passed; they then continued their destructive work in secret. Congar, exiled
in Rome, could write in all impunity:
The course I am currently teaching, De Ecclesia, despite its naïve tone, is my real answer;
it is my real dynamite under the seats of the scribes! Wait and take advantage of the occasions
as they arise to express outwardly my refusal of the lies of the system.…Rome is foreign to
those profound Evangelical perceptions which are the great preoccupation of our faithful and
 the source of their protest. Rome has closed itself off with its law and its sophisticated canon
of casuistry, in its sentiment of inalterable justice and in its self-justification.[421]
Fr. Ducatillon, the new provincial of Paris, had every reason to
complain of the modernist tendencies in Cerf, the Dominican publishing
house: “Our reviews and publications do not express the thought of most of
the religious of our province and, furthermore, the provincial authority is
powerless to give our publications their normal orientation in the service of
the Church.”[422]
✜✜✜
In France, the two most illustrious orders had literally been infiltrated
by neo-modernists and menaced the integrity of Catholic doctrine. Humani
Generis was the last rampart erected in extremis before the flood of errors
threatening to sweep everything away, in the words of Pius XII himself. It
was a dike raised up on the solidity of Pascendi and on the centuries-old
rock of Church Tradition and it resisted the new wave of modernism with
all its strength. It held out proudly and protected the faithful Christians
huddled behind its ramparts. Already, Cardinal Pacelli had prophesied:
I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of
Mary about the danger which menaces the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of
altering the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul. I hear around me reformers who want
to dismantle the Holy Sanctuary, destroy the universal flame of the Church, to discard all her
adornments, and smite her with remorse for her historic past. Well, my dear friend, I am
convinced that the Church of Peter must assume responsibility for her past, or she will be
digging her own grave.[423]
In 1958, Pacelli died and the Catholic Church seemed to descend into
the tomb with him, abandoning the faithful to the mercy of the new
“theologians of Man.”
 CHAPTER 20: ASSESSMENT OF NEO-MODERNISM
It is important to assess the damages at the end of our study of neo-
modernism in order to gain an overview, as we did for Protestant and
“Catholic” modernism respectively. A rapid sketch of the principle authors
will cast into relief their common fundamental principles. Seeing where
they stand will give us the perspective to judge how far they have advanced
beyond their modernist predecessors and to determine whether this new
school of thought constitutes a simple evolution in Catholicism or a
revolution of ideas. We will conclude by comparing the action taken by
Pius XII with that of St. Pius X.

1. An Overview of the Authors

Our four representatives of neo-modernists form a motley crew: a
famous paleontologist from the thirties, an atheist German existentialist
philosopher, a discreet French scholar, topped off with an abstruse post-war
theologian. Teilhard de Chardin’s life and teaching are entirely bound up
with his doctrine of evolution; his theology could be defined quite simply as
the marriage of biology and Hegelian evolution. Picking up where Darwin
left off, he developed the scientific theory of vital evolution according to
which matter evolves progressively toward life, then toward human life,
until it finally attains the Omega Point. This culmination of evolution will
be an apotheosis, the ultimate moment in time when men will be saved by
the coming of the Super-Man, personification of divinized humanity, the
universal Christ toward whom the Church is ever advancing. Behold the
syncretist religion satisfying to all beliefs. Draped in a scientific hypothesis,
namely, natural evolution, Teilhard de Chardin strolled confidently into the
domain of theology and began redefining the sacred terms of grace,
supernature, original sin, Incarnation, Redemption, and the sacraments
according to the categories of evolution. In so doing, he resurrected the
doctrines most dear to the eighteenth-century Deists: self-creation, self-
salvation, and the union of all men in a New Jerusalem.
Heidegger represents the philosophy born between the two world wars:
existentialism, which was to play so predominant a role in all of neo-
modernist thought. It is defined as the descriptive philosophy of personal
and free human existence. In contrast with the exaggerated optimism of the
Kantian idealists, existentialism underlines the absurdity of things and of
the world; it exalts the liberated human consciousness, moved by pure
caprice to launch forward upon a path to nowhere. The first principle of
existentialism, “I will, I think, it is,” betrays the same mixture of
voluntarism and introspective knowledge which we have already met in
studying Bergson. Existentialism is defined above all as the egological
philosophy of the consciousness: all that exists is and has meaning only in
virtue of the thinking self. What is more, things have no nature, since the
second existentialist principle states that existence precedes essence. In this
way, the primary human faculty is not reason but the most absurd liberty.
Man’s ultimate good is not truth but creative liberty. The third principle
defines that the present moment is creative, which reflects the Bergsonian
theory that being is duration and pure becoming. It is a return to Bergson’s
Creative Evolution, by which all things come from man.
De Lubac, in exegesis, follows Bultmann’s Form History, which is
essentially a resurrection of Strauss’s pure critique. However, de Lubac’s
tone is always one of moderation. His exegetical labor is aimed at
overcoming the opposition between dogmatism and the historico-critical
method, which had mutually excommunicated each other. His originality
comes from the following few points. He emphasized in exegesis the
authority of the Fathers of the Church but at the same time neglected the
traditional magisterium and Scholastic theology. He revived spiritual and
patristic exegesis but oriented them toward historical symbolism, faithful to
the modern principles of critique. Thus he claimed that the Fathers of the
Church sought in exegesis the full meaning of Scripture which is open to
two incompatible interpretations, one historical and the other a denial of
history. He also invented the notion of “living Tradition,” expressing the
theory of a pluralistic Revelation, indefinitely extending to successive and
enriching readings. In short, de Lubac represents a return to the sources of
exegesis, profitable in many ways but with the disadvantage of giving
precedence to history and critique over dogma. Notice that the same
inversion and imbalance were present in Loisy and ultimately led him
astray.
As for Rahner, the German owed his philosophy primarily to Hegel
with some dipping into Heidegger. He adopted Hegel’s dialectical method,
which sees all things as evolving out of the Great Whole, passing by the
cosmos and returning again to the Great Whole. Such a method, which
unites contraries only to go beyond them, ends in pure contradiction. The
Hegelian Absolute is the infinite, but it is also the finite, such that the
infinite becomes the finite and the finite steps beyond its boundaries to
become the infinite Absolute. What is more, Rahner reduced being to being
known and even confounded it with the will. In so doing he was espousing
the fundamental egological principle, cogito-volo–I will, I think, it is. In the
last analysis, Rahner’s theology is simply Catholic theology transposed into
the key of Hegel. Catholicism is transformed into a vast movement, a
tightly linking chain leading from the Trinity to Christ, and from Christ to
man and the cosmos before the final return to God.
This chain makes of man the center of theology, which is why Rahner
christened it “the anthropological inversion.” Its movement comprises three
principal phases: the Trinitarian phase, descending Christology, and
ascending Christology. Just as God needs History in order to become
Triune, just as the Word can only be Word if He is Word Incarnate, so also
God needs the world in order to be God. The infinite ought to exteriorize
and step out of itself by casting itself into the finite in order to emerge at
last as conscious infinitude, according to Hegel’s evolutionary pattern as
revised by Teilhard de Chardin. Rahner’s system possesses the same tight
internal logic as Hegel’s, linking without a hitch matter-spirit-capacity of
human nature-human nature-supernature-natural desire for the Incarnation.
Rahner’s theology blurs the distinction between the natural and the
supernatural orders, setting off a series of consequences: natural Revelation,
the pluralism of creeds, universal salvation, anonymous Christians, an
empty hell, the bursting of the Roman “ghetto Church,” and unlimited
ecumenism.

2. The Identity of Fundamental Principles

After viewing the rogues’ gallery of neo-modernism, we can definitely
speak of a family resemblance with previous eras. The generations go by,
the culture and the individuals are no longer the same, but the principles are
immutable. There certainly is nothing new under the modernist sun. The
same anti-philosophical principles of ignorantism, egology, and
revolutionism remain fixed points on the horizon.
The existentialists are ignorantist by their denial of essences to the
benefit of an empty existence–the existence which precedes essence. They
are ignorantist also when they reduce knowledge to appearances and
images: to be is to appear, which is a pure and simple denial that things in
themselves can be known. Biblical criticism follows Bultmann’s Form
History, which denies that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts of historical
facts. It would have us believe that the Evangelists did not know the Eighth
Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” because its primary
tenet is basically that the Gospels are not gospel truth since they are riddled
with errors. Spiritual exegesis also favors ignorantism because it admits of
equivocacy in terms and their polyvalent interpretation. As for Rahner’s
theology, suffice it to say that his sources are the contradictory dialectic of
Hegel and the absurd existentialism of Heidegger.
The neo-modernists also upheld the egological knowledge preached by
their modernist predecessors–that knowledge which makes liberty and
consciousness into being itself and which prepares the reign of blindness
and absurdity. “If no Dasein [human being] exists, no world is ‘there’
either.”[424] “I am the being by whom there is [es gibt] being.” [425] “I am
the absolute source. My existence does not come from my antecedents,
from my physical and social entourage; it goes toward them and sustains
them.”[426] The fundamental existentialist principle is indeed the cogito: “I
think, therefore it is!” Existence and liberty are interchangeable concepts. In
their jargon, to exist is to surpass what you are; it is to invent yourself in
perfect freedom; it is to create both your own essence and the world. In
exegesis, egology comes in the form of an ongoing Revelation, ever
progressing at the whim of readers and their re-readings. A creative
dynamism arises in the reader who understands the text when he begins to
understand himself confronted with the text. Thus, what the text signifies no
longer coincides with what the author meant to say.[427] Everything is left
to private judgment in readings ever more fulfilling in the Spirit, to the
detriment of the defined and immutable Revelation. Finally, egology seems
to have attained its paroxysm in Rahner. For him, if spirit is to be defined as
the full possession of oneself and of one’s creative power over oneself, then
it is perfectly defined as liberty and will.[428] “Every knowledge of another
by man is a mode of his self-knowledge, of his ‘subjectivity.’…Now this
holds also for man’s knowledge of God.”[429]
Finally, existentialism reduces being to pure duration–to
revolutionism, creator of worlds and destinies at the whim of the most
diverse “facts of consciousness.” For Sartre, being is one with the event and
the situation. It is duration for Bergson. For Heidegger, it is time. As with
Hegel, being is interchangeable with nothingness, for “being exists but it
vanishes into the event since, ultimately, it is not.”[430] Becoming is being.
All is flux. “This is the dawn of the most enormous transformation of the
earth, time, and history. We are in the night; we await the day.”[431] The
advocates of the new theology follow the same current when, with Blondel,
they define the truth as the mind’s correspondence with infinitely variable
and progressive life. And since truth is life and Tradition should transmit
the truth, de Lubac concludes at the existence of a living Tradition.
According to him, then, the ulterior beliefs of the Church need not
necessarily be logically bound to what she has always explicitly believed
from the earliest centuries.
Living Tradition bobs along like a cork through the stream of evolving
dogma. What a pleasant euphemism for the old heresy of dogmatic
historicism. As for Rahner, his evolutionism is generously tainted with
Teilhardian pantheism. Like Teilhard de Chardin, his starting point is a
world in constant evolution[432] which becomes man since matter becomes
spirit, while spirit little by little becomes God.
The discontinuity and essential difference between matter, life, consciousness, and spirit by no
means excludes evolution if it is true that there is becoming.[433] When we say against
pantheism that God and the world are different, this statement is radically misunderstood if it
is interpreted in a dualistic way. The difference between God and the world is of such a nature
that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself.[434]

3. The Innovations of Neo-Modernism

In contrast with “Catholic” modernism, neo-modernism exercised an
enormous influence on the life of the Church, thanks in particular to the
controversy surrounding Teilhard de Chardin. He stood forth as a scientist–
and a priest and a Jesuit to boot–who denied Creation and explained all
dogma in function of the biological evolution of matter on the Darwinian
model. The popularity of his system was also due to the astuteness of its
protagonists in covering their tracks and subtly propagating the same
modernist poison under the label of the Fathers of the Church and St.
Thomas Aquinas. Furthermore, existentialism, the philosophy of the day,
for all its failings, at least had the merit of doing away with an excessive
idealism. It offers a much less artificial and hence more human conception
of the world, although it over-corrected and tumbled into absurdity and
irrationality.
However, the progress made by the new doctrines was not simply
quantitative but above all qualitative. The great difference of neo-
modernism from modernism is in the clarity of its principles, which are
pushed to the limit of their conclusions. Comparing neo-modernism to the
preceding eras of Protestant and Catholic modernism is like looking at a
master-work in broad day light after having seen only the preliminary
sketch in the dark. Protestantism was bold in its ideas and modernism
perfectly espoused its principles, but these doctrines had neither the
cohesion nor the structure apparent in the system which developed between
the wars. Above all, these forerunners did not state their driving principles
clearly and openly. We have already seen in what these principles consist:
the cogito-volo of the existentialists, who basically deny the essences of
things (since being precedes essence), and who posit an absurd creative
liberty as their ultimate principle: the creative present moment. Theirs is
also the dialectic invented by Hegel, according to which the infinite pours
itself into the finite to become conscious infinitude.
Thus, through the diversity of disciplines a common element
predominates which is in contrast with the preceding modernist generations.
The Protestants rallied around a critique which was radically ignorantist.
The modernists were primarily attached to their notion of a fundamentally
revolutionist vital development. The neo-modernists, finally, in every
domain emphasized the individual consciousness as the sole origin of
knowledge. Theirs is a fundamentally egological knowledge, the profound
and obscure introspection of the self considered as the alpha and the omega
of all that is and moves. It is knowledge walled into itself and closed off
from other beings. It is the most complete egology which quite naturally
flows straight into narcissism and egolatry, the adoration of oneself. Of all
three aspects, this one is the most diametrically opposed to realism, open to
being. Ignorantism is simply negative and cannot constitute the foundation
of an anti-culture. The revolutionist aspect is more fruitful but itself exists
only because it is founded on the egological consciousness in constant
evolution. This is why the product of the Hegel-Heidegger-Rahner trio is
the last word in neo-modernism. Its clarity leaves a great deal to be desired,
but its loyalty to the principles is impeccable. In fact, the last forty years of
intellectual labor in the post-Vatican II Church have only been a thinly
disguised rehashing of Rahner’s theology.
Yet, paradoxically, a great openness of mind toward every system of
thought has grafted itself onto the negative aspect of man closed in on
himself, forging his own truth. The most contradictory inventions are
welcomed with equal respect. Each one is a little planet in orbit around
itself with no concern to maintain contact with any common, external center
of gravity. Heidegger’s goal was to create a symbiosis between the
consciousness and its object in order to step beyond the opposition between
dogmatic realism and subjective idealism. Beneath the mighty oak of
patristic spiritual exegesis, there is a little branch for everyone–for biblical
dogmatism just as much as for uncompromising critique. The pantheon of
the universal synarchic Church offers a shrine to all the gods, even to Jesus
Christ. Every individual, without distinction of creed or litmus test for
Revelation, can find refuge in the religion of man for man, since all are
anonymous Christians. Never had modernism succeeded in offering a
synthesis at once so logical in its fundamental principles and yet so
comfortable for all.

4. Evolution or Revolution in Christian Culture?

Neo-modernism is in effect a revival of modernism, be it Catholic or
Protestant, which is what justifies their common appellation. Here again, it
should not be difficult for us to reveal the radical incompatibility of these
same principles upholding the entire edifice of the “new” heresy. They yield
a definition of truth which destroys reason, opens the way to contradiction,
and prepares a vision of revolutionary ecumenism.
Existentialists destroy reason by denying that things in themselves
have a certain nature and by claiming that knowing means informing–or
rather deforming–the object, whereas the contrary is the case. Sartre openly
acknowledged his debt to Kant:
Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of
appearances which manifest it.…The being of an existent is exactly what it appears.…Our
theory of the phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the objectivity of the
phenomenon.[435]
For Heidegger, the human consciousness is what transforms brute
things to give them a sense. Thus, the faculty most proper to man is liberty,
understood as a spontaneous, irrational instinct, absurd beyond all
reasoning. This position is not only agnostic; it is absurd. How can such a
theory of the absurd even claim the title of a philosophy? But Rahner
advocated no other: “The intellect and the known and the knowing are the
same.”[436] “Being in its in-itself is being-known.”[437] “[T]he known is
always the being of the knower….”[438] “Knowing is the subjectivity of
being itself.”[439] His problem does not consist in finding the bridge
between mind and reality but in distinguishing the knowing subject from
the object known. Our philosopher brings egology full circle with his
cogito-volo. For the existentialists, truth is defined as a blind, absurd whim
of the will.
What are the characteristics of such a truth? Since there is no essence,
beings are deprived of identity or permanence; they have no depth allowing
them to rise above the present moment and escape the perpetual flux of the
world. The same applies to God. Being as imagined by Plato, Moses, or the
Church–Being-Substance, Being-Immobility, Being-Identity–is obsolete. It
is now recognized as Becoming.[440] De Lubac, in the realm of exegesis,
admitted a plurality of meanings for any given expression in Scripture,
which opens the door to double meaning. It goes hand in hand with the
concept of “living Tradition” and ever richer interpretations in the Spirit–all
the more fruitful that the text is pregnant with the most divergent meanings.
Rahner offered the global vision of an evolving truth according to which all
things, from matter all the way up to God, are subject to the laws of change.
The Hegelian Absolute is the infinite which becomes the finite even as the
finite stretches beyond its limits to become Absolute infinitude. The
immutable changes in order to gain awareness of itself and so reach
perfection. One can wonder if Rahner admitted even the possibility of
eternal, immutable truth.
The unity of Rahner’s ecumenism is universal and univocal. Since God
is all-powerful and wills to save all men, He does in fact save all men. The
simple awareness of God operates our salvation ipso facto. Every man is an
anonymous Christian, even if he explicitly refuses all association with the
visible, hierarchical Church: Outside the Church, salvation! The kingdom of
God on earth is humanity as a whole, such that all men are saved; and if hell
exists, it is empty. The People of God is not the “ghetto Church.” It is the
greater Church which “subsists” in the Catholic Church but is not reduced
to her. This theory of universal salvation is paralyzing to the very notion of
missionary effort, henceforth superfluous. What is the use of crossing the
seas and shedding your blood if it is only to render explicit something all
men already possess, the assurance of salvation? Such is Congar’s
reasoning when he argues that no one can justify the missions by alleging a
need to save souls.
Neo-modernism, founded on egological knowledge, fruit of Luther’s
“private judgment” as taken up by the Protestants under the sign of pure
critique and by the “Catholic” modernists in the name of vital development,
is the dissolution of all thought. It remains a system of thought which
makes everything revolve around the human consciousness, disdaining
being and historical facts, alleging that the consciousness alone is the
source of being and truth, and the source of Revelation and divinity in the
depths of man. It remains the same ignorantist, egological, and revolutionist
system of thought which obliterates the three pillars upholding Christian
culture: being, Jesus Christ, and God. It is that intellectual current which
adopts a philosophy without being and a Revelation without an historical
Christ to conclude in a theology without God. Modernism in this, its
ultimate phase, is historically the most perfect philosophical and religious
nirvana paradise that has ever been invented by non-Buddhists. Cardinal
Siri felt compelled by this evidence to publish the following severe
judgment of Rahner’s philosophy as a whole:
That is where the doctrines freely professed and taught lead to, which alter the objectivity
of revealed teaching and which want to wrench the supreme secrets of God regarding the
creation, grace and salvation, by the force of subjective intellection. And on this subject, here
is a proposition of the same Karl Rahner, which illustrates the importance of this erroneous
way of approaching the question of grace and the supernatural.…That is where one has gotten
in starting from a concept concerning as great a mystery as the mystery of the supernatural,
artificially presented as being part of the doctrine of the Church. All questions have been
touched upon. Little by little all principles, all criteria, and all the foundations of the Faith
have been questioned and they crumble.[441]

5. The Authority’s Reaction to Neo-Modernism

It is enlightening and reassuring to see that, faced with the same evil of
modernism, the two Popes Pius, Pius XII in the footsteps of St. Pius X,
declared war to the death on the same principles and the same doctrine. The
second modernist crisis was an opportunity to reaffirm the fundamental
principles of Christianity and to show that they are radically undermined by
modernist principles. Pope Pius XII systematically lambasted the
philosophical, exegetical, and theological positions maintained by the
partisans of error, opposing to them the constant and unchanging teaching
of the Church as upheld by St. Pius X, founded on the same realist
philosophy and the same historical Revelation. Thus Pius XII did not cede
an inch to the theory of mythical Gospels or of a mythical Genesis, all the
while leaving open those questions not yet resolved. There can be no
dialogue with a philosophy which prides itself on its ignorantism and its
absurdity. There can be nothing worth preserving in a theology which draws
all dogma out of human consciousness.
Disciplinary measures were taken to counter the influence of the
infiltrators, especially since the Pope considered that the situation was
threatening the very survival of the Church. Doubtless with hindsight we
can regret that the measures were not as severe as those taken by St. Pius X.
And yet, had not churchmen already been infected by a spirit of
insubordination toward Rome? We might also judge that the irrational
foundations of neo-modernism were not sufficiently exposed, as Rahner, for
one, had not yet formulated his brilliant synthesis. Like his predecessor,
Pius XII did not take a defensive position or try to dialogue with the evil
because, when a cancer is eating away at the very foundation of the Church
of Christ, there is no time for compromise or negotiation. No attempt at
ecumenism with the modernist clan; no kid gloves with the traitor lurking in
the square. His Encyclical Humani Generis truly resounds as a second
Syllabus of the same errors condemned a second time for the same reasons
and with the same arguments. Divine Providence willed to confirm that
modernism, even if advocated at the highest level of the Church, as would
soon be the case, is a cancerous heresy doubly denounced, abhorred, and
condemned for all time by the one Church of Jesus Christ, the Catholic,
Apostolic, and Roman Church.
 PART V: MODERNISM TRIUMPHANT
Humani Generis appeared in 1950. The year 1965 marked the closing
of the Second Vatican Council, which cast doubt on the fundamental points
reaffirmed by the Pope Pacelli. Never before had a dogmatic encyclical
been so quickly and so completely disavowed by the very men who had
fallen under its condemnation. How is it possible that the new theology,
censured so solemnly and so definitively by Pius XII, in perfect accord with
Pius X’s Pascendi, should have become the official theology of Vatican II
and the post-conciliar Church? Here we enter upon the history of Vatican II
and the “conciliar Church,” so baptized by the neo-modernists in power. For
Vatican II indeed represents a break with the Catholic Church, by the
avowal of her leaders themselves. The post-conciliar Popes, Paul VI and
John Paul II, rarely if ever cite the traditional magisterium. For them, the
Church began in 1962, the date of a new spiritual springtime.
Yet it was a springtime that flooded the Church with winter fog. Paul
VI spoke of uncertainty, of skepticism, and of the smoke of Satan entering
the Church. John Paul II occasionally stepped out of his habitual optimism
and ceded before the evidence of a crisis in the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger,
John Paul II’s alter ego, has described in great detail the gaping wounds of
each of the four Christian continents. Melanie of La Salette and Sr. Lucy of
Fatima, the two seers, united in predicting the spiritual disorientation, the
loss of the dogma of the Faith, the eclipse of the Church, and the nefarious
role of those appointed as shepherds of the flock.
In itself, such a crisis is nothing new; the novelty lies in its having
appeared so suddenly and with an unprecedented intensity. What is new is
that the burial of Catholic tradition in its entirety was performed with
official pomp and ceremony, with incense and pontifical high Mass.
Disguised as an apotheosis, Vatican II demolished piece by piece the
scaffolding constructed by our Lord, and what remained standing would be
bulldozed during the subsequent pontificates. “An intention to remain
faithful to two councils [Vatican I and Vatican II] which differ so clearly the
one from the other is quite simply untenable. The Council presented
Catholics with a problem so unusual that they only managed to sidestep it
by a certain blindness and surrender of the reason.”[442]
What is newest of all is the mode of operation. Satan’s master stroke
was to destroy the Church in the name of obedience, the ultimate Catholic
virtue. By following the directives of the Roman authorities undermining
the faith and the institutions, all–bishops, priests and faithful–knowingly or
otherwise, collaborated in the loss of the truth and of the faith. As though
the conscience could be excused for obeying the perverse orders of the
superiors! As though destroying the Church and denying the Faith could
become meritorious and virtuous! As though it were better to be mistaken
with the pope than to be right against him! By the subterfuge of blind
obedience, the authorities in service of evil conducted a revolution in tiara
and cope under the aegis of ecumenism. In the present post-conciliar period,
we may well ask how many of the faithful still hold to the faith of their
baptism. Paul VI perhaps never spoke so true as when he foresaw a period
in the not-so-distant future when the Church would be persecuted and
reduced to a remnant: the silent Church.
The structure of the following chapters will differ from that of the
previous studies. Here we must treat of history still in living memory and
not of the abstract dogmas of a bygone age. Accordingly, in strict justice,
we should have balanced our criticism of the pontificates under study by
throwing into relief their positive aspects as well. But we are constrained by
lack of space to go directly to the essential, just as the doctor, called to a
patient’s bedside, does not begin listing the healthy organs, but promptly
applies the scalpel to the malignancy. Thus our literary scalpel must confine
itself to the negative aspects. A council or a pontificate is distinct and can
be defined not by what it preserves but by what it adds or cuts away–in
other words, by its guiding theme. The theme stands out boldly when we
begin to study the conciliar Church.
To describe the triumph of modernism over St. Peter’s, we first must
spend a certain time looking at the history and the teaching of Vatican
Council II. We will then be in a position to appreciate the subsequent
pontificates of Paul VI and of John Paul II, with an interlude devoted to
Cardinal Ratzinger and the scriptural question.
 CHAPTER 21: VATICAN II: THE ECUMENICAL
REVOLUTION
John XXIII insisted that he had been led to convoke the new Council
by a supernatural inspiration. Symbolically opening the window of his
apartments, he indicated his will that the Church, at the Council, open
herself to the world and undertake her aggiornamento–her updating. His
two immediate predecessors had already considered calling a council but
with greater circumspection. Pius XII considered the possibility, but twenty
years before (in May 1923) Pius XI had gathered the cardinals of the
Roman Curia in a secret consistory to seek their advice on the timeliness of
a general council. At the time the idea was ill-received; Cardinal Billot
spoke for them all:
The most serious reason, the one which seems to me an absolute argument for responding in
the negative: the reopening of a council is desired by the worst enemies of the Church, namely,
the modernists, who–according to the most reliable evidence–are already preparing to take
advantage of the Estates General of the Church to launch a revolution, a new 1789, object of
their hopes and dreams. We fear lest they introduce methods of discussion and of propaganda
more in conformity with democracy than with the traditions of the Church.[443]
Cardinal Billot, who has been called the greatest theologian of the twentieth
century, ended with a categorical affirmation: the age of councils had been
brought to a close with the definition of papal infallibility.
These men were aware that the Church was being infiltrated by
modernists. How, in the space of four years, was the Church to reject the
doctrine of two millennia–still echoed by the preparatory schemata–and
find herself at the end in such perfect harmony with the religion of man
made God?[444] Therein lies the history of the conciliar revolution, which
is not without resemblance to the French Revolution. To carry off a
successful revolution on the model of the Revolution of 1789, prior
agreements have to be reached and men of confidence have to be in the
right position (the three pacts and the infiltrators); there has to be a
mastermind (Rahner); there has to be a Magna Charta (religious liberty,
collegiality, ecumenism). There must also be an engine of war set in motion
by a key, a magic word to energize and set in motion the entire revolution.
That key word was pronounced by the liturgist Dom Lambert Beauduin
when he prophesied that Roncalli, once elected pope, would be able to call
a council and consecrate ecumenism.[445]
1. The Leitmotiv of the Peaceful Revolution
Vatican II wanted to consecrate the opening of the Church to the
world. Now, the world of the 1960’s was marked by profound political and
moral changes: no more war, peace at any price, economic development,
liberation from taboos, the hippie movement, culminating in the student
protests of May 1968. The Church, too, would have her peaceful revolution
as she came into harmony with the world. The aging “Good Pope John”
longed to bring about a revolution in the Church under the banner of
aggiornamento and openness to the world. No more condemnations, no
more anathemas! Let us extend a new message of optimism to the world
reaching out to us. Let us rediscover our lost unity. Vatican II would finally
erase fifteen centuries of heresy and schism, throwing the past in the
rubbish bin and acting as though nothing had happened, ever moving
toward a more perfect fraternity. For what motive? For the motive and in
the name of ecumenism. At what price? At any price. The Church wanted at
all costs to establish peace with the world under the standard of ecumenism.
With such a wedge set at the heart of the conciliar preoccupations, it would
be possible to break apart the entire Church.
Ecumenism means universality or catholicity. The ecumenical effort
signifies the work to promote the universality of the Church–the Catholic
Church. It was the wish of our Lord in the prayer after the Last Supper:
“That they may be one!” We have sufficiently described the modernist
ecumenism of Rahner to be able to understand the equivocacy which might
slip into this traditional term. For modernists, undaunted in the face of
contradiction, all churches are true; their differences are measured only in
degree. The Catholic religion is true, but only a little more so than the
others. The “ghetto Church” of the Vatican ought to open her doors to
rediscover unity, lost more or less by her own fault. In other words, ever
since the emergence of schisms and heresies, the Catholic Church has
lacked the marks of unity and universality which have traditionally argued
her veracity.
It is interesting that the enemies of the Church do not mention her
sanctity and apostolicity, the two other marks of the true Church. Evidently
they are much less “ecumenical” than the others. Neither Luther nor Calvin
nor any other heresiarch shone particularly by his sanctity. Moreover, none
of them can claim to have received an apostolic mission from Christ to sow
subversion and schism in His own Church. The later generations of
modernists concentrate rather on the unity of the Church and, in this, they
are quite correct. Indeed, unity is the one mark which defines essentially the
Catholic Church and the source of her cohesion. (The other marks are also
proper to the Church, but they do not define her essentially or properly.)
This unity is triple, including unity of government, of faith, and of
sacraments.
It is precisely here that the question becomes more complicated for the
false ecumenists. They would square the circle and reconcile contraries.
Now, there are three ways of uniting elements which differ from one
another. They can be transformed into a new reality, according to the
proverb Solve et coagula–dissolve and unite. One might also preserve a
common core while dissolving the differences. Finally, one might choose to
let them peacefully coexist, respecting the differences of each. The first
case represents the Church of the Future, Teilhard’s vision, which,
according to him, is unimaginable and indescribable. However, this
metamorphosis of all religions would sign the death warrant of the Church
of Christ since it would annihilate above all her unity of government. On
the other hand, the unity of faith and of sacraments would be destroyed in
the second case with a vague union of religions. The result would be a
centripetal Church in which the differences would be downplayed and the
common points underlined to produce a sort of Charter of United Religions
which would serve as a backbone to the whole. This pretended union would
thus be founded on the lowest common denominator, or else on a common
dogma, or quite simply on a common impulsion toward the divinity.
However, the wish to establish a common and universal Religion is as
absurd as believing in a God who is at once the Holy Trinity, Allah,
Buddha, and the Dalai Lama.[446] It is evident that the truths of the Faith
such as the Trinity and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ would then be
reduced to symbols and ultimately to chimeras in which no one placed any
significant belief. Such is probably the type of religion of which dreamed
Schleiermacher and Tyrrell.
There is a third image sought by the ecumenists at Vatican II. It is the
pantheon-Church, the Tower of Babel of religions, infinitely wide and
varied. It does indeed seem that the conciliarists envisioned a real but
flexible union of all religions, an amalgam of beliefs in a mutually
enriching respect for the differences of each. This third option is Rahner’s
open, pluralist Church. Sadly, far from representing a satisfying solution, it
labors under the difficulties of the two previous “churches” put together.
The structure of the Church and the Faith are both destroyed, for truth is, if
it were possible, even less diversified than the Roman scaffolding of the
Church; it is exclusive. It admits of no degree and suffers no contradiction.
The ecumenists responsible for the making of Vatican II–and for its
undoing–had to distort words and realities before the open, pluralist Church
could be accepted. Only with abundance of ambiguities and behind-the-
scenes maneuvering did they succeed in passing off to the Council Fathers
the identity of contraries: the Church of Jesus Christ is only the Catholic
Church and is not only the Catholic Church; truth in matters of religion is
the Catholic Faith alone and it is not the Catholic Faith alone; the grace of
Jesus Christ is received exclusively through the Catholic Church and it is
not received exclusively through her. Or else, if they did not identify
contraries, they relativized them, portraying one Church to be as good as
another, one faith as true as another. These two means, contradiction and
relativism, lead to absolute skepticism: nothing is true since everything and
its contrary is true. So it is that the Council was only able to implement the
incoherent charter of ecumenism by sacrificing the principles of reason and
faith. In good logic, such an opinion leads straight into the perfect
intellectual and religious nirvana which is the very essence of modernism.
Moreover, since this conciliar ecumenism is itself founded on philosophical
skepticism and doctrinal relativism, we are led to conclude that it is indeed
the practical application of modernism.
With this in mind, there is no better illustration of the ravages of
modernism than to see our leaders struggling in vain to make ecumenism
work. Finally disillusioned, Paul VI declared at the end of his life:
[T]he difficulties to re-establishing a real unitarian fusion of the various Christian
denominations are such as to paralyze all human hope that it can be realized historically. The
ruptures that have taken place have ossified, solidified, and organized themselves in such a
way as to characterize as Utopian all attempts to reconstruct in dependency on the head, which
is Christ, “a body,” as St. Paul writes, “joined and knit together.…”[447]
This text reveals more than the Pope’s dream of combining all the Christian
Churches; it reveals that he had not yet understood that an enterprise to
unite contraries is quite simply absurd. Only a mind tainted by modern evil
could desire at all costs the squaring of the circle. Such is, nonetheless, the
amalgam sought by Vatican II, which declared that “the Church of Christ
subsists in the Catholic Church”[448]–another way of saying that the
Catholic Church is no longer the exclusive Church of Jesus Christ. Only
recently, Cardinal Ratzinger gave a perfect explanation of the weight of this
text, recognizing the ineluctable contradiction yet without overreacting:
However, the difference between “subsistit” and “est” represents the tragedy of
ecclesiastical divisions. Although the Church is but one and subsists in a single subject,
ecclesial realities exist outside of this subject: veritable local churches and diverse ecclesial
communities. Since sin is a contradiction, we cannot, in the last analysis, fully resolve from a
logical point of view the discrepancy between “subsistit” and “est.”[449]
If we analyze the texts, it is easy enough to see that the Council was
only a ratification of false ecumenism à la Rahner. It affirmed that the
separate Churches are not without their value in the mystery of salvation
since the Church of Christ does not disdain to use them as instruments of
salvation.[450] To Congar, friend of Rahner, do we owe the schema of
Lumen Gentium, which, with its famous “subsistit,” claims that the separate
Churches belong to the Church of Christ–pure heresy.[451] Small wonder if
equivocacy of terminology was rampant at the Council. Where the
traditional magisterium dealt with the nature of the Church, Congar spoke
instead of the mystery of the Church; where Pius XII consecrated the notion
of member of the Mystical Body of Christ, Congar inserted Tyrrell’s vague
notion of “communion of the People of God.” Why? Because one is or is
not a member of a body, but one can be more or less in communion.[452]
Vatican II hastened to render explicit the “multiple reasons” uniting us
to non-Catholics: the Holy Scripture, belief in the Holy Trinity, baptism, the
Eucharist, devotion to Mary, union in the Holy Ghost, martyrdom.[453] The
fragility of these “multiple reasons” need scarcely be proved when we know
that the Orthodox refuse the magisterium of the Church in the interpretation
of Holy Scripture and that the Protestants reject devotion to Mary. Seeing
only the positive side of a heresy means failing to understand that the
element of truth is not the animating force in a false doctrine but rather the
slave to the element of error.[454] The true mode of operation of conciliar
ecumenism is to hide the truth; it is like the doctor who, by charity, would
spare the cancer of his patient under the pretext that the evil may well be of
good faith. We will see where ecumenism was to lead under John Paul II,
not only hiding the truth but making it serve as an instrument in the
propagation of the error of religious syncretism.

2. The “Devil’s Spoon”

Cardinal Suenens declared that one could draw up an impressive list of
theses taught at Rome before the Council as exclusively true and which
were eliminated by the Council Fathers.[455] Obviously, the 2,400 Fathers
who had arrived from around the world were, at the beginning of the
Council, united by the same doctrine, the same love for our Lord, and the
same will to labor for the conversion of souls. How, then, can these same
bishops have ultimately proclaimed something other than the perpetual
doctrine of the Church? The project of ecumenism was an open invitation to
the devil. There is a proverb which says, if you want to dine with the devil,
you had better use a long spoon. What spoon did the devil use to hoodwink
all of the bishops at once? The same as he used in 1789. An historian of the
French Revolution, Augustin Cochin, puzzled over the baffling incapacity
of the government of Louis XVI to react against the Revolution. His
response to the question sheds light for us on the methods employed at the
Council. He explained that the ideas of the revolution managed to penetrate
contemporary minds unchecked thanks to societies of thought, the
equivalent of our modern pressure groups. These societies, whatever their
particularities, all had the same basic characteristics: the exclusion of any
effective activity and thus of any reality check; the quest for unity at any
cost in spite of differences of opinion; the method of dialogue. Vatican II,
like the societies of thought, was carried out by ideologists.
The essential characteristic of these demagogical societies is their lack
of finality and realism–we would say, their lack of pastoral vision. Yet, was
not Vatican II touted precisely as a pastoral council? Yes, if the word
signifies ambiguous, indecisive, refusing to define anything infallibly; no, if
the word means seeking to resolve concrete problems. All of the previous
councils, even the most dogmatic, had been eminently pastoral because they
preserved the faith of the flock while condemning particular heresies.
Pastoral activity had a precise goal, that of addressing current problems
faced by Catholics, and it did not have time to concoct ambiguous
declarations to please other religions. Vatican II was notoriously indecisive
from the outset. What was meant by a council with no precise goal apart
from “opening to the world”? Was it not tempting the Holy Ghost to
proclaim His intervention in a meeting which had no real reason for being?
Did it not amount to giving the modernists carte blanche to fill the void?
Cardinal Siri actually considered that some prelates had come to the
Council specifically intending to lead the Church into Protestantism by
eliminating Tradition and papal primacy.[456] Moreover, what could be
more vague than a great missionary movement toward souls in general, than
wanting to address a theoretical “modern man.” Ecumenism claimed to
open the Church to the world and address global issues, but it remained
general and abstract–far from the realism of true shepherds of the flock.
Thus, in the name of aggiornamento, the Council Fathers undertook to
examine every aspect of the life of the Church, a colossal undertaking and
obviously beyond their competence. It seems, too, that the less one knows
about a subject the more tempting it is to oversimplify and adopt definitions
of a false and ultimately simplistic clarity. In such conditions, it was not
difficult for them to be carried away by an enlightened minority.
A second point proper to ideological societies is their quest for unity at
any price. A consensus must be obtained whether it is true or not.
Monsignor Zaula, among many others, confessed at Fulda that such had
also been the principal preoccupation in the aula. The objective which the
Commission on the Liturgy held most at heart in examining the
amendments of the Council Fathers was to develop a text sure to obtain the
assent of two thirds of the conciliar assembly.[457] Unfortunately, the vote,
ill-used, is not a recipe for truth but for accommodation. During the
Council, voting was ubiquitous; there was voting at every level: at
preparatory episcopal conferences, in the commissions, in the aula, and
finally in the general sessions, where there were 538 distinct votes. The
sheer quantity of votes tended to discourage the recalcitrant, such that the
most controversial schemata were opposed in the end only by a tiny
minority.[458] The means to ecumenical union is the democratic
combinazione, ambiguity, the path of least resistance–at the expense of
truth. As an example, Cardinal Ottaviani confided that, at the Council,
equivocation was used and largely prevailed. We could cite a hundred cases
of such ambiguity, which was in fact premeditated, as Fr. Laurentin
explained:
Here and there, ambiguity was cultivated as an escape from inextricable oppositions. One
could lengthen the list of such wordings encompassing opposing tendencies, because they
could be looked at from both sides just like those photographic tricks whereby you see two
different people in the same picture depending on the angle you look at it. For this reason,
Vatican II already has given, and will continue to give rise to many controversies.[459]
The method of consensus is dialogue. Dialogue automatically gives
rise to three things: selection, for any group is profane compared to a group
of initiates; the adhesion of all members to general and emotionally loaded
ideas; conformity to the opinions of the group, even at the expense of
reality and truth. Jean Guitton, French journalist and a great friend of Pope
Paul VI, explains that: “When two men of different convictions dialogue
with the idea of finally coming to an understanding, their procedure is first
to delimit the zones of agreement, then to extend them as much as possible.
…The ecumenical method consists in such dialogues.”[460] Obviously,
dialogue is the appropriate method when the two parties seeking a
resolution are on the same footing. How, then, can Catholics engage in
serious dialogue to seek the truth, knowing that they already possess it
fully? We do not read in the Gospel that Jesus Christ ever commanded us to
“enter into dialogue” with the pagans but rather to teach them and convert
them. However, the mentality of ecumenical dialogue reigned supreme in
the conciliar aula: “A text is not ecumenical simply because it exposes the
truth. The schema does not constitute a progress toward dialogue with non-
Catholics but is rather an obstacle to it; worse yet, a prejudice.…If the
schemata of the Theological Commission are not rewritten, we will be
responsible for the Second Vatican Council’s destruction of a great, an
immense hope.” To which Monsignor Carli replied: “Apparently, some
would have us make no mention of Tradition or of the Blessed Virgin, on
account of the Protestants; of primacy, on account of the Eastern Church; of
atheism, in order to keep out of politics; of the moral order, so as not to
alienate modern man.”[461]
Rubbing elbows with non-Catholic observers at the refreshment stand
(jokingly nicknamed Bar Jona) gave a strong ecumenical dimension all by
itself. A Catholic theologian pointed out that if Rome were to print in red all
the passages in the conciliar documents modified in connection with
commentaries uttered by non-Catholic observers, it would make a very
colorful volume.[462] The Fathers were also abandoned to the influence of
opinion, in particular that of the ubiquitous press, to such an extent that
John XXIII spoke of the “Council of the journalists.” These journalists
considered themselves to be the spokesmen of the laity. They issued
marching orders or anathemas to influence the Fathers, who were terrified
of being labeled fundamentalist. Under the united action of Catholic
innovators, Protestants and laymen, St. Peter’s Basilica became a giant
pressure-cooker, quickly and profoundly transforming the mindset of the
Catholic leadership of the entire planet. Dialogue quickly gave way to the
tyranny of the most organized group with its own carefully prepared
agenda. The Council soured; Vatican II metamorphosed into a vulgar
conciliabulum.
3. The Pacts and the Coup d’État
The French Revolution did not simply explode one fine spring day at
Versailles. It had been prepared long before by means of secret pacts. It was
masterfully conducted by a band of brigands united by the Tennis-Court
Oath, swearing to topple the throne. They managed to put in place, in
perfect illegality, the structure responsible for the most revolutionary laws
which succeeded each other at a lightning pace. Precisely the same thing
occurred at Vatican II.
In deliberately styling the Council as pastoral and ecumenical, the
Pope meant to offer to the world a unity which Vatican I had not managed
to obtain. To this end, Rome signed before the Council the “triplice pacto
previo–the triple prior agreement” with the Jewish Freemasons of B’nai
B’rith, the Communists, and the Protestants. The Rome-Moscow agreement
was concluded at Metz on August 18, 1962, between the Patriarch
Nicodemus, the KGB’s right-hand man, and Cardinal Tisserant. The latter
had received the injunction from John XXIII to sit down for talks at any
price, as well as formal orders not only to negotiate an agreement but also
to verify its exact execution during the Council.[463] So it was that all the
numerous petitions calling for the condemnation of communism found
themselves classified deep within a Roman drawer.[464] Vatican II, with its
claims to “read the signs of the times” and glorify “the Church of the poor,”
managed to pass over in silence the single most important event of the
twentieth century and so abandon a hundred million unhappy victims of
Luciferian communism. Might not “the spirit of the Council” be the silent
demon of the Gospel? It is equally painful to see the complacency of John
XXIII toward the Jews. In 1963, a dispatch arrived from Washington
addressed by Dr. Label Kartz, president of B’nai B’rith. He had been
encouraged by Cardinal Bea to send his desiderata: a declaration which
would affirm the responsibility of all humanity for the death of Christ,
removing all responsibility from the Jewish people.[465] The same scenario
was repeated with the Protestants, again by the intermediary of Cardinal
Bea. In July 1965, the Ecumenical Council of Churches presented a
document expressing seven fundamental requirements of the Protestants in
the matter of religious liberty. Four months later emerged the conciliar
Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, satisfying every one of these requests.
These agreements, signed with the enemies of the Church–the same
who were later present at the Council as observers–represent a first step
toward revolution. They were only the beginning. During the preparatory
meetings, an active minority working to bend the meaning of the texts had
already begun to make itself heard. Modernism was already strongly
represented by the very men who would make and unmake the Council:
Cardinals Liénart, Döpfner, Bea, Frings, Alfrink, Léger, König, and
Richaud. Of the twenty preparatory schemata not one remained except the
insidious text on the liturgy; the Council therefore opened without an
agenda, without the least preparation, at the mercy of the first comer. The
revolutionary spirit watched and waited in the minds of certain men
determined to seize the wheel of the Council the moment it began. It was
embodied by those who swore their own Tennis-Court Oath. Jean Guitton
recounts an anecdote whose source was Cardinal Tisserant:
He showed me a painting.…It shows six or seven porporati around their president who is
Tisserant. “This is an historic painting, or rather symbolic. It represents the meeting we had
before the opening of the Council at which we decided to block the first session by refusing
the tyrannical rules established by John XXIII.”[466]
These rules required the members to vote on the very first day to elect
the members of the various commissions. Naturally, many conservative
members of the Preparatory Commission were likely to be elected on
account of their universally recognized competence. Their election was
precisely what the modernists wanted to avoid at all cost in order to put
their own men of confidence in those key positions. Cardinal Liénart was
the protagonist of that tragic day, October 13, 1962. Against the explicit
will of the Pope, he took the microphone and asked that the vote be
delayed; his suggestion received wild applause from the assembly. As he
left the session, which had lasted barely twenty minutes, he was met with a
cry of “Allons, enfants de la patrie.[467] Ah! You Frenchmen!” After this
little coup d’état, the revolutionary party of the European Alliance strode
from victory to victory. The journalist-priest Ralph Wiltgen made an
impressive list of them in his evocatively titled book, The Rhine Flows into
the Tiber:
• October 16, 1962: the European Alliance carries off a majority of
conciliar commissions in the elections.
• October 22, 1962: priority is given to the liberal schema on the
liturgy, which would set the tone for the other conciliar documents.
• November 14-22, 1962: the schema on the sources of Revelation is
rejected, blocked by the liberals who, refusing Tradition, adopt the Lutheran
sola Scriptura.
 • December 1962 and the end of the first session: no schema has been
approved, revelatory of a strong opposition toward the spirit of the
Preparatory Commission.
• End of 1963: the schema on the Blessed Virgin is included in the
schema on the Church. Absolutely no mention is made of her title as
Mediatrix of All Graces, judged non-ecumenical.
• September 30-October 6, 1964: the discussion of the schema on
divine Revelation, in which the problem of the two sources was skillfully
avoided.
• October 20-November 10, 1964: the liberal, naturalistic schema on
the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, is accepted.
• November 20, 1964: the decree on ecumenism, Unitatis
Redintegratio, is accepted.
• October 28, 1965: promulgation of the declaration on religious
liberty, Dignitatis Humanae.
• November 15, 1965: summary approval of the schema on marriage,
whose wording leaves open the question of the use of artificial birth control.
It was finally amended in extremis by Paul VI to eliminate the ambiguities.

4. The Mastermind
Wiltgen, in speaking of the European Alliance–already strongly
supported by the French cardinals–highlights above all the dictatorship of
the German element. Since the position of the German language bishops
was regularly adopted by the European Alliance and the position of the
Alliance was more often than not adopted by the Council, it might only take
one theologian’s convincing the German-language bishops of his point of
view for the entire Council to change its position. Such a theologian
existed; his name was Karl Rahner.
In principle, Fr. Rahner was merely the personal theologian of
Cardinal König. In fact, many members of the German and Austrian
hierarchies had recourse to his inspiration. During a private conversation,
Cardinal Frings declared that Fr. Rahner was “the greatest theologian of the
century.”[468]
Rahner had had a run-in with the Holy Office over his dubious theses
against the Assumption of Mary and the virginal Maternity, so that Cardinal
Ottaviani felt compelled to prevent this outlaw’s participating in the
Council. All of his writings were subjected to a preventative Roman
censure, as had been the case for de Lubac and Congar. However, Pope
John XXIII, who had already included his French co-religionists as experts
at the Preparatory Commission for the Council, welcomed Rahner with
open arms after receiving a petition on his behalf from certain powerful
protectors. Other notable modernists were named as experts: Schillebeeckx,
later infamous for his Dutch Catechism, Küng, Ratzinger, and Chenu. These
innovators were transformed from marginal crypto-modernists into
conciliar theologians by Roncalli’s sleight of hand.
When Rahner was named as an expert at the Council along with about
190 other theologians, he was by far the best prepared thanks to the
preliminary work of his own writings. His influence at the Council was
such that the official commentary of the Council texts in German cites
Rahner 95 times, Congar 67 times, St. Thomas 48 times, and de Lubac 15
times. The fact would seem to suggest that the Council was interpreted in
the light of Rahner’s works, especially those on the Church, the episcopacy,
and the question of permanent deacons.
Rahner had carved himself out a sphere of influence among the other
theologians: over Ratzinger, his right hand man, but also over Vorgrimler,
Küng, Boff, Metz, Lehmann, and a number of German-language bishops.
They were all under his spell, according to the testimony of one of them.
Asked to describe Rahner’s influence on the Doctrinal Commission, Congar
replied:
Enormous. The atmosphere became: “Rahner dixit, ergo verum est.”[469] I will give you
an example. The Doctrinal Commission was made up of bishops, each with his own expert at
his side, but also included certain superior generals (of the Dominicans or the Carmelites, for
instance). Now, there were two microphones on the table of the Commission, but Rahner
practically had one of them to himself alone. Rahner was a little invasive and, in addition, very
often the cardinal from Vienna, Franz König, of whom Rahner was the expert, turned toward
him and invited him to intervene by saying: “Rahner, quid?” Naturally, Rahner intervened. In
any case, he was always very interesting and often courageous.[470]
He was indeed omnipresent: he held conferences in the presence of the
German-language bishops; he was invited by the South American bishops
favorable to liberation theology; he participated in meetings between
French and German theologians; he had an open invitation from the liberal
cardinals, in particular Montini and Lercaro.
The European Alliance, united around its mastermind, quickly realized
that it would not be enough to boycott the preparatory schemata, but that
they would have to counterattack with replacements. Rahner himself
explained to what extent the German element was well organized:
 These last days, I have composed in Latin a criticism of the first dogmatic schema (Lumen
Gentium). This afternoon, it will be in the hands of every one of the German bishops. The
German experts have already printed four hundred copies. Tomorrow I will have to write a
summary for the South American bishops. Maybe, after all, we will obtain a good third of the
votes, which will avoid the worst. Frings is optimistic.…Frings is also distributing about two
thousand copies of a pseudo-schema “fabricated” by Ratzinger and me. But I think there is
little hope for that one.”[471]
Rahner was already influential in liturgical matters by his doctrinal
justification of concelebration; he now threw all his efforts into sabotaging
the schemata on the sources of Revelation, for if there existed a second
source of Revelation outside of Holy Scripture, namely oral Tradition, then
it would become impossible to reach an agreement with the Christians who
base their faith on sola Scriptura.[472] Once short work had been made of
the schema on the two sources, there remained little hope for the others.
Henceforth the Council began to advance beyond anything the European
Alliance had ever imagined. Rahner composed new schemata on
Revelation, the Blessed Virgin, and the Church in 1963 for the conference
of Fulda, of which he was the mastermind. Thanks to a carefully organized
work, “each of the German-speaking Council Fathers had been supplied
with a total of 480 mimeographed pages of comment, criticism, and
substitute schemata by the time he left for the second session.”[473] The
Germano-European Alliance thus became the group by far the best prepared
for determining the orientation of the Council.
The schema Dei Verbum on the sources of Revelation gives an idea of
what was at stake in the struggle and also of the modus operandi of the all-
powerful modernists within the Commission responsible for the schema,
constantly chipping away at the traditional view. Their goal was nothing
less than the denial of oral Tradition as the second source of Revelation, the
denial of the universal inerrancy of the Holy Bible by confining it to
questions of faith and morals alone, and finally the casting of doubt onto the
historicity of the Gospels: “The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels…
always in such a way that they tell us true and sincere things about
Jesus.”[474] The Rahnerians systematically blocked all amendment in the
traditional sense, until the day when Paul VI, realizing–a bit late–the
underlying ambiguity, felt obliged in conscience to demand a more
orthodox formulation.[475] However, most of the equivocations remained
in place. All of the major dogmatic texts–on the Church, on ecumenism, on
Revelation, on religious liberty–were riddled with equivocal statements
cunningly inserted by the revolutionary periti.
 The schema on the Blessed Virgin was a source of considerable
anxiety to Rahner since it promised to wreak havoc in the domain of
ecumenism. The point which he found particularly offensive was the
teaching of the schema on the mediation of the most Blessed Virgin–more
precisely her title of Mediatrix of All Graces. Rahner’s diktat became
manifest when he made it known that the bishops of Austria, Germany, and
Switzerland should consider themselves forced to declare openly that they
could not accept the schema in its present form.[476] This victory of his
Marian views established Karl Rahner as the most powerful man at the
Council.
The Council studied the theme of collegiality based on Rahner’s book
Episcopacy and Primacy,[477] newly re-edited by Ratzinger. Here more
than in any other text Rahner marked the final product with his indelible
stamp. He congratulated himself on it openly, considering this text to be the
Council’s most significant innovation.[478] Congar confirmed this
sentiment but insisted that Rahner’s interests were universal:
He did not have the good fortune of collaborating, like me, in the composition of the texts on
ecumenism, religious liberty (where his collaboration would have been very important), and
non-Christian religions within the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians. Yet he was consumed
by the ecumenical desire.[479]

5. The “Magna Charta”

The Declaration of the Rights of Man had been prepared in secret
conclaves long before carrying off the assent of the revolutionary assembly.
The same was true for the “Magna Charta” consecrated by Vatican II.
Vatican II was not so much the starting point for a new theology as the
endpoint and official ratification of the neo-modernist theories. The
theology which triumphed at the Council was that of the same theologians
who had only recently been condemned, removed from teaching posts or
sent into exile.[480] The theology of the outcast doctors had indeed
triumphed across the board. As a general rule, the conciliar texts were not
openly heretical or they would never have received the approval of the
conciliar assembly. Schillebeeckx, complaining of a particular text as too
openly conservative, was assured that the drafters had expressed themselves
diplomatically; after the Council, they would draw all of the implicit
conclusions.[481] The texts were simply ambiguous, thus constituting, in
reality, so many time-bombs. The three most important time-bombs of our
modernist pyrotechnicians correspond perfectly with the revolutionary
trilogy Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. We have sufficiently addressed the
question of ecumenism, the conciliar equivalent of revolutionary fraternity.
It remains for us to speak of the debates on religious liberty and collegiality.
Religious liberty, treated in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, was
the object of heated debate even before the opening of the Council. Cardinal
Ottaviani, bulldog of the Faith, defended the freedom of the Catholic
religion, which in certain circumstances may lead to the toleration of error.
Cardinal Bea, on the contrary, spoke of the freedom of religions and granted
freedom in principle to all faiths, as exercised in public as well as in private.
Such a theory amounted to granting rights to error and vice, according to
the American dream of Fr. John Courtney Murray, condemned by the Holy
Office prior to his victory at the Council. The absurd character of such a
“right” is flagrant in the intervention of Archbishop Wojtyla: “It is
necessary to accept the danger of error. One cannot embrace the truth
without having a certain experience of error. It is therefore necessary to
speak of the right to seek error and to err. I call out for liberty for the
conquest of the truth.”[482]
Pius IX, however, had already cast anathemas against those who affirm
that freedom of conscience and of worship is a right proper to every man, or
that the best condition of society is one in which the government does not
have the right to punish the violation of the Catholic religion by legal
censures unless necessitated by public order.[483] Precisely what Pius IX
condemned, Vatican II affirmed in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae:
“The person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom consists in this,
that in matter of religion, no one…should be prevented from acting
according to his conscience, in private or in public, alone or in association
with others, within just limits.”[484] Congar could not refrain from
admitting that such a text was in fairly strict contradiction with Propositions
15 and 17-19 of the Syllabus of 1864.[485] How could the modernists
justify their innovation? By pretending that the condemnation was valid for
the nineteenth century but was not valid in perpetuity, for, according to
Murray, Vatican II represents a continuity in the evolution of the traditional
teaching. It is as though, one fine autumn day, our Lord suddenly changed
His mind and decided He would no longer reign on earth. Before the hue
and cry of a number of Council Fathers, the Pope, to break the standoff,
decided to add a textual note claiming that nothing in the text contradicted
Tradition. These blithe words, which changed nothing, were the spoonful of
sugar allowing the liberal revolution to go down without a protest.
Moreover, let us not imagine that such quarrels were mere hair-
splitting. Thanks to religious liberty, the last of the Catholic nations–Spain,
Columbia, certain Swiss cantons, and Italy–found themselves obliged to
laicize the State. Thanks to religious liberty, divorce has now invaded these
countries. Thanks to religious liberty, children are no longer entitled to learn
that they have a Father in heaven who loves them. Thanks to religious
liberty, sects and new religious movements offer an easy way out to
Catholics thrown off balance by the conciliar whirlwind. Thanks to
religious liberty, more than sixty million Catholics in South America have
already apostatized. Are these the abundant fruits of the Council, welcomed
as the springtime of the Church?
Equality completes the triptych of the Masonic Magna Charta of the
Rights of Man. In religious terms, equality signifies the democratization of
the formerly “monolithic” Church. Our divine Redeemer created the
Church by founding it on Peter: “And I say to you that you are Peter and on
this rock I will build My Church.”[486] Rahner, on the contrary, was to
propose the collegial doctrine according to which the pope is but the equal
of the bishops–primus inter pares. His function would be limited to playing
the policeman to keep order among the other members, with a synarchic
and no longer a monarchic power, according to a thesis condemned by the
Church.[487] Thus, on October 30, 1963, the Council voted in favor of
collegiality, which invited the pope to share the government of the Church
with the bishops. Congar declared, triumphant, that the Church had carried
off her October Revolution! Though often warned of their perverse
intentions, the Pope had left the drafters free rein until the day when one of
the experts committed the supreme indiscretion of putting in writing the
interpretation which the modernists planned to draw from the ambiguous
passages once the Council had ended. This paper fell into the hands of the
conservatives, who carried it to the Pope. Pope Paul, finally understanding
that he had been fooled, was greatly moved and wept.[488] It was on this
occasion that he said to Cardinal Ruffini, summoned in haste one evening
of November 1964: “Eminence, save the Council! Save the Council! He
shuddered and wept: Sono i periti che fanno il Concilio![489]…We have to
rally, in the face of the mutiny of these employees.”[490]
 What could be done to rectify an ambiguous text that laid waste to the
divine constitution of the Church but was accepted by the Council Fathers?
The Pope ordered an appendix to be included in a nota explicativa praevia
which excluded the heretical interpretation. The Catholic doctrine had been
saved in extremis, at least as regards the constitution of the Church.
Nonetheless, the addition of such a note will ever remain a mute but
eloquent testimony to the ambiguity of the conciliar texts.
It is evident that these democratizing theories could only bear bitter
fruit. The personal authority of the bishops was henceforth torn between the
authority of the pope and that of the powerful episcopal conferences, a
situation that threatened to ruin the Church. Bishops saw their authority
melting into that of the episcopal conferences.
As an individual bishop I am absolutely powerless. Matters have been so arranged in the
Church today, that an appeal by a bishop would be ridiculed as well as going unheard.[491]
Almost all synods, diocesan or national, have tended to assert their independence and taken up
ideas and made proposals at odds with the stated policy of the Holy See, requesting such
things as the ordination of married men and of women, Eucharistic communion with separated
Christian brethren, and the admission of bigamous divorced people to the sacraments (the
Synods of the German and the Swiss Bishops).[492]
✜✜✜
Vatican Council II, in the words of Cardinal Suenens, was the 1789 of
the Church–the revolution sought by John XXIII, according to the
Freemason Marsaudon. Congar perhaps best defined the accomplishments
of Vatican II:
The Council liquidated what I would call the unconditionality of the system. By “system” I
mean the extremely coherent whole made up of the ideas communicated by the teaching of the
Roman universities, codified by canon law, protected by a strict and reasonably effective
surveillance under Pius XII, with accounts rendered, calls to order, submission of writings to
the Roman censor, etc.–in a word, a “system.” The Council disintegrated all that.[493]
What Congar calls “the unconditionality of the system” includes the
revealed deposit, the Faith, the sacraments, and the jurisdiction of the
Catholic Church, the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth, which alone holds
the promises of eternal life. The man who had for years been awaiting the
opportunity to put dynamite under the seats of the scribes could well rejoice
to see the Church renounce its mission of preserving the deposit of faith and
of teaching urbi et orbi the faith and the means of salvation. Like the child
who takes a perverse pleasure in destroying, it seems that Congar had no
greater joy in life than that of witnessing the dilapidation of the treasure of
the Church and the destruction of the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ.
 After the Council, the revolutionaries had the good sense to seal their
victory by preventing any return to the old order. Paul VI affirmed Vatican
Council II to be, under certain aspects, more important than the Council of
Nicea. Whoever today considers the Council to have been merely pastoral
is treated as a heretic and a schismatic! However, the Theological
Commission certainly went to enough pains to insist on the non-dogmatic
character of the Council.[494] Might it not be infallible after all, since it has
all the earmarks of the universal ordinary magisterium? It could at first
glance come as a surprise that the neo-modernist theologians who, on the
eve of the Council, detested the universal ordinary magisterium, should
today be its greatest advocates and invoke its authority at the drop of a hat.
But that was before the storming of the Bastille! Henceforth the
“fundamentalists” have been chained and scorned as leprous, which has
created de facto a universal modernist consensus. The revolutionaries can
therefore celebrate the universal ordinary magisterium, holding it up as
infallible after the definition of Vatican I, in order to grant the seal of
infallibility to the heresies of the modernists. However, they are getting a
little ahead of themselves because, unless one has the mental schemes of a
hard core modernist, the universal magisterium cannot contradict itself and
remain infallible. Are we facing an insoluble dilemma? On the contrary, the
solution is very simple. Universality in the context of magisterium does not
signify mere unanimity in space but also in time, according to the Canon of
Lerins: “quod semper et ubique”–always and everywhere. Take the
character of perpetuity away from infallibility and nothing remains to
prevent the Church from falling prisoner to an ideological mass movement,
imposing its errors by means of a pressure group. This is precisely what
occurred at Vatican II, and not only at Vatican II; the post-conciliar era is
every bit as modernist, with Paul VI, Ratzinger, and John Paul II flying the
same ecumenical colors saluted at the Council. The following chapters will
confirm this by a detailed study of these three authorities within what has
been so aptly named the “Conciliar Church.”
 CHAPTER 22: THE GRAVEDIGGER OF TRADITION, PAUL
VI
More than a century has gone by since the Carbonari, the Italian
Freemasons, first laid plans to undermine the papacy:
The work which we are going to undertake is not the labor of a day, nor of a month, nor of
a year; it may last several years, perhaps a century; yet, within our ranks, the soldier dies but
the battle continues.…What we must seek and await, as the Jews await the Messiah, is a pope
who suits our needs.…And this pontiff, like most of his contemporaries, will necessarily have
more or less imbibed the humanitarian principles which we are going to begin circulating.…
You wish to establish the reign of the elect upon the throne of the whore of Babylon and see
the clergy march behind your banner always believing it is marching behind the banner of the
Apostolic keys.…Throw out your nets.…deep into the sacristies, the seminaries, the convents.
…You will have preached a revolution in tiara and cope marching with the cross and the
banner–a revolution which will only need a little directing in order to set fire to the four
corners of the earth.[495]
When not being described as a revolutionary in tiara and cope, Paul VI
has been compared to Moses guiding the chosen people out of Egypt
toward the unknown Promised Land. He has often been presented, as well,
as a modern-day Hamlet who somehow found himself on the throne of
Peter. His indecisive temperament may have had its origin in a lack of solid
intellectual formation, since Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978) never
went to the seminary–a reality made all the more regrettable by the fact that
his father, a man of influence, was editor of a libertarian review. Hence a
certain juvenile utopianism: we can collaborate with the left but not with
the right.[496] These gaps in his formation were only accentuated by his
tendency to let imagination dominate over reality: “I am convinced that one
of my thoughts, a thought from my own soul, is worth more to me than
anything in the world.”[497]
His friend Jean Guitton describes him well. He represented the modern
man, which is remarkable in itself, for a pope, intended as a guide and a
leader of humanity, is not charged with the task of resembling the men of
his time, especially not the utterly disconcerted specimen who is modern
man. This pope was not content merely to think as we do, which is an easy
exercise of the mind, but he felt, he worried, he suffered as we do. Paul VI
bore in his nature a resemblance to the men of his time, in his aspirations as
in his torments.[498] With such a mentality, this unwitting liberal had but
one ambition: to gather into one all peoples and all Churches; it was an
ambition to which he was prepared to sacrifice everything. It was he who
discreetly fomented modernism in the Vatican of Pius XII, in the shadow of
his protector, John XXIII. However, he should be known above all as the
pope who undertook the systematic application of conciliar iconoclasm.

1. His Friends
“Tell me who your friends are, I will tell you who you are.” This
proverb holds the key to an understanding of this contradictory, anxious
character who served as substitute Secretary of State under Pius XII. He
was a great admirer of modernism and the only priest who dared to attend
the gatherings and discussions held at the home of Count Gallarati-Scotti,
twice condemned by the Holy Office. He was reportedly an admirer of the
Philosophies of Action, popularized in France by Laberthonnière, Blondel,
and LeRoy. His flirtation with modernism is confirmed by his confidant,
Jean Guitton:
September 8, 1969–The Pope sings the praises of Fr. de Lubac. He boasts of his intellect
and of the solidity and the breadth of his documentation, he is astonished to see him treated by
some as “outdated.” April 29, 1974–The Pope tells me of his great esteem for the modern
theologians. He cites Manaranche, de Lubac, to whom he gives first prize, Congar, Rahner
(whom he says is not a very clear thinker), and Cardinal Journet (whom he finds a bit too
scholastic).[499]
He sheltered Blondel:
Your trilogy on “Philosophy and the Christian Mind”...has proven itself a monument of
lofty and beneficial apologetics; and how could your filial homage to His Holiness not have
been pleasing to Him? Your philosophical speculations, therefore, all of which respect the
transcendence of the revealed deposit of faith, are nonetheless consistently fruitful in their
application to the mysteries of the Faith as a whole.[500]
In the name of Pius XII, Montini thus approved Blondel’s entire opus–
which the same Pope would condemn only a short time later in Humani
Generis.
The substitute Secretary of State was finally distanced from the Curia
in the last years of Pacelli’s pontificate on account of a certain
independence of judgment as well as Montini’s tardiness in reporting
certain facts to the Pope in the hope that tensions would ease over time.
[501] He was dismissed also for having established contact with Stalin
during the Second World War against the explicit orders of the Pope. In
1954, in a secret report from the archbishop of Riga, imprisoned by the
Soviets, Pius XII was informed that a high personality of the Secretariat of
State had been in contact with the persecutors in the name of the Pope. His
bitterness was so great as to affect his health, and he felt obliged henceforth
to direct the external affairs of the Vatican unassisted by a Secretary of
State.[502]
The treason appeared in still greater relief when Humani Generis was
published, in which Pius XII condemned with vigor the modernist
deviations of the time. He had commanded the bishops and superior
generals, under pain of grave sin, to keep diligent watch that such opinions
not be spread in schools or in meetings and conferences.[503] Montini
proceeded, under the Pope’s nose, to confide to his friend Jean Guitton that
the errors condemned were but
ways of thinking which could lead into error but which in themselves remained perfectly
respectable. Moreover, there are three reasons for which the encyclical will not be deformed:
the first, I can tell you between us, is the explicit will of the Holy Father. The second is the
mentality of the French episcopacy, which is so open-minded, so welcoming of contemporary
currents of thought.…I come to my third reason. It is a short one: the French are intelligent.
[504]
Once again, Pius XII was made aware of the treason and took
disciplinary measures against Montini, distancing him from Rome by
naming him archbishop of Milan–promoveatur ut amoveatur. He refused
him the red hat of a cardinal and never accepted to receive him in audience.
While de Lubac dodged thunderbolts from the Holy Office and saw his
books denounced, from Milan there came to him words of adhesion and
encouragement.[505] Montini was made a cardinal by his friend John
XXIII, opening for him the path to the papacy which Pius XII had
intentionally blocked. Once elected pope, Montini was able to wield the
supreme authority in service of the forces of modernism.
To an even greater extent than John XXIII, he opened the doors of the
Council to the new theologians. Their number went from 201 in September
1962 to 480 at the end of the Council, thanks to the discreet influence of
Paul VI showing them his approval by receiving them in private audiences,
concelebrating with them, and praising their collaboration.[506] He
exercised the same discreet influence over the Council Fathers, subtly
urging them to ratify the new theology condemned such a short time before
by Pius XII. Cardinal Daniélou defined Paul VI as a liberal pope. This was
not so much because he was compromising and undecided but, on the
contrary, avid to defend liberal ideas. Paul VI knew what he wanted and
used discretion in order to sidestep the foreseeable reactions of the
recalcitrant, as Bugnini bore witness.[507] In reality, he guided the bark of
Peter with a methodic and tenacious firmness–belying an equally tenacious
legend–on a straight and steady course toward ecumenical modernism.
Thus he brought into line Fr. Charles Boyer, rector of the Gregorian
University, obliging him to rehabilitate both de Lubac and Teilhard de
Chardin by forcing him to invite de Lubac to a Thomistic congress.[508]
The Pope was equally firm in breaking the resistance of the exegetes
by reinstating certain professors of the Biblical Institute, a den of
modernism under the influence of the nefarious Cardinal Tisserant. Zerwick
and Lyonnet, the very men who had been expelled by the Holy Office in
1961, triumphantly reassumed their chairs of Holy Scripture in the heart of
Rome thanks to Paul VI. Yet these professors had not cast off their errors:
the denial of the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, “Behold, a virgin will
conceive and will bear a child…”; the refusal to consider Romans 5:12 as
pointing to original sin, as defined by the Council of Trent; the denial of the
primacy of Peter in Matthew 16:17-19, “Blessed are you, Simon.…”[509]
Congar accurately described Paul VI as speaking to the right and
acting to the left. Paul VI effectively packed the court of the Biblical
Commission by the addition of new, enlightened members who introduced
Bultmann’s Formgeschichte. The Pope brought the same modernist bias to
his judgment of Hans Küng, his comrade in arms at the Council. In fact, the
condemnation of Küng was perfectly benign since he was allowed to
continue teaching.[510] On the other hand, when Archbishop Lefebvre
decided to form his seminarians of Ecône according to Catholic Tradition,
he received notice of suspension a divinis and the order to disband his
Society and close his seminary within thirty days. His crime? He was anti-
modernist. Paul VI, ever clement for those of the left, revived the
Inquisition and its condemnations for the benefit of the “fundamentalists.”
How true it is that no one is more sectarian than a liberal.
Paul VI was an ardent promoter of ecumenism, following in the
footsteps of his protector, John XXIII. With Cardinals Bea, Frings, and
Liénart for faithful lieutenants, he considered it his duty to bring a new kind
of universality to the Church in order to render it acceptable to the modern
world such as it is, with its false philosophy, social principles, and religions.
All of these men seem to have suffered from an excessive fear of any taint
of superiority or exclusivity. They were afraid to be the salt of the earth and
the light of the world because it would mean opposition to the world. Their
false humility led them to reject the pride and treasure of Catholics: the fact
of belonging to the true religion, the only religion on earth to defend the
Ten Commandments, the only one to defend its principles in a reasonable
and logical way, the only one to satisfy the human conscience by its sanctity
and its charity. No! all of that must disappear. The mirage of the union of
mankind and his faith in man, believer or non-believer, was an obsession
for the spiritual leader of humanity, moving him even to sacrifice his role as
Vicar of Christ. He abandoned the primacy of divine truth and the primacy
of the pope. He was thus able to ignore the primacy of Jesus Christ and of
His Church.

2. Abandonment of the Primacy of the Faith

The principal abandonment was certainly that of the primacy of the
truth and of the truths of the Faith. The abdication of authority was
painfully manifest in the Dutch Catechism, better named the Catechism of
Heresies for its denial of angels, the priesthood, the Incarnation, and the
Real Presence. Rome allowed its publication and dissemination throughout
the world on condition that it include the Roman condemnation as an
appendix! This grave dereliction of the duty to protect the Faith was not an
isolated incident; the catechism of the French bishops, Pierres Vivantes
(Living Stones), was published surreptitiously before receiving Rome’s
approval. Cardinal Ratzinger at first decried the “indigence of the new
catechism” and the “degradation” of this catechism riddled with heresies;
he was met with an uproar on the part of the episcopacy and immediately
withdrew his criticism, insisting that he had only meant to address the
catechetical situation in general and not condemn the catechetical work in
France. The French bishops were free to toast their victory.[511]
In reality, revolutionary teachings had undermined the universities and
seminaries well before infiltrating the catechism. Cardinal Decourtray once
admitted that, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, openness and dialogue were already
watchwords in the Church and particularly in France. University professors
were also being swept off their feet by the wave of new methods and
ideologies, including the cult of secularism. Group therapy was the rage,
hand in hand with the study of modern systems of information, ranging
anywhere from unbridled freedom of expression to methods of thought
control.[512] Brainwashing was coming into its own, all the more so given
the immense popularity of Teilhard de Chardin in seminaries and lodges
alike.[513] Should we be surprised to see clergy and professors losing the
most essential of bearings: their Catholic faith?
 Fearing lest their sabotage of teaching institutions had not achieved its
full effect, the modernists decided to attack the Holy Bible itself by placing
in the hands of believers a Bible in harmony with their own oft-condemned
fantasies. This was the reasoning behind the new “ecumenical” Bible.
Could an ecumenical Bible be anything other than a fraudulent translation,
with a commentary infected with indifferentism? It is not difficult to
imagine the passages judged “too Catholic” being cleverly swept under the
table. The word of God had to bend before the fiat of the “separated
brethren.” God and His word are rather troublesome at times.
Such publications were free to roam and deny the doctrines of the
Church in all impunity since the Pope had suppressed the Index in 1965 and
paralyzed the Holy Office, following to the letter the modernist agenda,
which had called for the weakening of authority by the reform of the
Roman congregations, particularly the Holy Office and the Index.[514]
Gone are the days of condemnation and judiciary procedure! Modern man
has come into his own and is sufficiently adult to judge for himself.
Henceforth the Pope pledged never again to condemn anyone at all; the
faithful would follow the way of the Church more fully and out of love if
the content of the Faith and the nature of morals were simply laid out before
them.[515] Likewise, the Holy Office, henceforth renamed the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, found itself legally paralyzed
before even the most glaring cases of heresy since the secret inquisitorial
procedure had been outlawed. The Congregation had to use the ordinary
judicial procedure, which effectively prevented its reaching a final
decision–all the more so when the incriminated had the favor of powerful
protectors. This is the reason why, since 1968, so few condemnations have
been issued against heretical works, which proliferate with impunity. Such
was the case with Hans Küng, supported by the Swiss and German bishops.
Such was the case with Fr. Léon-Xavier Dufour, professor of exegesis at
Fourvière, who denied the Resurrection of Christ and found shelter behind
his Jesuit brothers. This state of affairs reduces by half the activity of the
papacy since its goal is not only to propagate the deposit of faith but also to
defend it against the attacks of the enemy. What use is an army when the
enemy knows it has no defense?

3. Abandonment of the Primacy of the Pope

 Along with the primacy of the Faith, the primacy of the pope has been
the object of repeated attacks since the close of the Council. In reality, the
first anti-papist was the Pope himself. As early as 1967, he complained of
the primacy of the pope as an obstacle to ecumenism.[516] His conviction
passed quickly into action as he relinquished his power as Vicar of Christ.
The Pope had a headlong collision with the bishops’ conferences over the
publication of Humanae Vitae. The Pope appointed a Commission to
consider the lawfulness of the pill, giving it two years to decide, as though
the Church had not definitively ruled on the question long ago. Certain
American bishops took advantage of the delay to encourage the use of
contraceptives. The encyclical finally appeared in 1968 to put an end to all
discussion. This act reaffirmed the authority of the pope over and above all
opposition; no believer could deny the competence of the teaching authority
of the Church in interpreting the natural law. Humanae Vitae became by the
very fact the most important act of Paul VI’s pontificate, for he had acted
against the advice of the Commission of theologians and against the “signs
of the times,” putting himself at odds with no less than twelve dissenting
bishops’ conferences. The principle of collegiality, or co-responsibility,
theoretically gave every bishop the right to judge anything and everything,
including papal decisions. The French episcopacy, with the Dutch and the
Canadians right behind, gave its own version of Humanae Vitae. It claimed
that, in case of conflicting duties, the individual conscience could decide
before God which duty was more important under the circumstances and
that one might be dispensed from moral obligations if faced with humanly
insupportable circumstances. Their presentation betrayed a twisted
exegesis, in flagrant opposition to the encyclical itself, which declared in no
uncertain terms that an intrinsically evil act was never licit.[517]
This sole act of authority on the part of the Pope and the storm of
protest to which it gave rise around the world were so painful to him that he
swore it would never happen again. The abscess of papal abdication was
opened with the pastoral council of Holland, which brought together a large
number of the faithful in the presence of the bishops. Ninety percent of the
participants voted for the abolition of priestly celibacy, the use of laicized
priests at the heads of parishes, the ordination of women, the right of
bishops to a deciding voice in papal decrees. The Pope’s response to this
assembly is typical of the pontificate of Paul VI. The eye sees the damage,
but the hand does not go to the root of the problem. The Pope admitted that
certain doctrinal propositions accepted by the bishops left him perplexed
and seemed worthy of serious reservations. He declared himself profoundly
moved to see Vatican II so rarely cited and to see the acceptance of
propositions so out of harmony with conciliar and papal rulings. Finally,
even though the bishops were in connivance, rather than asking them to
reaffirm the Faith on the disputed questions, Paul VI continued: “The
awareness of Our responsibility as Pastor of the Universal Church obliges
Us to ask you in all frankness: What do you think We can do to help you, to
strengthen your authority, to enable you to overcome better the present
difficulties of the Church in Holland?”[518]
This white flag before the Dutch offensive marked the complete
abdication of papal authority, so much so that, on June 22, 1972, the Pope
confessed openly: “Perhaps the Lord called me to this service not because I
was particularly apt for it or so that I would govern the Church and save it
from the present difficulties, but so that I might suffer something for the
Church and so give proof that He and no other guides and saves it.”[519]
Henceforth, the Pope had already abdicated his authority de facto. Rather
than removing errors and heretics from the midst of the faithful, the Vatican
stuck its head in the sand, notably in liturgical matters. Many priests did
whatever they liked in the matter of liturgy. Initiatives taken without
authorization had gone out of control. The Pope often yielded against his
better inclination.[520] In this manner, the French bishops illegally imposed
Communion in the hand and then spread the practice by force throughout
the Catholic world. With the phobia of authority typical of liberals, Paul VI
found it much more convenient to place the government of the Church in
other hands. The reorganization of the pontifical Curia had put all of the
Roman Congregations under the control of the Secretary of State, who
henceforth had the power to act as the true leader, with the Pope as a
figurehead.[521]
If we have analyzed accurately the historical facts of the pontificate of
Paul VI (repeated under John Paul II), we might draw the following
conclusion. Since the publication of Humanae Vitae, the Pope has not used
his power of infallibility to rule on an open question of faith or morals,
considering that he no longer has the strength to oppose the decisions of the
powerful bishops’ conferences. What is true for orthodox teaching is true a
fortiori for heterodox teaching. This conclusion alone destroys one of the
principal arguments used by the sedevacantists.[522]
4. The Abandonment of the Primacy
of Jesus Christ and of the Church
After the primacy of truth and of the pope, Rome consciously
abandoned the primacy of Jesus Christ, King of society. The gulf separating
St. Pius X from Paul VI might be expressed by two passages of Holy
Scripture on the reign of Christ. Ignoring the marching orders of St. Pius X,
“Restore all things in Christ,” the Church began contrariwise to echo the
cries of the Jews during the Passion: “We do not want Him to reign over
us,” effectively repudiating the kingdom of Christ on earth. The politics of
Rome has consisted in suppressing the last of the Catholic States, content to
see the Church granted the same rights as all religions. After Spain,
Colombia, and certain Swiss cantons, came Italy’s turn. As early as 1976,
Paul VI began preparing the Treaty of 1984, abrogating the article by which
Italy recognized the Catholic religion as the sole religion of the State.[523]
Paul VI asked only that the Catholic Church be recognized as a form of
religious expression which had played an important role in the history of
Italy, and nothing more.[524] Such an abdication of the primacy of Christ
the King over society opened the door to the secularism now rampant in
these once Christian countries: divorce and abortion by the unilateral
decision of the State, and catechism no longer obligatory in schools. How
could we pass in silence over Rome’s betrayal of the Catholics living under
a Communist regime, such as when Paul VI deprived Cardinal Mindszenty
of his functions as primate of Hungary to please the local authorities; such
as when he showed his sympathy toward the schismatic Catholic Church of
China condemned by Pius XII in 1956; such as when he visited Colombia
in support of the campesinos and, indirectly, the guerilleros; such as when
he embraced the KGB agent Athenagoras by lifting his excommunication;
such as when numerous official meetings took place between Casaroli and
the Soviet government, each one advancing the Communist cause. The
persecuted Catholics are still waiting to see the tangible fruits of this
nearsighted Ostpolitik.
Finally, Paul VI abandoned the primacy of the Catholic Church,
outside of which absolutely no one is saved.[525] The ecumenical spirit of
the Council was manifest in two different ways: by a despoiling of the
riches of the Church and by the scandalous overtures made to heretics. As
for the riches of the Church, we refer above all to the Holy Mass and to the
consecrated life. The Mass is the heart of the Christian life. It was
pulverized by the arrival of the New Mass, as Annibale Bugnini, the
architect of the Novus Ordo Missae cynically declared.[526] The Pope, in
an allocution to members of the Consilium, which included six non-
Catholic observers, reproached the Council of Trent with having obscured a
more ancient tradition.[527]
Jean Guitton shed light on the mindset of his illustrious friend: “Paul
VI had the ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to underplay anything
in the Mass which might be too Catholic in the traditional sense of the
word, in order to draw the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist
Mass.”[528] With such a criterion, we can understand why the Institutio
Generalis gives a Protestant definition of the Mass:
The Lord’s Supper or Mass is the holy assembly (synaxis) or meeting of the people of God,
gathered together under the presidency of a priest to celebrate the memorial of the Lord,
according to the promise of Christ, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in My name,
I am there in their midst” (Mt. 18:20).[529]
The New Mass is equivocal because it casts doubt on the nature of the
priest, seen here as the animator of the crowd; on the Mass as a sacrificial
act, reduced to a simple commemoration (a proposition condemned by the
Council of Trent); and on the Real Presence, denied by the Protestants. This
ambiguity is affirmed from all sides. From the side of the Catholics,
Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci immediately wrote to tell the Pope that “the
Novus Ordo Missae marked a significant departure, both as a whole and in
its details, from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated at
the twenty-second session of the Council of Trent, which, in establishing
definitively the canons of the rite, erected an insurmountable barrier against
any heresy aimed at damaging the integrity of the mystery.”[530] From the
Protestant side, Max Thurian of Taizé declared: “One of the fruits of the
liturgical reform will perhaps be that non-Catholic communities will be able
to celebrate the Holy Supper with the same prayers as used by the Catholic
Church. Theologically, it is possible.”[531] The same was clearly not the
case with the traditional rite. M. Siegwalt, professor of dogmatic theology
at the Protestant University of Strasbourg, also commented, along with
other Protestants, that “nothing in the Mass so renewed could really trouble
an Evangelical Christian. It remains to be seen whether such a rite could
still be called a Catholic Mass.”[532]
The same vandalism which tore apart our Mass has also paralyzed the
consecrated life. Priests are naturally the first victims of the ecumenical
Mass. There is an unprecedented crisis in the priesthood at the present time,
not so much because the defections have attained unimaginable proportions,
or because they have been legalized on so large a scale, but because the
priests themselves seem to deny their sacred character. The priest has lost
his identity. In the same way, the conciliar hurricane brought with it a spirit
of democracy which has wrought chaos in the religious life. After the
Council, every one of the religious institutions had to call an extraordinary
general chapter to rewrite its constitutions and rules. St. Padre Pio did not
mince words when he heard of such innovations: “Now what are you doing
in Rome? What are you scheming? You even want to change the rule of St.
Francis!”
True religious reforms have always moved from something lax or easy
toward something more difficult. In this case, the ruling principle was the
spirit of independence. Religious set about destroying the authority of the
superior general in favor of a democratic assembly; they laid waste to
enclosure and monastic stability; they destroyed community life in order to
be “each one in his each-oneness”; above all, they lost the spirit of
consecration to the service of God in favor of a consecration to the service
of man–or worse yet, to the service of humanity. Cardinal Daniélou himself
evoked a state of religious decadence. The statistics are there, indisputable:
in the ten years after the Council, the Church lost a quarter of all her
religious, with recruitment near zero. The moral disarray of the modernist
Church–its spiritual, intellectual, and moral license–is obviously not the
ideal climate for inspiring generous souls.
The forces of the Church were neutralized by Paul VI but never so
radically as when he was pursuing his chief obsession: ecumenism at any
price. The abandonment of the primacy of the Catholic Church suddenly
appeared in all its gravity in the lifting of the excommunication of the
schismatic Eastern Churches without requiring the least abjuration; in the
handing over of the papal ring to Ramsey, a layman, a Freemason, and a
heretic, who proceeded to give his blessing at the Pope’s side; in the
promulgation of the decree on Eucharistic hospitality toward Protestants; in
the Pope’s concelebrating with Anglican pastors at the Vatican; in his
offering the Moslems the flag of Lepanto; in his dropping the requirement
that children of mixed marriage receive baptism. This Pope had the
ecumenical itch, a veritable “ecumania,” desperate to gather all Churches
and religions into one. Had he ever read the ancient oath sworn during the
papal coronation, which stipulates: “If ever I betray the Tradition received
from my predecessors, God will not be a merciful judge at the Last
Judgment”?
Alas! Paul VI did not follow the wise counsel of St. Pius X. This last
had rightfully taught that truth does not want to be concealed, but unfurled
like a flag. Only by honesty and sincerity can we do any good, even if it
means attracting the attention of the enemy and drawing down his attack.
✜✜✜
In spite of his natural optimism, on December 7, 1968, Paul VI
confessed his anguish before the conciliar disaster: “The Church is in a
disturbed period of self-criticism, or what would better be called self-
demolition. It is an acute and complicated upheaval which nobody would
have expected after the Council. It is almost as if the Church were attacking
herself.”[533]
The Pope’s own words reveal the source of the evil, but he refused to
see it. He took up the same tone on June 29, 1972:
From somewhere or other the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: doubt,
uncertainty, issues, anxiety, dissatisfaction have all appeared.…What happened? We confide to
you our thought on the matter: some adverse power, the devil, that mysterious being, enemy of
all men, that supernatural something, came to spoil and dry up the fruits of the ecumenical
council.[534]
Truly, the devil would not have been able to do much at all in the
Church if an anti-Church had not already been in place: Freemasonry,
certainly, with its unacknowledged Satanism, but also and above all their
henchmen in the Church herself who opened wide the gates. Now, it is
difficult to deny that Paul VI, in the footsteps of John XXIII, maintained
friendships with secret societies. Montini, before 1950, reportedly predicted
to Fr. Morlion that a generation would not pass before peace had been
established between the two societies.[535] We have already spoken of
Cardinal Bea’s numerous meetings with B’nai B’rith of New York, with
such consequences for the conciliar Decree Nostra Aetate. The Pope
followed and encouraged these meetings–some of them public–with high
Freemasonic dignitaries in view of reaching an “ecumenical” public
agreement between the Church and Freemasonry.[536] We might also
evoke the unconditional support granted to organizations of a Freemasonic
bent, such as the United Nations.
If the facts which we have reported are indeed historical and confirmed
by the evidence of a continuing labor to demolish the values of the Church,
then the reader will understand our anguish at reading the discourse of Paul
VI for the closing of the Council. He professed an immense sympathy with
the anti-Church–ultimately, the Church of Lucifer:
The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who
makes himself God. And what happened? Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There
could have been, but there was none. The old story of the Samaritan has been the model of the
spirituality of the council. A feeling of boundless sympathy has permeated the whole of it.
[537]
This text–already revealing for the Council itself–is particularly
significant for our study, for it gives us the key to deciphering the enigmatic
pontificate of an equally enigmatic Pope. Tragically, did not Paul VI serve
the religion of man becoming God more than the religion of God made
Man?
 CHAPTER 23: THE NON-HISTORICAL GOSPEL
ACCORDING TO RATZINGER[538]
Divine Revelation had already been the object of pitched battles
between the still relatively small modernist faction and the orthodox troops,
as we have observed in an earlier chapter. There had also been skirmishes in
Rome before the Council between the modernist Jesuits of the Biblical
Institute and the Lateran University, ally of the Holy Office. During the
Council itself, Rahner had declared war on the two sources of Revelation.
The schema on Revelation became his ecumenical torpedo, designed to
incapacitate this key element of traditional theology. He had calculated
well, having taken his strategy from Luther and aiming, as he did, to reduce
oral and written Tradition to Scripture alone. Once he had neutralized
Tradition, he turned his sites on a defenseless Scripture. His primary goal
was to deny all objective and historical foundation to Scripture, leaving the
Gospels, the touchstone of the Faith, henceforth deprived of their certainty
and infallibility.
Twenty years later, Joseph Ratzinger, a brother in arms since promoted
cardinal, delivered another mortal blow to a foundering Revelation. He took
it upon himself to advocate a permanent Revelation issued from an ever-
flowing source–the personal interpretation of the faithful–and erected into a
supreme magisterium of the Church. Setting off, as Luther did, from sola
Scriptura, he likewise destroyed the truth of the Scriptures; he went a step
further than Luther by concluding in a communal free interpretation, source
of a never ending Revelation.

1. The New Luthers

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger does bear some resemblance to Paul VI.
Like Paul VI, he has been all-powerful within the Curia, holding the
functions of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of the
International Theological Commission, and of the Pontifical Biblical
Commission. Like Paul VI, he laments the demolition at work around him.
Yet, like another Paul VI, he pushes forward like a pure ideologue
determined to see his principles through to their logical end. It never seems
to have occurred to him that the poison is to be found in the very principles
of the Council and not in their abusive interpretation.[539] The tragedy of
Paul VI’s pontificate has therefore continued throughout the reign of John
Paul II, with no end in sight. None of the late Pope’s theological mentors
has seemed inclined to objective self-analysis before the haps and mishaps
of the past; on the contrary, they all advance undaunted in a euphoria of
blind optimism. The tragedy devolves into a tragic farce. We have already
watched as Paul VI personally liquidated the treasures dearest to the
Church. Ratzinger and his team were not to be outdone and so took their
hatchet to the very taproot of the Faith, double Revelation. For them, “The
decisive question is not what objectively took place, but whether we are
ready, as the first disciples were, to give ourselves to be absorbed by Jesus
Christ.”[540] These theologians have little to distinguish them from
sentimental fideists like Schleiermacher and Strauss.
Ratzinger recognizes the difficulties inherent to his new notion of
Revelation; he makes no attempt to hide them:
Since the Council, differences of confession between Catholic and Protestant exegetes have
practically disappeared.…But the negative aspect of this process is that now, even in Catholic
circles, exegesis and dogma are severed from one another, while Scripture has become a mere
echo from the past which each one strives to translate into the present–careful not to put too
much weight on the foundation holding it up. The Faith thus becomes a sort of philosophy of
life; it falls to each one of us to distill its essence from his own reading of the Bible. Dogma,
deprived of its scriptural foundation, floats in midair. The Bible, separated from dogma,
becomes a mere document of the past; it is itself a part of the past.[541]
It is ironic that Ratzinger should now be sounding the alarm,
considering that he was one of the original arsonists. True, Paul VI shares
part of the responsibility for having sent away the conservative exegetes
and honored with the title of papal theologians the avant-garde contingent
of the Biblical Institute. He is also guilty of having sung the praises of
Bultmann,[542] thus bringing the official magisterium into line with the
most radical of Protestant critics. The tragedy now is to see these modern
ideas holding an absolute monopoly, thanks to the influence of Ratzinger.
Gone are the days of a small underground network; the network is now a
dominating force, engulfing the city of Rome like a gigantic spider web,
embracing every aspect of the Church’s activity. Now that the modernists
are in command, they have no need to dissimulate their victory. While
members of the Concilium (“hard modernism”) occupy all the chairs of
theology, the founders of Communio (“soft modernism”) have become
cardinals, namely, Balthasar, de Lubac, and Ratzinger.[543] Communio has
provided most of the theologians who have been appointed bishop in the
last few years and whose influence in the Church goes well beyond their
diocesan jurisdiction. They constituted a veritable think tank within the
Church of Karol Wojtyla.[544] Ratzinger manned the most coveted posts
with his own protégés. He it was who organized and oversaw the
construction of the many-armed monster now embracing the whole of
“Roman” theology. Thus he brought into the Congregation of the Doctrine
of the Faith Cardinal Lehmann, who denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus;
Georges Cottier, who advocates dialogue between the Church and the
Masonic lodges; Albert Vanhoye, for whom Jesus was not a priest.
Likewise, in the Theological Commission, we find Cardinal Schönborn, fan
of Balthasar’s ecumenical super-Church, and Msgr. Léonard, the Hegelian
responsible for the Seminary of St. Paul, where Lustiger sends his
seminarians.
Among the most illustrious adepts of neo-modernism we must
certainly note Walter Cardinal Kasper. He is another co-composer of the
new symphony on Revelation, since he drafted the document of the
Theological Commission published in 1988 and endorsed by his old friend
Ratzinger. To give the reader some idea of Kasper’s exegetical teaching we
need only cite a few passages from his Jesus: The Christ, the German
version of Renan’s Life of Jesus. He follows the omnipresent Bultmann’s
famous “Form History,” concluding that, “A number of miracle stories turn
out in the light of form criticism to be projections of the experiences of
Easter back into the earthly life of Jesus, or anticipatory representations of
the exalted Christ.” Thus,
It is the nature miracles which turn out to be secondary accretions to the original
tradition....[545] [V]arious other [Gospel] texts which mention touching the Risen Lord and
sharing a meal with him…seem to be intolerably drastic statements that very nearly touch the
limits of the theologically possible and run the risk of founding a “powerful” Easter faith....
[546] By these criteria miracles could only be firmly established if we really had a complete
knowledge of all the laws of nature and could inspect their operation in every individual case.
[547]
In not so many words, Jesus is not really the Son of God.[548] The
divinity of Christ is a Paulinian or Johannine invention.[549] Likewise,
Kasper denies the Ascension and casts doubt on the Virgin Birth.[550]
Finally, he denies the infallibility of the Church, which he claims has
transfigured and altered Revelation. Kasper is no creative genius but only
the clever parrot of his masters, Loisy, Renan, Harnack, and Bultmann. The
saddest of all is to see such an enemy of the notion of apostolic testimony
promoted to a successor of the Apostles and, worse yet, the primary author
of an official pontifical document on Holy Scripture.
 To conduct the new symphony on Revelation, Pope John Paul II
appointed a man in perfect intellectual harmony with its composer.
Ratzinger, once the right-hand man of Rahner, is not an exegete by trade.
However, his seal of approval on a document carries all the authority of a
seasoned and respected champion of the Faith. To assess this new rampart
of orthodoxy we need only peruse his Introduction to Christianity,[551] a
new Catholic classic, always in print, responsible for deforming a
generation of clerics and laymen. What, then, does he teach in his book?
Christ came to coincide with God when, on the Cross, He embodied the
man open to others.[552]
Christian faith believes in Jesus as the exemplary man….But precisely because he is the
exemplary, the authoritative man, he oversteps the bounds of humanity….In him
“hominization” has truly reached its goal.[553] From here onwards faith in Christ will see the
beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and
more into the being of one single Adam, one single body–the man to come. It will see in him
the movement to that future of man in which he is completely “socialized,” incorporated in
one single being….[554]
Ratzinger is thus not immune to the Teilhardian virus. His teaching in
the realm of Christology can be transposed to apply to the other articles of
faith. The doctrine of salvation and of vicarious satisfaction are medieval
inventions. The virginal conception of Christ remains nebulous, and the
divine maternity as such is not even mentioned. This Introduction to
Christianity is much more interesting and informative on the subject of neo-
modernist thought than on the subject of Catholic dogma. Have the teachers
in Israel recanted and denied the works of their youth? Such hardly seems
to be the case. Their works are still best sellers and continue to deform
generations of innocent priests, without the least caveat from their now
aged authors. What kind of symphony shall we hear, given such composers
and so particular a conductor? The latest pontifical documents resound like
a cacophony, combining all of the previously composed modernist
melodies. They close the series in a marvelous fugue of which Luther
himself could have been proud.

2. The Gospels Are Not Gospel Truth

With sola Scriptura, the Protestant Bible resembles nothing so much
as a pendulum hanging in thin air, without the least support. Even if all
other proofs were lacking, the variations and contradictions of Protestant
scholars would be enough to discredit the entire system. For Catholics,
severing Scripture from Tradition and the magisterium would be an
absurdity. Parchments are incapable of saying everything or explaining
everything. They presuppose an authority which defines their limits and
determines their own particular authority. A living and acting authority is
absolutely necessary to decide, to teach, to send to heaven and call down
anathemas under pain of hellfire. However, we are on modernist ground
here; all of the recent pontifical documents take their starting point in
Scripture, onto which Church Tradition is subsequently grafted.[555] In so
proceeding, the modern theologians put the cart before the horse; they leave
the Scriptures at the mercy of the first comer, who is free to draw from them
all truth and its contrary. Theirs is a position leading infallibly into Lutheran
private judgment. Rather than establishing divine inspiration and inerrancy
on the constant magisterium of the Fathers and of the Church, they leave
Holy Scripture to fend for itself; they allow it to be judged next to profane
and vulgar documents according to internal criteria alone. The Protestant
misadventures in this domain have given ample proof of where such
conduct will lead.
In the most recent pontifical documents, one might have expected
Rome to provide clear directives on the three foundations of Catholic
exegesis: the divine inspiration of Holy Scriptures, their absolute and
universal infallibility, and the historicity of the four Gospels. These are the
three truths of divine faith which have been denied with impunity in the
very city of Rome by the professors of the Biblical Institute, in the footsteps
of Cardinal Martini and Ignace de la Potterie, Ratzinger’s golden child. The
Vatican II document Verbum Dei was saved from heresy only by a personal,
last-minute intervention of the Pope, while leaving unresolved such
essential questions as absolute inerrancy. The modernists had orchestrated a
clever compromise. In 1993, the Biblical Commission signed the official
Roman surrender by refusing to broach the question of inspiration, as
though it were but a minor detail for the Christian Faith.[556] In reality,
while the text does not explicitly deny divine inspiration, it nonetheless
implies such a negation by denying the infallibility of Holy Scripture. It
offers a colorful panorama of the various approaches to Scripture, from the
historico-critical method to fundamentalist readings, by way of synchronic,
traditional (canonical and Jewish), and contextual (liberationist and
feminist) approaches. Within the unconditional paean lavished on the
various interpretations, the only notes of disapproval fall on “
fundamentalism.”[557] Modernists have deliberately expanded this word
into a catchall for truth and error, using it to refer both to the strict literalism
of Protestant fundamentalism and to the traditional Catholic position as
defined by Leo XIII. By condemning the “fundamentalism” according to
which every detail in a text is infallible, the Commission was merely
casting aside the unanimous doctrine of the Fathers of the Church and of the
universal magisterium.
Furthermore, the omnipresent exegesis du jour, the historico-critical
method, has succeeded in casting doubt on the historicity of the Gospels.
In 1988, the Theological Commission[558] –with the blessing of
Ratzinger and John Paul II–revived all of the false notions of the historico-
critical method, Heidegger’s “hermeneutical circle,” the importance of
“signs and symbols” proper to Father de Lubac and Ricœur.[559] Of course,
in 1993, the Biblical Commission lamented the fact that such a method
should cast perplexity and doubt onto a number of vital points touching the
Faith. Yet, were these words a condemnation of the method? On the
contrary, the Commission spoke in order to rehabilitate the method as a part
of the colorful mosaic of interpretations to which the Church is now open.
There is liberty for all in all things–except, of course, for the enemies of
liberty. Once again, the “fundamentalists”–that is, the Fathers of the
Church–are the exception. Why? Because they fail to acknowledge the
development of the Gospel tradition, naïvely confounding the final phase of
this tradition (what the Evangelists wrote down) with its initial phase (the
actions and words of the historical Jesus).[560] The pontifical document
would forever establish the distinction between the Jesus of the Gospels and
the Jesus of History, as invented by Loisy and reworked by Bultmann.
However, the medicine is administered with a spoonful of sugar, for they
covered the novelty by invoking the authority of Pius XII in a citation
(albeit abusive) of the Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. While the Pope, in
1943, encouraged scholars to rediscover the literal meaning of texts and
distinguish their literary genres, the modernist exegetes claimed to discover
in his words an approval of their heresies. They took great care to skip over
the Pope’s repeated insistence on the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and
turned a deaf ear to the castigations of the same Pius XII in Humani
Generis, aimed very specifically at criticism and spiritual exegesis. The
1993 document thus has the impudence to put Pius XII in contradiction
with himself.
 The conclusion no less incredible than inevitable is that Rome, for
more than thirty years, has taught in all impunity that the Gospels placed in
our Lord’s mouth words which He never spoke–in short, that St. Matthew
and St. John were liars. For such is indeed the upshot of the critical method
as borrowed from the most radical Protestantism. It should come as no
surprise that the apostolic spirit is rapidly nearing extinction. Who would
cross the seas and shed his blood for Scriptures riddled with error or to
teach a Gospel more or less symbolic for a Christ who has nothing in
common with the true Jesus of History? The Formgeschichte of Bultmann
is henceforth untouchable, for the modernist view is universally accepted as
the norm. The scientist Thiede, a papyrologist and an honest Protestant
researcher,[561] thus vainly proves the authenticity of the fragments of St.
Mark’s Gospel found in the caves of Qumran, dating from 50 A.D.; the
exegetes refuse the factual evidence of sound science in the name of their
theological hypotheses.[562]

3. An Ever-Flowing Revelation
It is interesting how the modernists, from the same Lutheran starting
point of sola Scriptura, reach exactly the same conclusion: the pure and
simple destruction of the Bible as rule of faith. It is equally interesting to
see the same parallel developing on the subject of Revelation, both oral and
written. According to the Catholic doctrine on Revelation, God speaks to
man. Before his divine Master, man has only to be silent and accept the
infallible Revelation passed down both orally and in writing. This
Revelation, which ended with the death of the last Apostle, is to be taught
over the course of the centuries by an authority established by Jesus Christ
Himself. This authority–the pope and the bishops–constitutes the authentic
living magisterium, whose role is to interpret and faithfully transmit the
deposit of faith. This teaching is called living and true Tradition, always in
perfect accord with the deposit of faith under pain of betrayal. Needless to
say, the innovators retain no trace of such a doctrine.
The theologians of the day are like military strategists. For the
tactician, there are two ways to prevent the enemy from using a water
supply. He could stop the canal which ties it to its source, the tactic adopted
by the Protestant theologians who accept the written source of Revelation
and at the same time remove its foundation, the traditional teaching of the
Church; or he could pollute it, making the water available this time but
perfectly undrinkable. Such was Luther’s tactic. Such was also the tactic of
the Roman modernists, but they executed their movements with greater
cunning. Unlike Luther, they admitted the two sources of Scripture,
bringing back into circulation the three key words of Tradition, Revelation,
and ecclesiastical magisterium, so unfamiliar to the Protestant ear. Could
our theologians have found their way back to the pure spring of the
traditional magisterium? That is a sweet illusion: there is no Catholic
substance behind their façade of traditional terminology.
The pontifical documents leave the reader with the impression that the
authors were suffering from intellectual vertigo. Nothing is stable, nothing
is constant; everything is in flux. According to the teaching of the 1993
document, Revelation did not end with the death of the last Apostle. It is
not an unchanging deposit, a precious diamond guarded in a protective case.
It extends and expands with every “significant rereading” in the Spirit,
according to Fr. de Lubac’s spiritual exegesis. Spiritual exegesis is only
concerned with life, with the dynamism of the Paschal mystery of Christ,
with the development of meaning, with the “becoming” of the text. The text
becomes a symbol, open to a whole new world of hitherto unsuspected
meanings.[563] Those “meanings” surely refer to the various fantasies
described by Ratzinger: the ecumenical meaning of a text, the evolutionist
meaning of a text, the charismatic meaning of a text…[564] In other words,
Revelation and inspiration progress every time a Christian reads the Bible
and feels inspired. Never fear, Tradition has its place in the system. Rather
than echoing the voice of an absent Founder, Revelation is the ever-
enlarging circle of diverse testimonies concerning the life and words of
Jesus. Texts not only can but must admit of multiple interpretations: a literal
meaning, a Paschal mystery meaning, and a meaning arising from the
present circumstances of life in the Spirit. Just as, long ago, the text was
interpreted according to the “vital context” of the primitive community, so
today exegetes must translate the Faith according to the conditions of the
present time.[565] That is to say, we are free to pick and choose among the
heirlooms of preceding generations so as not to be encumbered in our
march toward the future. Here the document reveals its veritable sources:
Loisy and his “vital germ” passing through successive and contradictory
phases of development; Bultmann and his non-historical Gospels; de Lubac
and his living Tradition, without a logical link to the past. Here present is
the contradiction, divergence, confusion of Babel already deplored by St.
Paul–nothing seems to fluster our Roman theologians.
The novelty which appears in the pontifical texts pertains to the
function of the magisterium. For the Catholic, the Church speaks as the
mistress whom all must heed under pain of eternal damnation. The
magisterium is the Tradition of the Church, the divinely instituted organ for
teaching–“Who hears you, hears Me.” It speaks in the name of God and
infallibly interprets the written word of God. Henceforth the Church has
passed through her 1789 and must toe the line by adopting democratic
principles. Teaching by authority is abandoned since, Ratzinger informs us,
undertaking a “critical reading” of the Bible means abandoning all recourse
to Tradition or authority.[566] Yet a thing is properly destroyed only once it
has been duly replaced. If the Church authority no longer has the power to
teach, who does hold the power? The scriptural magisterium comes from
the people and ought to be interpreted with authority by the people.[567]
The “sense of the faith” of the People of God is the operative notion,
signing once and for all the abdication of the authentic magisterium of the
Church. The Biblical Commission explains, in accord with Lumen Gentium
of Vatican II, that, by the operation of the Spirit, the exterior word becomes
for the faith “spirit and life.” Thus the faithful are instructed by the unction
of God Himself. Luther would be jubilant to hear that verdict. Better yet, in
spite of the anarchy looming behind such “private judgment,” the Biblical
Commission points out its sociological advantages: “This kind of reading, it
should be noted, is never completely private, for the believer always reads
and interprets Scripture within the faith of the Church and then brings back
to the community the fruit of that reading, for the enrichment of the
common faith.”[568]
Behold the official enthronement of loose, communal free
interpretation in the Church, already condemned by St. Pius X under the
name of collective conscience. It rises from its ashes to assume the role of
authentic interpreter of Revelation. In fact, the alleged “sense of the faith”
of the People of God is, in reality, oriented by the theologians who take it
upon themselves to promote the spirit of the day: dialogue, pluralism,
cooperation, anathematizing the anathema. Behold Luther’s private
judgment fully rehabilitated. This Luthero-modernist method of
interpretation, adopted with the blessing of Rome, signifies the destruction
not only of dogma but of the Bible itself.
4. Practical Applications
We have already given numerous examples of theologians, bishops,
and cardinals teaching error in matters, casting doubt on the historicity of
the Resurrection of Jesus, His divinity, and the primacy of Peter, among
other things. They are legion those who now cast aside their mask and
reveal their true nature unabashed.[569] Graver still is the official
endorsement given by John Paul II to the Protestant Pentecostalists and to
the charismatic movement. Yet perhaps most scandalous of all is the late
Pope’s own personal exegesis of Holy Scripture.
Here is a revealing example in which doubt is thrown on the famous
text concerning the woman who crushes the serpent. On May 29, 1996,
citing the proto-evangelical text (Gen. 3:15), Pope John Paul II announced,
“We have already had the occasion to point out that this version does not
correspond to the Hebrew text, according to which it is not the woman but
rather her [seed], her descendant, who was to crush the head of the serpent.
This text attributes the victory over Satan not to Mary but to her Son.” The
press seized the opportunity to proclaim that the image of Mary crushing
the head of the serpent beneath her foot is false. And yet the Pope knew that
his interpretation went against the unanimous tradition of the Fathers and
very particularly against the dogmatic bull of Pius XII defining the
Assumption. Could it be that our Lady crushing the head of Satan is no
longer ecumenically correct?
Graver still is the Pope’s discourse on hell, which quite frankly reeks
of the devil:
It is not question of a chastisement which God inflicts from without but of the development
of what man has already begun in this life.…To describe this reality, Holy Scripture employs a
symbolic language.…Using images, the New Testament presents the place destined for people
who have been guilty of injustice as a fiery furnace, where “there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth” (Mt. 13:42; cf. 25:30 and 14), or again as the Gehenna “where the fire dies
not” (Mk. 9:43)….[These images] evoke the total frustration and emptiness of a life without
God. More than a place, hell means the situation of those who freely and definitively separate
themselves from God, source of life and joy.[570]
In this discourse, the Pope states the contrary of what Catholic
theology has always taught: the fires of hell are real; the fire is the pain of
the senses, distinct from the pain of damnation or of the loss of God; hell,
heaven, and purgatory are places and not only conditions of life. But the
worst is yet to come: “Damnation remains a real possibility, but it is not
given to us to know, without a particular divine revelation, if human
beings–and which ones–are actually concerned.” Thus, for the late Pope,
contrary to the constant teaching of the Church, hell is the place of torture
for the demons, but we cannot know if any human beings will ever be
damned. This thesis implies the Wojtylian theory of the salvation of all
men, even in spite of themselves. It is an admission of the heresy of an
empty hell advocated by Rahner and also by Balthasar, who insisted that
Ratzinger and Wojtyla shared his opinion.[571] However, the denial of hell
is heavy with consequence. It leads to a negation of original sin and of the
supernatural, and trivializes the mystery of the Redemption. It leads to the
notion of a God who is so good that He is incapable of condemning those
who scorn Him.
Another highly publicized blow to Catholic theology came with the
Pope’s message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, killing two birds
with one stone–or rather, three birds with one stone. Not only did the
message distort the text of Genesis concerning the creation of man from the
dust of the earth, but it was a wholehearted endorsement of evolutionism:
Today, nearly a half-century after the publication of the encyclical [Humani Generis], new
discoveries lead us to consider the theory of evolution as more than a mere hypothesis.…The
convergence–neither sought nor concerted–of the results of independently conducted research
constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.[572]
In reality, the modernist position, which follows Darwin in his theory
of the simian origin of man, has long since been discredited and
contradicted. If we want to cite convergences, all the related disciplines of
embryology, genetics, geology, and paleontology encounter serious
difficulties when they try to integrate evolutionism. Such was the
conclusion of the evolutionary scientists at the congress of Chicago in 1980.
[573] Why does the Pope insist on reviving a myth which is dead and
buried? The reason is simple: among the mythomaniacs of evolutionism we
find Teilhard de Chardin, who claimed to found his theory of the
Christological evolution of man on the evolution of species, and Teilhard’s
evolutionist theology is shared by Ratzinger and praised by the Pope.[574]
Was John Paul II the Pope of Teilhardianism, the religion of the “ascent of
man,” not the Incarnation of God? We will now examine this final question
before drawing our study to a close.
 CHAPTER 24: ANOTHER PAUL: JOHN PAUL II
“Let us hope that Providence will leave us Paul VI for many years, but
the day when we will need a pope, I have my candidate: Wojtyla! Only, it is
impossible! He has no chance.”[575] De Lubac had his reasons for
supporting the election of a Polish cardinal, a surprise to many. Of course,
they might have chosen the cardinal primate of Poland, Wyszynski, a living
symbol of the Church of the martyrs. However, he was not papabile, for he
was too open in his denouncement of the post-conciliar Church–a Church
with an elastic creed and relativistic morals, a Church lost in a fog, a
Church closing her eyes to sin. In contrast, Cardinal Wojtyla was
thoroughly modern; better yet, he was a dyed-in-the-wool modernist. The
Archbishop of Krakow encouraged the Polish edition of Communio and, as
Pope, was quick to make cardinals of its three founders: Ratzinger, de
Lubac, and Balthasar (although Balthasar died on the eve of the ceremony).
Fr. Meinvielle, in a memorable work written in 1970,[576] prophesied
the formation of a double Church: the Church of the Promise, professing the
incorruptible faith of her Founder, and the Church of Propaganda, in the
service of liberal Christian gnosis. The same pope could very well preside
over the two Churches. He would profess the immaculate doctrine of the
Faith, but he would support the Church of Propaganda by his equivocal
actions. This book was written under the pontificate of Paul VI, and
describes him admirably. Needless to say, under John Paul II, duplicity and
equivocation concerning the deposit of faith became common currency in
Rome. After sketching a rapid portrait of the late Pope, we will delve into a
study of his thought, which will put us in a better position to define the goal
of his pontificate: the establishment of a universal religion. Paul VI was
ingenuously dubbed a new Moses by some; John Paul II stands forth, on the
contrary, as a new St. Paul–but of a different order entirely.

1. The Road to Damascus

Karol Wojtyla was a philosopher; more precisely, he was a moral
philosopher. Insofar as his philosophy follows the existentialist current, his
mental universe was far removed from that of a realist. His dream was to
reconcile Kant with St. Thomas, Scheler, and Heidegger.[577] His vision of
reality, often deemed original, was an offshoot of subjective,
anthropological existentialism. John Paul II was first and foremost a
doctrinaire intellectual. He reasoned from principles and not from real life.
At the Council he defended the document on religious liberty and combated
those who wanted to publish a severe condemnation of atheism.[578]
According to him, atheism should be studied in the light of sociology and
psychology, not as a negation of God but rather as a state of consciousness
of the human person.[579] A die-hard ecumenist, he made several visits to
Taizé, a community of Protestant monks which he hoped to use as a bridge
for ecumenical dialogue.
St. Paul received his vocation on the road to Damascus when he was
knocked from his horse and threw himself at Christ’s feet. John Paul II had
a lightning conversion as well, but the details are quite different. He was
converted at Rome during the Council: “[I]t was the Second Vatican
Council that helped me, so to speak, to synthesize my personal
faith....”[580] The Council was what allowed him at last to reach a
synthesis in his personal faith. What did he mean by his “personal faith”? In
his own words: “For faith does not do violence to the intelligence, it does
not subject it to a system of ‘ready-made truths.’”[581] In 1963, in the thick
of the conciliar debates, he could not say enough in praise of the neo-
modernists:
In less than four years, the interior situation in the Church has [drastically] changed.…Such
eminent theologians as Henri de Lubac, J. Danielou, Y. Congar, H. Küng, R. Lombardi, Karl
Rahner, and others have played an extraordinary role in the work of the preparation.
The objective of John XXIII was above all the unity of Christians; giant steps have been
made along this road. The Church is persuaded, as never before, that what unites Christians is
stronger than what divides them. The yearning for the unity of Christians joins hands with the
wish for the unity of all the human race. The new conception of the idea of the people of God
has replaced the old truth on the possibility of redemption outside the visible bounds of the
Church. This premise shows the attitude of the Church towards the other religions, which is
the basis for recognizing values which are spiritual, human, and Christian at once, extending to
religions such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism.…The Church wishes to undertake a dialogue
with representatives of these religions. Here Judaism occupies a particular place.[582]
As early as 1963, Assisi was already visible on the horizon. De Lubac
shows how deeply Wojtyla was imbued with this one-world spirit as he
brought his collaboration to the drafting of the schemata on the Church in
the modern world and on religious liberty. It was by Wojtyla’s efforts, more
perhaps than those of any other, that Gaudium et Spes finally gained
approval–the last in a long line of rejected drafts–at an hour when many had
begun to despair of its acceptance. It was in the same spirit of openness that
he had delved with interest and energy into the two broad themes of
ecumenism and religious liberty.[583]
 Elected pope in 1978, Karol Wojtyla remained faithful to his friends
and intellectual mentors. In 1981, the centenary of the birth of Teilhard, the
Secretary of State sent a letter in the name of the Holy Father which lauded
“the wonderful repercussions of his [Teilhard de Chardin’s] research and investigations,”
describing him as a man seized by Christ in the depths of his being, ever anxious to hold in
high regard both faith and the answer of reason, thereby containing almost by anticipation
John Paul’s appeal: “Be not afraid; open, open wide the doors to Christ, those immense fields
of culture, of civilization, of development.”[584]
In 1984 he sent his personal greetings to Rahner before his death, as
well as to Balthasar. During his visit to France in 1980, he insisted on
giving special honor to his French friends Yves Congar and Jacques
Maritain, the defender of religious liberty. He sent two telegrams on the
death of the revered Cardinal de Lubac,
Recalling the long and faithful service which this theologian gave, using the best of
Catholic tradition in his meditation on Scripture, the Church and the modern world [his
Gaudium et Spes].…Throughout the years I have greatly appreciated the immense learning,
the self-denial, and the intellectual acumen which made this exemplary religious a great
servant of the Church, especially at the time of the Second Vatican Council.[585]
The Pope’s sympathies also went out to the pioneers of liberation
theology, among others the pro-Communist Helder Camara. However,
perhaps the surest indicator of Pope John Paul II’s true colors was his
nomination of Ratzinger as the official defender of the Doctrine of the
Faith. Now, Ratzinger believes in packing the court. Thanks to him, a
veritable regiment of progressive theologians control the magisterium of the
Church. With such a lieutenant commanding the rank and file, how can
there be any doubt about the orientation which the Pope has given to the
Church as a whole?
2. The Glory of Man
It would be fastidious to seek a definition of the dogmatic thought of
John Paul II by analyzing his verbose encyclicals. If it often seems difficult
to understand the Pope, it is because his thought is literally “complex,”
folded back on itself and doubled over. The reader who thinks the Pope
wrote for the multitudes is sadly deceived. On the contrary, the pontifical
message is masked in such a way as to be understood by none but the
initiates. Using the same words, he plays his melody on two entirely
different keyboards, one orthodox, the other modernist. St. Pius X
denounced the modernist tactic of deliberately mixing rationalism and
Catholicism. In the Pope’s long encyclicals, it is not difficult to find
examples of terminology with a double meaning, allowing a double reading
at once traditional and modernist.[586] We therefore need to use an
unequivocal text, taken from the retreat he preached as a cardinal to Pope
Paul VI and members of the Curia in the form of a non-theological
commentary of the conciliar documents. He was among friends and had no
need to conciliate the conservatives. This retreat stands forth as a perfect
doctrinal introduction to Assisi ten years before the fact.
Two texts will serve to illustrate our point. The first explains the notion
of God; the second, the thesis of universal Redemption:
“The concept of infinity is not unknown to man. He makes use of it in his scientific work,
in mathematics, for instance. So there is certainly room in him, in his intellectual
understanding, for Him Who is infinite, the God of boundless majesty, the one to Whom Holy
Scripture and the Church bear witness saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy, God of the universe, heaven
and earth are full of Your glory.’ This God is professed in His silence by the Trappist or the
Camaldolite. It is to Him that the desert Bedouin turns at his hour for prayer. And perhaps the
Buddhist, too, rapt in contemplation as he purifies his thought, preparing the way to Nirvana.
God in His absolute transcendence, God who transcends absolutely the whole of creation, all
that is visible and comprehensible.”[587]
The other text is a commentary on Gaudium et Spes, §10:
“Thus the birth of the Church at the time of the messianic and redemptive death of Christ
coincided with the birth of ‘the new man’–whether or not man was aware of such a rebirth and
whether or not he accepted it. At that moment, man’s existence acquired a new dimension,
very simply expressed by St. Paul as ‘in Christ’ (cf. Rom. 6:23; 8:39; 12:5; 15:17; 16:7 and
other letters).”
[Fr. Dörmann continues:] Man exists “in Christ,” and he had so existed from the beginning
in God’s eternal plan; but it is by virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection that this “existence
in Christ” became historical fact, with roots in time and space.[588]
Cardinal Wojtyla’s commentaries embolden us to attempt a rapid
tableau of the mental universe of Pope John Paul II. Whereas St. Paul, on
the one hand, once converted, submitted his mind and will to Christ
crucified, John Paul II emerges as a doctor of religion glorifying man and
man alone, by tracing everything back to man’s own consciousness. The
pontifical texts betray their author’s philosophical past by their Kantian,
Hegelian terminology and by their underlying existentialist themes.
Ultimately, everything for him revolves around the consciousness–the “self-
consciousness,” the alpha and the omega of knowledge, reality, and faith,
according to his own writings. For him, God is knowable “on the basis of
man’s experience both of the visible world and of his interior world.” By
the same path, “man recognizes himself as an ethical being” and “as a
religious being.” Since man knows the philosophy of religion by reference
to “the categories of anthropological experience,” he concludes that:
Our faith is profoundly anthropological, rooted constitutively in coexistence, in the
community of God’s people, and in communion with this eternal “THOU.”[589] In the very
search for faith an implicit faith is already present, and therefore the necessary condition for
salvation is already satisfied.[590] In reality, the name for that deep amazement at man’s worth
and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News.[591]
The supernatural is thus redefined on the basis of the personal,
subjective consciousness and so is degraded, in the Encyclical Redemptor
Hominis, to the level of the natural, setting the tone for the entire
pontificate. Divine Revelation is simply man revealed to man; Christ’s
Redemption has justified all men by making them aware of their dignity;
sin is but an incoherence within the conscience; liberty, fruit of the
conscience and the foundation of human dignity, is inviolable even in
matters of religion; the Church of Christ is numerically identical to
humanity;[592] the Roman Church should act as a mediator in the advent of
universal fraternity. A few examples drawn from the encyclicals of Pope
John Paul II should bear sufficient witness to his “anthropological
inversion”:
“For, by his Incarnation, he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each
man.” Thus God sent a Redeemer who “fully reveals man to himself,” inviting him to
encounter Christ who, by His redemptive act, has united every man to himself for all time.
[593]
The “mysterious Original Sin” is the root of a weakness of his called sin, by which he is
inclined to live in a manner not worthy of his dignity.[594] Religious liberty therefore
constitutes the very heart of human rights. It is so inviolable as to demand that others
recognize the freedom to change religions if one’s conscience requires it.[595] The
Ecumenical Council gave a fundamental impulse to forming the Church’s self-awareness by so
adequately and competently presenting to us a view of the terrestrial globe as a map of various
religions.[596] By her relationship with Christ, the Church is a kind of sacrament or sign and
means of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all mankind.[597] There is a basis for
dialogue and for the growth of unity, a growth that should occur at the same rate at which we
are able to overcome our divisions–divisions that to a great degree result from the idea that one
can have a monopoly on truth.[598]
The Pope’s theology is none other than that of the “anonymous
Christian,” whom we have already met. However, to affirm that all men are
saved unconditionally is to destroy absolutely the principles of Christian
morality. If all men are already saved, why bother? Why not let ourselves
slip into the laxism of “Sin heartily and believe more heartily still?” Dogma
is travestied, for hell may exist but it is certainly empty. If salvation does
not depend on faith and baptism, what is the utility of the Church? The
central tenets of the Pope’s theology are obviously part of a recurring
theme. The errors, the abstruse ideas, the questionable points of doctrine are
only the tip of the iceberg rising from the invisible mass of errors below the
surface. What is the compact and unified system of thought hidden beneath
the Pope’s words? Who can crack the code of the enigma which has
stymied so many Catholic theologians, horrified at the monstrosities of
heterodoxy which regularly surface from the depths of the pontifical
doctrine? The question remains open, but, in the light of what we already
know about the last generation of neo-modernists, we can already discern a
great affinity of thought between them and the late Pope. The convergence
of views is most pronounced between Pope John Paul II and Rahner, both
existentialists by training. Understand Rahner and you have understood the
tortuous language of the Council; you have understood Ratzinger; and
would it be overbold to say you have also penetrated to the depths of the
Pope himself? Certain texts are disturbingly close to those of the prince of
the neo-modernists. Take for example the following passage:
By means of this “hominisation” of the Word-Son, the self-communication of God reaches
its definitive fullness in the history of creation and salvation. This fullness acquires a special
wealth and expressiveness in the text of John’s Gospel: “The Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14).
The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human
nature, but, in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is “flesh”: the whole of
humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, also has a cosmic
significance, a cosmic dimension. The “firstborn of all creation” (Col.1:15), becoming
incarnate in the individual humanity of Christ, unites himself in some way with the entire
reality of man, which is also “flesh” (cf. Gen. 9:11; Lk. 3:6; I Pet. 1:24)–and in this reality
with all “flesh” with the whole of creation.[599]
If the doctrine of Pope John Paul II seems for a Catholic
incomprehensible and contradictory, it is because it is thoroughly imbued
with Rahnerian concepts. Circumstances obliged him to insinuate his
questionable theses into a larger system which, for reasons of prudence, the
Pope never proclaimed in all its candid unorthodoxy. By his writings and
his actions, the late Pope nevertheless stands forth as a convinced
modernist; the truths which he may cite are not merely falsified by the
errors around them but actually serve as a mask for the error, ensuring its
diffusion far and wide. The truth is only present in his writings as a
handmaid of the error–and the horror–of the modernist nirvana. Tragically,
the theory passes into act in the creation of a syncretist Super-Church.

3. From the Areopagus to Assisi

 The entire pontificate of Pope John Paul II can be defined as nothing
but the opening urbi et orbi of the Catholic Church to all other religions by
knocking down all the walls raised up by Jesus Christ. The Pope’s
anthropocentric theology remained unchanged throughout the decades,
simply manifesting itself more clearly in the last years of his reign: the
spectacle of Assisi with its Hindus and Native American Indians is much
more attractive than an abstract meditation on the anonymous Christian. In
fact, the insult to the thrice-holy God is all the more brazen. Assisi
represents the official acknowledgment of paganism. Rome had finally
succumbed to the old temptations of the idolaters, who were happy to offer
Christ a niche in the Pantheon and who would have welcomed the Catholic
religion among the other cults of the Empire without shedding a drop of
Christian blood.[600] Is there need of demonstration that the pantheon of
Assisi runs contrary to the scriptural tradition and the magisterium? Bible
history is a constant reiteration of the warning that Israel will be prosperous
if she serves her God and will be punished if she turns toward the false gods
who are really demons.[601] St. Paul, speaking of the pagan worshippers
with whom he was daily rubbing elbows, says that they have no excuse for
their disbelief.[602] He was furious at seeing the city of Athens consecrated
to idolatry.[603] Pius XI severely condemned religious congresses on the
basis of the Faith, for such meetings amount to proclaiming all religions to
be more or less praiseworthy since they manifest the native inclination of
all men toward God. Those who cling to such an opinion are not simply in
error, but they betray the idea of a true religion and thus, little by little, fall
into naturalism and atheism. Therefore whoever sustains any such theory
and puts it into practice is purely and simply abandoning the divinely
revealed religion.[604]
The most spectacular episode of the prayer meeting at Assisi,
convened by the Pope on October 27, 1986, was when the Dalai Lama
placed a statue of Buddha on the altar of St. Peter’s Church. How did the
Pope justify this scandal, which the Protestants condemned as a sin against
the First Commandment and a step toward a syncretist world religion? The
Pope replied: Understand Assisi in the light of Vatican II! Thus, Vatican II
provides a justification for blasphemy against the glory of God. The Pope
went on to explain that the action at Assisi was a defense of an individual’s
duty of obedience to his conscience, that is to say, a defense of the absolute
freedom of the conscience, whether it be Catholic, Protestant, or Buddhist.
Assisi was founded on the mystery of unity already obtained or else sought
for by those who are oriented toward the People of God. Assisi is founded
above all on the Wojtylian leitmotiv of universal redemption:
This radiant mystery of the created unity of the human race and of the unity of the salvific
work of Christ, which brings with it the birth of the Church as its minister and instrument, was
manifested clearly at Assisi, in spite of the differences between the religious professions,
which were not at all concealed or watered down.[605]
The treason of Assisi was the first of its kind, and it opened the way to
an uninterrupted stream of more or less motley ecumenical demonstrations.
We have to admit that the very first meeting of this kind was a very hard act
to follow. Nonetheless, in October 1999, the Pope called for a repeat
performance of Assisi, this time before St. Peter’s Basilica. The
abomination of desolation draws closer and closer to the sanctuary. Such a
display of impiety toward God made man would seem to call down upon
mankind a new deluge or worse: the chastisement of Sodom and Gomorrah
by fire and blood.

4. The Apostle of the Universal Religion

St. Paul was established the Apostle to the Gentiles by the grace of
Jesus Christ. The Pope of the new millennium was a second Paul. He too
wished to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, but he went a step further. He
assumed the role of Apostle to All Religions, invoking the nature of self-
divinized man. Aside from the various meetings of religions, there were the
more personal visits–though no less hearty–to the ancient enemies of the
Church. This wild ecumenical dance leaves everyone a winner, except the
honor of God and of His Church. We could cite the declarations at
Frankfurt, where the Pope traveled on a pilgrimage toward the spiritual
heritage of Martin Luther (1980); the refusal of all proselytism of the
Orthodox by Dimitrios I of Istanbul (1988), as well as the agreements of
Balamand in Lebanon (1993); the visit to a synagogue in Rome (1986) and
several official receptions of the Jewish Freemasons of B’nai B’rith at the
Vatican; the Pope’s reception of the sacred vibhuti ashes and of the sign of
the tilac proper to the Hindu worshippers of Shiva (1986); the abandonment
of the Filioque clause denied by the Orthodox (1986); the blessing for the
inauguration of a Roman mosque, and the kissing of the “holy book” of the
Koran (1999). The list grew ever longer with the Pope’s unending travels,
taking the opposite itinerary of the apostolic voyages of St. Paul, who, on
the contrary, preached to the pagans the need to convert to the Catholic
Faith. The Pope explained: “If you see me traveling the length and breadth
of the whole world in my efforts to meet with people of all civilizations and
religions, it is because I have faith in the seeds of wisdom which the Spirit
has planted in the conscience of all these various peoples, tribes, and clans;
from these hidden grains will come the true resource for the future of
mankind in this world of ours.”[606]
The worst is that the spirit of Vatican II which, the Pope assured us,
was the principle behind Assisi, was likewise the spirit presiding over the
great pontifical works. Under John Paul II, Rome underwent a cultural
revolution which made a blank slate of the last remnants of the past. All
things must be brought into harmony with the conciliar spirit. What Paul VI
had left standing was made to bow at last to the spirit of Vatican II.
As early as 1983 there appeared the new Code of Canon Law
supplanting that of St. Pius X. This ecumenical code inscribes on stone
tablets the Protestant ecclesiology of the “People of God,” of the Church of
God which merely “subsists” in the Catholic Church, which grants Holy
Communion to Protestants. It is the code of episcopal collegiality, which
democratizes the Church and paralyzes for all intents and purposes the
pope’s power in the Church.
The same spirit presides over the new Catechism of the Catholic
Church of 1992, which the Pope offered as “a loving appeal even to those
who are not a part of the Catholic community.” By it he would give “new
momentum on the path towards that fullness of communion which reflects
and in some way anticipates the total unity of the heavenly city.”[607] His
friend Schönborn points out that the key text in the new catechism echoes
the Pope’s favorite theme: “By His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a
certain way united Himself with each man.”[608]
The Joint Declaration on Justification of October 31, 1999, marked a
major progress in ecumenical dialogue, sweeping away all remaining
taboos. The Declaration resurrects Luther’s blasphemous heresies against
God, which leave man justified and sinful all in one, destroying human
liberty and the merit of good words. The result of thirty years of intensive
labor is a “differential accord” and hence, by their own admission,
ambiguous and heretical. The Catholic Church is set on an equal footing
with the multitude of Lutheran confessions, themselves a mere ghost of a
Church without any real unity. The infallible doctrine of the Council of
Trent is mixed and matched with the blasphemies of Luther. The drafters
hoped finally to obtain a unity in which any differences which still remain
would be “reconciled” and lose their power to divide. Cardinal Kasper, the
prefect of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, explains the
new ecumenical shift: “The old concept of an ecumenism of return has been
replaced today by that of a common path which directs all Christians
toward the goal of ecclesial communion understood as unity in reconciled
diversity.”[609] In other words, the new ecumenism is a reversion to the
heresy of the fundamental articles, which would mean the ruin of the divine
constitution of the Church, as Pius IX already warned us. Pius XI was
equally vehement in his condemnation of the iniquitous attempts at
negotiating the truth revealed by God, since the role of the Church is
precisely to defend that revealed truth.[610]
Another ecumenical salvo launched against the Mystical Body targeted
papal primacy under the initiative of the Pope himself. Here we have a
perfect illustration of the “auto-demolition” of the Church already lamented
by Pope Paul VI. In 1995, the Pope urged Cardinal Ratzinger to organize a
symposium on “the primacy of the successor of Peter,” including
theologians infamous for their denigration of the Church. We have already
met in Ratzinger a defender of Teilhardian themes. Monsignor Penna,
professor of exegesis at the Pontifical University of the Lateran, has
adopted the heresy of Loisy by which our Lord never pronounced the
words: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church.”[611]
Giuseppe Colombo is no less categorical, asking for a change in the papacy
such as it was instituted by Jesus Christ. Why? Quite simply because such a
conception is no longer in harmony with a more mature understanding of
the Gospel. With such a team of experts, the symposium on the primacy of
the pope set off to revise the structure established by our Lord and infallibly
defined by the Church at Vatican I. Ecumenism has obliged the pope to
auction off the papacy. Yet, four centuries ago, the Fathers of the Council of
Trent denounced the rejection of the papacy as the origin of Protestantism.
We are entitled to wonder who is Protestant. Who is against the pope? Who
is the enemy of the Church? More than ever, the faithful have the strict duty
to be more papist than the pope, standing up as the defenders of the papacy
itself by resisting a pope who does not act “according to the truth of the
Gospel.”[612]
 It would seem that there was nothing left to sacrifice to the false gods.
However, the entire history of the Church of Jesus Christ remained to be
sullied, lest the faithful with a nostalgia for the old days be encouraged by
gazing back into the glorious Ages of Faith. The ceremony of “repentance”
celebrated by the Pope on March 12, 2000, took care of this oversight. Yet
what the Pope did was something very dangerous. Such an act confuses the
institution of Jesus Christ, which is the kingdom of God on earth, with the
men of the Church. It implies that the Church was mistaken in matters of
faith and morals, and that she must evolve in her beliefs, laying waste all of
her credibility.[613] It destroys the authority of the pope and casts shame on
all Catholics. Finally, and most gravely, the fact that the greatest
benefactress of humanity should ask pardon for what was her glory and her
strict duty constitutes an insult to the Mother of us all: asking pardon for the
Crusades and the Inquisition, for having opposed Luther and Calvin, for not
having calumniated Pope Pius XII, for continuing, more or less, to promote
traditional morality, for defending the true role of woman. These penitential
ceremonies do nothing but pillory the honor and the history of the Church,
after everything else has been sold. What remains in the hands of the Pope
that he can still sacrifice to the Prince of this world?
✜✜✜
The intention of the late Pope was neither conversion nor syncretism
but “legitimate pluralism,” according to which all religions offer their
prayers for peace in a profound fidelity to their respective religious
traditions. In reality, this “legitimate pluralism” is only a euphemism for the
syncretism so hastily denied. There is nothing legitimate about a pluralism
of credos unless we consider the essence of religion and the only common
ground to be a certain impulse toward the divine. By that definition, Lucifer
is certainly the most religious of all creatures, for he most ardently desired
to become God.[614] The central theme at every interreligious meeting is
the moral unity of all religions, which implies that none of them is given
precedence. From the outset, the exclusivity and the veracity of the Church
of Jesus Christ are cast aside. Such is precisely the definition of
Freemasonry, which claims that its moral code and religion are rich because
they are not exclusive.[615] Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews,
Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, free-thinkers, and free-believers–to each his
first name, but all carry the great family name of Freemason.[616] After
Assisi, the lodges were jubilant:
 Our interconfessionalism earned us the excommunication issued by Clement XI in 1738.
However, the Church was certainly in error if it is true that, October 27, 1986, the present
Pontiff united at Assisi men of all religious confessions to pray together for peace. What,
indeed, did our Brothers seek as they gathered in their temples, if not love for all mankind,
tolerance, solidarity, defense of the dignity of the human person, considering themselves as
equals, above political creeds, religious creeds, and the color of their skin?[617]
Pope John Paul II’s significant departures from Catholic tradition on
original sin, the difference between nature and supernature, the gratuity of
the Savior and the choice of the elect, as well as on hell leave us perplexed.
However, when we consider his friendships and his actions, there can no
longer be any doubt as to his intentions. The late Pope’s ties to Rahner, who
smacks so strongly of pantheism, and to de Lubac, who wrote three books
on Buddhism and professed a boundless admiration for Teilhard de Chardin
and openness to all Asiatic religions whatever their ilk, augur the worst. If
the Catholic Church has not yet been completely absorbed by the religion of
man who makes God in his own image, it is simply because the fruit is not
quite ripe. All is in readiness for the shift to the typically Buddhist model of
religion, whose most perfect expression comes to us from Teilhard de
Chardin: the ascent of man toward the cosmic Christ.
 CHAPTER 25: CONCLUSIONS
Before we draw to a close our study on the roots of modernism, we
need to compose a brief assessment of the post-conciliar period. It will not
be necessary to summarize one by one the chapters concerning triumphant
neo-modernism, since in reality this final phase adds nothing substantial to
the principles of neo-modernism. Everything had already been included,
taught, and propagated by a previous generation. The only aspect particular
to the post-Vatican II period–and it is not negligible–is the triumph in St.
Peter’s Square of doctrines hitherto condemned and deplored. The task now
before us is to establish the ties binding the recent pontificates to the arch-
heretical clan, which we will present by means of progressive conclusions
supported by what we have learned in the preceding chapters. These
conclusions will put the finishing touches on this book, which set out to
define the modernist heresy both historically and theologically and then to
show its affinities and its links to the “conciliar Church.”

1. Is the Conciliar Church the Child of Neo-Modernism?

• Vatican Council II was prepared, directed, and dominated by the
gurus of modernism.
Modernism was strongly represented by the very men who were to
make and unmake the Council, in particular by Cardinals Liénart, Döpfner,
Bea, Frings, Alfrink, Léger, König, and Richaud. Behind these leaders came
theologians known to the Holy Office for their modernism and yet named
experts at the Council by diktat of Pope John XXIII. The most important of
these periti were Rahner, de Lubac, Congar, Chenu, Ratzinger, and
Schillebeeckx–later infamous for his Dutch Catechism–as well as Hans
Küng, Rahner’s polemic disciple. Fr. Wiltgen, in The Rhine Flows into the
Tiber, documented the dictatorship of the German element at the Council,
almighty within the European Alliance which was itself at the helm of the
Council. It sufficed that a single theologian convince the German bishops of
his point of view for that opinion to be adopted by the entire Council.
Moreover, there was a theologian capable of just that ascendancy: his name
was Karl Rahner. He held a veritable sphere of influence over the German-
speaking participants, not only prelates but also theologians like Ratzinger,
Vorgrimler, Küng, Boff, Metz, and Lehmann, to such an extent that he was
considered the most influential man at the Council. In addition to this
contingent of “Catholic” neo-modernists, we should mention the Protestant
modernists who also played a very active role at the Council. Hence the
unanimity of historians of the Council in declaring the victory of the
progressivists over the Roman Curia and the defenders of the traditional
doctrine of the Church. Add to their testimony the fact that Rahner and
Congar are cited more frequently in the official German commentary on the
Council than any other authority, and there remains little doubt as to
whether the European Alliance steered the Council toward modernism.
• The influential men of the Council tried to pass and sometimes
succeeded in passing points of doctrine in open contradiction with
previous decrees of the magisterium.
Given the fact that the masterminds of the Council were imbued with
modernism, the Council could hardly have escaped untainted. The clocks
had to be changed, and since the time had come for aggiornamento,
emissaries had to be sent to the ancient adversaries of the Church begging
to know what they demanded of her. Thus it was to please the Russian
Orthodox lackeys of the KGB that the Council refused to issue an explicit
condemnation of atheistic Communism. The same Council met the
desiderata of the Jewish Freemasons of B’nai B’rith in exonerating the Jews
of all responsibility for the Passion of Christ. Likewise the seven
fundamental demands of the Protestants in the realm of religious liberty
were satisfied by the conciliar Declaration Dignitatis Humanae. For the
same ecumenical reasons, our Lady was denied the title of Mediatrix of All
Graces.
As a general rule, all of the great dogmatic texts on the Church, on
ecumenism and Revelation, on religious liberty and collegiality, were
riddled with equivocal phrases astutely formulated by the revolutionary
periti. These ambiguous expressions constituted veritable time-bombs
which the modernist pyrotechnicians knew how to preset for the most
effective explosion. For example, on the subject of Revelation, the
progressivist faction managed up to the last minute to sell the Council
Fathers a schema which, by its ambiguities, denied oral Tradition as a
second source of Revelation, denied the universal inerrancy of the Holy
Bible by confining it to simple questions of faith and morals, and cast doubt
on the historicity of the Gospels. The question of religious liberty was in
turn the most fiercely debated subject at the Council. It was a matter of
accepting or denying the principle of freedom of conscience and of
worship, against which Pope Pius IX had already issued vehement
condemnations. What Pope Pius IX condemned, Vatican II very precisely
affirmed in the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae: “The human person has a
right to religious freedom. This freedom means that no one is to be forced
to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly,
whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”[618] Congar
and Ratzinger admit that the Council does in fact say just about the opposite
of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864.
Collegiality was another flagship of the modernists. Collegiality meant
the democratization of the “monolithic” Church, an idea launched by
Rahner, who would have made the pope the equal of the bishops–primus
inter pares, according to a formally condemned thesis. Collegiality was
therefore voted and duly accepted until the day when one of the periti let
slip the interpretation which the modernists planned on drawing from it
after the Council. What rectification could be brought to a text already
accepted by the Council Fathers yet ambiguous in the extreme, to the point
of undermining the divine constitution of the Church? The Pope decided to
include as an appendix a nota explicativa praevia excluding any heretical
interpretation.
The equivocation heaviest with error was the doctrine of ecumenism,
expressed in various Council documents but particularly in Unitatis
Redintegratio and Lumen Gentium. It is to Congar that we owe the schema
of Lumen Gentium which, with its famous “subsistit”–“the Church of Christ
subsists in the Catholic Church”–implies that separated Churches also
belong to the Church of Christ and that they are means of salvation–a pure
heresy. Small wonder if the language of choice was ambiguity. Where the
magisterium once spoke of the nature of the Church, Congar alluded rather
to her mystery; where Pius XII had consecrated the notion of member of the
Mystical Body of Christ, Congar introduced the marvelously vague notion
of communion of the People of God. Why? Because one is or is not a
member of a body, whereas one can be more or less in communion.
• The heterodox doctrines proposed and often accepted at Vatican
Council II concerning Revelation, ecumenism, religious liberty, and
collegiality are conclusions in perfect harmony with the fundamental
principles of the modernists.
The document on Revelation is surreptitiously modernist. Rahner’s
original text, rejected in extremis, offered the Protestant vision of sola
Scriptura along with the denial of the three pillars of the Church’s teaching
on Revelation: namely, inspiration, inerrancy, and the historical character of
the Gospels. The overall Rahnerian theory of Revelation within the
individual consciousness is not explicitly present in the text proposed to the
Council, yet it was clearly designed to prepare the ground for the
introduction of that theory by undermining the foundations of the Catholic
Faith.
Of all the topics treated at the Council, that of ecumenism certainly
best reveals the affinity and the unity of thought between the Council and
the modernists. In fact, the periti who directed the Council are the same
men who were targeted and exiled for their modernist ideas fifteen years
earlier. It should come as no surprise that the ecumenism advocated and put
into practice at the Council should be of modernist inspiration. Ecumenical
unity cannot arise from the truth of facts and realities, and so poses a
theoretically insoluble problem, to be resolved only in practice.
Accordingly, the only solution can be to sacrifice truth and the principle of
non-contradiction in the name of an artificial unity maintained by
equivocation. To promote ecumenism means signing a treaty of non-
aggression, granting all religions citizenship in the great pantheon of creeds.
The only commandment is the exclusion of exclusivity: freedom for all in
all things, except for those who believe in the truth. The Catholic Church
herself is warmly invited to take her place in the assembly, on the condition
that she abdicate her pretension to a monopoly of holiness, truth, and unity.
The logical consequence of conciliar ecumenism is religious liberty.
Religious liberty is the public denial of the distinction between good and
evil, between true and false. Religious liberty is the refusal to accept Jesus
Christ and His Church as supreme authorities over man. It is the practical
affirmation of the egological, modernist conscience, independent of all
exterior rule of action or thought. It is the affirmation of liberty as the
principle and the sovereign right of man, transcending God and His laws.
Collegiality denies the Church the monarchic constitution which our
Lord bestowed upon her. It signs the abdication of all ecclesiastical
authority on every level, for neither the conservative bishop nor the pope
himself is able to resist the lobbying force of the modernist episcopal
conferences. It is the paralysis of the Catholic Church’s system of defense
and attack to the benefit of a modernist cryptocracy, all the more powerful
for its clandestinity. It is the destruction of the principle of authority with its
necessary correlative, Catholic obedience. It is the installation of the most
tyrannical despotism imaginable, to which nothing is sacred, with its
inescapable correlative, blind obedience. There can be no doubt that
collegiality moves in the direction of an insubordinate, egological
individualism. There can be no doubt that, in its hour of triumph, the
collegiality which signs the abdication of authority acts in the service of the
modernist cause.
• The Catholic Faith is incompatible with the theoretical ecumenism
professed by Vatican II, founded as it is upon modernist principles.
Accordingly, post-conciliar ecumenism has proven to be modernism in
practice.
Because it seeks a practical union of the diverse confessions through
equivocation and contradiction, abstracting from the true and the real, the
ecumenical spirit is incompatible with Christian culture, realist before all
else and hence turned toward what is true. Indeed, religious truth, which is
reasonable, exclusive, and absolute, admits of no contradiction. There can
be no melting pot of churches if Jesus Christ, God made man, really did
constitute the Catholic Church as the sole divine authority on earth.
Therefore, in simple logic, the Christian spirit and the ecumenical spirit
cannot coexist. What is logically incompatible with Christian truth proved
itself historically incompatible as well when it came time for the Council to
elaborate the Magna Charta of ecumenism. A thousand difficulties arose
during its passage at the Council on account of its incoherence; it was only
approved after the principles of reason and faith had been silenced. Thus,
by means of astutely worded ambiguities, the Council became the advocate
of false ecumenism (of the Rahnerian strain, to be precise) and found itself
obliged to identify contraries: the Church of Jesus Christ is only the
Catholic Church and is not only the Catholic Church; the truth in religious
matters is the Catholic Faith alone and is not the Catholic Faith alone; the
grace of Jesus Christ is bestowed upon the world through the Catholic
Church alone and it is not bestowed through her alone. Or else, where the
Council did not identify contraries, it relativized them, which amounts to
the same thing–absolute skepticism. Inescapably, the result of conciliar
ecumenism is that perfect intellectual and religious nirvana which
constitutes the very essence of modernism. It seems necessary to conclude
that, since it is founded on philosophical skepticism and doctrinal
relativism, conciliar ecumenism is the practical application of modernism.
• Paul VI was a liberal pope and a philomodernist, an advocate of
practical modernism.
The Pope often sang the praises of modern theologians: Manaranche
and de Lubac, Congar, Rahner, not to mention Blondel. To an even greater
extent than John XXIII, he opened the doors of the Council to the new
theologians. Cardinal Danielou saw in Paul VI a liberal pope, that is to say,
not a pope without strong convictions but, on the contrary, a pope avid to
defend liberal ideas. Thus he put pressure on the Council Fathers to accept
ambiguous decrees. Thus he forced the rector of the Gregorian University
to rehabilitate de Lubac and Teilhard de Chardin in one fell swoop. With the
same firmness the Pope broke all resistance by readmitting the exegetes
Zerwick and Lyonnet to the Biblical Institute.
Ecumenism was the Pope’s obsession; he balked at no sacrifice to
further its implementation, even the sacrifice of the very primacy of Peter.
He prostrated the Church before her age-old enemies with his outrageous
concessions, such as that of “Eucharistic hospitality.” For the same reason,
Pope Paul VI encouraged the project to create a so-called “ecumenical”
Bible. He was responsible for the institution of the New Mass in order to
suppress what was too Catholic in the liturgy and make it resemble more
closely the Calvinist supper. It was he who pushed for a series of meetings
with the Freemasons in view of an “ecumenical-style” public agreement
between the Church and Freemasonry.
• Paul VI, by the actions and omissions of his pontificate, sent tradition
to its grave and promoted a theoretical modernism in its place.
The Pope, a long-time friend of the neo-modernists, did all that was in
his power to promote the progressivist agenda by removing all of the
obstacles in its way. Thus, whether by action or by omission, he effectively
abandoned the primacy of the Faith, of pontifical authority, of Jesus Christ,
and of the Church. The great evil of the pontificate of Paul VI was that he
consistently refused his primary duty: to feed the flock and preserve the
deposit of faith. The abdication of authority was particularly blatant in the
Pope’s relations with the Dutch on the occasion of the pastoral council of
Holland, carried out with the complicity of the bishops themselves as a
means of advocating patently heretical reforms. Next came the affair of the
Dutch Catechism, which culminated in the scandal of the Roman authority’s
leaving this veritable Catechism of Heresies in the hands of children. Such
publications were able to multiply and spread their heresy with impunity,
since the Pope had suppressed the Index in 1965 and paralyzed the Holy
Office, thus fulfilling the desiderata expressed by the modernists sixty years
before. It is for this reason that so few condemnations have been issued
against the works of heretics who blithely publish volume upon volume,
such as Hans Küng and Léon-Xavier Dufour. The Pope had effectively
abdicated his authority after his unpleasant experience with the episcopal
conferences over Humanae Vitae and its condemnation of contraception.
• The theological commissions instituted under Pope John Paul II and
Cardinal Ratzinger were overrun with modernists.
Under the pontificate of John Paul II, the chairs of theology were
dominated by the men of Concilium (“hard” modernism); Communio, on
the other hand (the standard-bearer of “soft” modernism) saw its leading
theologians promoted bishops. The most important among them was
Ratzinger, charged with the defense of orthodoxy. In fact, he was himself
imbued with the modernist poison, as his famous book, innocuously entitled
Introduction to Christianity, bears witness. Once in power, he proceeded to
install his protégés in the most coveted posts of influence. Thus he
promoted as defenders of the doctrine of the Faith Monsignor Lehmann, for
example, who denies the bodily resurrection of Jesus; Georges Cottier,
advocate of the dialogue between the Church and the Masonic lodges;
Albert Vanhoye, for whom Jesus was not a priest. On the Theological
Commission we find Monsignor Schönborn, who sings the praises of the
ecumenical Super-Church of Balthasar; the Hegelian professor Monsignor
Léonard; and, above all, the future Cardinal Kasper, whose book is little
more than a German edition of Renan’s Life of Jesus.
• Cardinal Ratzinger has taken it upon himself to foster the modernist
theories on Revelation.
The last of Pope John Paul II’s pontifical documents resurrect the pet
themes of Rahner, casting doubt on the key dogmas of Revelation: the
historicity of the Gospels, inspiration, and inerrancy. Nor do they stop there.
According to them, Revelation did not end with the death of the last
Apostle. It continues and progresses indefinitely, in harmony with
“significant re-readings” in the Spirit, according to the spiritual exegesis of
Fr. de Lubac, the method of preference cited in the pontifical documents.
The advantage of this exegesis is that it allows multiple interpretations for a
single passage: a literal meaning, a meaning within the Paschal mystery, a
meaning in accord with the present circumstances of life in the Spirit–the
possibilities are limitless. In the regime of spiritual exegesis, scriptural
magisterium comes from the grassroots, imbued with the true sense of the
faith. This “sense of the faith” of the People of God is the key word
indicating the effective abdication of the authentic magisterium of the
Church. The Biblical Commission has added a sociological aspect to the
pure Protestantism of unbounded interpretation. When the believer reads
and interprets the Scripture, he acts in order to bring to the community the
fruit of his readings; he acts to enrich the faith of all. This spiritual exegesis
is in fact none other than the institution of communal free interpretation
within the Church, condemned by St. Pius X under the name of collective
conscience.
• John Paul II was a philomodernist steeped in modern philosophy.
John Paul II began his career as a professor of moral philosophy. His
dream was to reconcile Kant with St. Thomas, Scheler, and Heidegger. The
Kantian or Hegelian language of Pope John Paul II’s pontifical documents,
as well as their underlying existentialist themes, betrays this early training.
His world view owed much to subjective and anthropological
existentialism. His favorite authors were Teilhard de Chardin and de Lubac.
At the Council he defended the document on religious liberty and, most of
all, Gaudium et Spes. He stood up against those who wished to publish a
severe condemnation of atheism. He was strongly influenced by the dyed-
in-the-wool modernists for whom he did not hide his admiration: Henri de
Lubac, J. Danielou, Y. Congar, Hans Küng, Ratzinger, Lombardi, and Karl
Rahner. He was so at one with modern ideas that de Lubac considered him
the ideal candidate for the papacy. Created archbishop of Krakow, he
encouraged the Polish edition of Communio and, as Pope, hastened to make
cardinals of the three founders of the review: Ratzinger, de Lubac, and
Balthasar.
• John Paul II never disavowed and, on the contrary, took up the
defense of many of Rahner’s modernist theories.
Rahner founded his philosophy on the existentialist principle of
egological knowledge: “I think-I will-It is!” He founded his theology on the
same principle of the independent conscience and, among other things, on
the thesis of universal salvation. Such a thesis necessarily supposed an
openness to all creeds, the idea of the anonymous Christian, an empty hell,
and the tearing down of the walls of the “ghetto Church.” John Paul II
adopted disturbingly similar theories. His first encyclical, Redemptor
Hominis, makes the individual consciousness the foundation of Revelation
and reduces the entire supernatural order to pure nature. Divine Revelation
is simply man revealing himself to man. God is the abstract infinite who
reveals Himself to the human consciousness. Sin is but an incoherence
within the conscience. Freedom, fruit of the consciousness and foundation
of human dignity, is inviolable even in matters of religion. The Church of
Christ is perfectly identified with the human race as a whole. Citing
Gaudium et Spes, John Paul II defended the notion of universal salvation,
such that all men–knowingly or otherwise, willingly or otherwise in the
faith–already belong to Christ. Clearly, the Pope’s ideas are dangerously
close to those of the prince of the modernists.
• John Paul II actively encouraged practical modernism by advocating
religious pluralism.
The ecumenism of John Paul II is essentially philanthropic, in the
spirit of the Deists of the eighteenth century and the Freemasons. Whereas
St. Paul preached the Catholic Faith to the pagans, the Pope preached a
religion beyond ecclesiastical boundaries and creeds. He preached it and
brought it into being with the ecumenical gatherings of Assisi and of St.
Peter’s in Rome. He established it as a law in the great pontifical reforms
carried out in the ecumenical spirit of the Council. Thus, already in 1983,
there appeared the new Code of Canon Law, setting in stone the Protestant
ecclesiology of the “People of God,” of the Church of God which only
“subsists” in the Catholic Church; according Holy Communion to
Protestants; and formally instituting episcopal collegiality. The same spirit
also presides over the new Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992, best
deciphered in the light of the Pope’s recurring theme: “By his Incarnation,
he, the son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man.”
Another ecumenical blow against papal primacy was delivered in
1995, this time on the initiative of the Pope himself, in a perfect illustration
of the “auto-demolition of the Church” already decried by Paul VI. The
Joint Declaration on Justification issued in union with the Protestants
represented major progress in the ecumenical endeavor, crowning thirty
years of labor with a “differentiated agreement”–thus, by its own admission,
ambiguous and open to heresy.

2. Epilogue
 Having in a sense unearthed and examined the foundations of our
Christian culture, we begin to understand that the Catholic Church, like a
mighty tree, has been able to flourish and to spread her branches all over the
world only because she is nourished by healthy roots: faith in Jesus Christ
and right reason. Henceforth, in the shady foliage of this tree replete with
the fruits of wisdom, the birds of heaven have found their repose. The great
minds and the powerful rulers, alongside the humble and the simple, have
tasted and savored the benefits of the civilization of Christ, so divine and so
human, so reasonable and so sublime.
Modernism appears in contrast as the perfect negation of Christian
culture. From Luther to Loisy by way of Kant; from Tyrrell to the “conciliar
Church” by way of Rahner, we see the same causes producing the same
deleterious effects. These men cast off the moorings of faith by separating it
from reason. They thus inaugurated a faith in the absurd, fruit of the
individual consciousness, without justification or rule. In its wake,
Revelation was emancipated from the Revealer, Jesus Christ, to become a
mere sentiment of the divine that warms the heart. The price to pay for
following this religion of absurdity is nothing less than the destruction of
the reason. Freed from the laws of reality, the intellect blindly follows after
dreams and illusions. Everything is in flux, everything melds into
everything else, everything is true and everything is false at the same time,
everything is good and everything is evil. Behold chaos and contradiction
established as the supreme principles of reality.
If the Christian heritage symbolizes order and the perfection of being,
oriented ultimately toward the fullness of absolute Being who is pure
perfection, modernism is its photographic negative. Modernism is the
absence of God, founded on an imaginary Revelation, dependent upon the
philosophy of the absurd. Against the fullness of Catholic truth, modernism
offers the most absurd nothingness imaginable, the horror of nirvana. It is
not an alternative culture, it is viscerally a counterculture, or rather an
anticulture. Rather than adoring his Creator, man adores himself in an
introverted narcissism; rather than God creating man in His image, man
makes “God” in his own image; rather than God becoming man and
dwelling among us, man makes himself God by rejecting the true God.
Since man without God is nothing, willing to love and adore oneself outside
of God is the most radical suicide possible. Modernism is the suicide of the
mind and the soul, for within it man nourishes himself on his own fantasies
rather than seeking his fulfillment in Him who is Being and Life.
This dilemma–man or God–has divided the human race and the history
of religion from the outset, but particularly since the coming of our Lord.
For two thousand years, the pantheist religion of man’s self-adoration has
been screaming out its revolt against God. After Luther, this perennial
religion developed into the great modernist movement we know today, all
the more dangerous as it feeds off the Church’s riches. Now it only awaits
the final coming of the triumphant Antichrist. The prophecies concerning
the Son of perdition grow clearer as we approach their fulfillment. There is
no difficulty today in imagining the Antichrist possessed of a power and
authority of global proportions. No one is surprised at the loss of faith
among the majority of Catholic nations and in Rome herself, a situation
unthinkable only forty years ago.
There is a relation of cause and effect between the retreat of the light
and the invasion of darkness. Evil spreads when good begins to crumble.
The Prince of evil gains ground to the extent that the Church, the kingdom
of Christ on earth, loses her footing. The devil’s dream is obviously to
neutralize the Church and draw her into his infernal game. Through the
repeated lessons of history, totalitarian regimes have learned that, for all
their power of physical coercion, they were incapable of breaking the mind
and the will. Thus, the Antichrist had to complement totalitarianism in
politics with totalitarianism in religion, which alone holds sway over the
soul. Religion had to be demolished–more precisely, the Catholic religion,
the only one which still believes in God and in truth. The result will be what
Paul VI announced shortly after the Council: “It may be that this non-
Catholic thought within the Catholic Church will one day dominate. Yet it
will never reflect the thought of the Church. A small flock will always
remain, though it be but a very small flock.”[619]
Once the Catholic religion has been emptied of its substance and
infused with the modernist virus, nothing will stand in the way of the power
of the Antichrist. Through the connivance and complicity of the “Catholic”
leaders, he will penetrate the sanctuary of God and see himself enthroned,
presenting himself as God. By joining the two supreme powers on earth, he
will accomplish the most perfect of totalitarianisms which, in the words of
Solzhenitsyn, consists above all else in the negation of the idea of truth. The
State and religion, the natural institution and the divine institution, will be
led by this man of lies without other restraint than his own will of iron.
When Paul VI spoke of a majority of Catholics in error and a faithful
remnant, he was certainly indicating a time of crisis. It is that crisis we have
been living for forty years as modernism triumphs in St. Peter’s Basilica.
The time of crisis is a time of fog, confusing the shape of things and
blending their colors. The crucial question in such an age is to identify the
landmarks still allowing us to discern with certitude the true from the false.
There must be landmarks as immovable as the Rock of Peter and the God of
our fathers. These landmarks are the three intuitions, the three evident facts
which make up the Christian heritage: the Faith is reasonable; the
Revelation of Jesus Christ did take place, by the testimony of prophecies
and miracles just as historical and as true as the death of St. Paul and the
existence of the Church; being and truth, religious or otherwise, are as
immutable as God Himself. Men change their ideas and sometimes fall into
error; the men of the Church also change and can be in error, but the
fundamental principles remain eternal and infallible. Revelation and the
Faith will be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday and today. Our
infallible landmark is the past, the faith of our pious fathers, of our Holy
Fathers Pius: St. Pius V, Blessed Pius IX, St. Pius X, and Pius XII. To
betray this faith so as to follow after men, even men of the Church, is to
betray Jesus Christ. Let the true Christians therefore prepare themselves in
obedience to God for the coming of this Son of perdition, whom the Son of
God will destroy with the breath of His mouth. Above all, let them be
empty of themselves to be filled with God thrice holy. Let them imitate the
example of the Virgin Mary who, by her humility, has already crushed the
head of the serpent and will at last destroy his accursed offspring–“Ipsa
conteret.”[620]
 A BRIEF LEXICON OF MODERNISM
Authority and Hierarchy: According to the principle of private judgment,
all that comes from without ought to be systematically rejected, in
particular the Sacraments and the Church (Luther). It is clearly vital to
distinguish the monarchical Roman Church from the collective conscience
of the People of God, which (unlike the former) is always healthy and truly
possesses authority and infallibility. Excommunication is a baptism by fire
and a means of sanctification for the pious man (Tyrrell). Nothing is less
equal to expressing the whole of truth than the extrinsicist doctrines which
maintain in the Church a unity of constraint through the sole bond of a
visible transmission and a visible authority (de Lubac). The duty of the
authority is to offer to individuals directly inspired by God the means to
express a healthy and ordered public opinion in the Church (Rahner).
Church: The Church is a spirit fed on one and the same nourishment, the
Gospel, which ought to be a source of understanding and not of discord, but
the collective experience ought to yield to individual experience. Therefore,
a true Christian should be in the Church but not of it (Harnack). The Church
is the society of those who are conscious of their dependence on the
universe considered as the Great Whole (Schleiermacher). The kingdom of
God is the sum of those who believe in the Christ of the Scriptures and are
moved by love. Thus a religious society will consist of an infinite variety of
religious experiences, satisfied with themselves and infinitely tolerant of
others (Ritschl). Why does not humanity gather together of its own
impulsion into the New Jerusalem? The Apocalyptic Jerusalem is the
Mystical Body of Christ, the “Super-Man” formed by the sole effort of man,
through the achievements of technology and the birth of Super-States
(Teilhard). I believe in the holy universal Church, visible expression of the
ideal communion of all beings (Hébert). True Catholicism is not the
Christianized Judaism of the New Testament, but rather Christianized
paganism or world-religion, which amounts to a change from tight clothes
to elastic (Tyrrell). The People of God is the greater Church which
“subsists” in the Catholic Church but is not reduced to her alone. The
Church does not see herself so much as the exclusive community of
candidates for salvation as the historical and social vanguard of that hidden
reality (Rahner).
Dogma: Since religion is above all a sentiment of dependence, each Church is
free to construct its particular dogma, variable in function of the depth and
purity of that sentiment of dependence (Schleiermacher). Dogmatic
formulae are in a sense the product of life. Dogmas are to the real Church
what a map of London is to the city itself: a simple guide for practical
purposes. Theological elaboration was useful in its time, since it preserved
the seed of the Gospel like a mammoth preserved in ice (Tyrrell).
Ecumenism: The beliefs of humanity as a whole are unified not by a
common dogma at the interior of religions, but by a common impulsion
behind them. Their sole point in common is man’s sentiment of adoration
and dependence upon an invisible Power (Schleiermacher). True
Catholicism is Christianized paganism or world-religion, which amounts to
a change from tight clothes to elastic. It resembles a Buddhist community
more than anything else and its creed is like to it: “I put my trust in Buddha;
I put my trust in the doctrine of Deliverance” (Tyrrell). The only possible
conversion to the World and the only conceivable form for the Religion of
the future is the general convergence of all religions into a universal Christ,
fundamentally satisfying to all parties (Teilhard). Buddhism is the greatest
spiritual event in the history of Christianity itself (de Lubac). The mission
of every one of us, as people of the New Age, is to lead all human beings
capable of being receptive back to the state of consciousness that was man’s
before the Fall. Little by little, this new consciousness will infiltrate all the
daily activities of men. The transformation will then accelerate
exponentially (Pigani, Channels: Mediums of the New Age).
Faith (Act of): The “faith” is a mortal leap, a transport of distress and of
confidence toward the unknown, coming from the depths of the self.
Reason is directly opposed to faith. It is impious to say that if a thing is
true, it is true for philosophy as well as for theology (Luther). The Gospel is
not an absolute and abstract doctrine applicable to all times and all men; it
is a living faith (Loisy). If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were
to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my
faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.
The world is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe…I
surrender myself to an ill-defined faith in a world that is one and infallible–
wherever it may lead me (Teilhard de Chardin). Extrinsicist doctrines
maintain in the Church a mere unity of constraint through the sole bond of a
visible transmission and a visible authority. They transform the obedience
of the faith into a faith of pure obedience (de Lubac).
God: He is reduced to an abstract and distant Being, powerless and
unjust after the model of Protestant man (Luther). “Let us make God in our
image!” (the Deists of the eighteenth century). The only God we can ever
know is the God within; this God is but a chimera (Kant). God is in the
process of becoming Himself; He is the category of the idea (Hegel). Does
God exist? Not yet! (Renan). I believe in the objective value of the idea of
God, of an absolute and perfect ideal, distinct but not separate from the
world, one and three, for it can be called: infinite activity, intelligence, and
love (Hébert). For us, God is not, He becomes; and His becoming is our
very progress (LeRoy). Does God exist? The great problem is to know if
the universe is inert, empty, deaf, without soul or viscera. There is no proof
we might call definitive, allowing us to give a yes or a no (Loisy). Our best
God is but an idol, a temple made with hands in which the Divine will is as
little to be confined as our hell-purgatory-heaven (ground floor; mezzanine;
second storey) schematization (Tyrrell). I do not hold the “antipantheistic”
position you attribute to me. On the contrary, I am essentially gnostic by
thought and by temperament; all my life has been spent crying that there is
but one true “pantheism of union” (Deus omnia in omnibus) (a pan-
Christism, as Blondel would say), as opposed to the pseudopantheism of
dissolution (Deus omnia) (Teilhard). If God Himself is man and if He has
been from all eternity, if man is forbidden to hold himself of little value for
he would be holding God of little value, if God continues to be the ineffable
mystery, then man is from all eternity the mystery of God expressed, who
participates from all eternity in the mystery of His foundation (Rahner). The
universe as a whole is a living, conscious, spiritual being. This
Consciousness–we may call it “God,” or whatever name suits us–is
inhabited by aspects of itself, that is, by conscious beings (Pigani, New
Age).
Gospels: The Gospel is symbolic of the progress of humanity. The myth, the
symbol, is more important than the fact. The Gospel speaks not so much of
events which took place eighteen hundred years ago in Palestine, as of the
mystical evolution of souls illustrated by the supposed events (Strauss). The
fourth Gospel is a book of mystical theology in which we hear the voice of
the Christian conscience, not the Christ of History (Loisy). Are we to frame
our minds to that of a first-century Jewish carpenter, to whom the stellar
universe was unknown; who cared solely for the kingdom of God and His
righteousness? (Tyrrell). In a more general way, I liked thus discovering on
all sides the historical symbolism, and the symbolic history, that already
characterize our Gospels. The Fathers of the Church teach that the same
words express two meanings signifying two distinct realities, one human
and the other spiritual (de Lubac).
Grace: Grace is received from God but remains totally exterior to man, such
that man remains closed in upon himself and free from all action of God
upon him (Luther). Nature and supernature are but two faces of the same
coin (Schleiermacher). Man is part and parcel of the spiritual universe and
the supernatural order; in God is his life, his movement, and his being
(Tyrrell). St. Augustine is that unfortunate man who spoiled everything by
introducing the supernatural (Teilhard). The supernatural is absolutely
impossible and absolutely necessary to man (Blondel). God could not have
created pure nature without ordering it toward the supernatural (de Lubac).
As to what we call grace and the immediate vision of God, God is really an
internal principle constitutive of man. God and the grace of Christ are in all
things, as the secret essence of all reality (Rahner).
Hell: God is but a chimera, and no chimera has the power to send to heaven
or to hell (Kant). If hell exists, it is empty (Balthasar). It is impossible for
man to refuse God definitively (Rahner). Today nobody can claim that any
need to save souls from hell is what accounts for the missions (Congar).
Humanity and Incarnation: Man himself is a being melded into the Great
Whole. The difference between Jesus Christ and ourselves is only a matter
of degree for, in fact, humanity bears in itself the power to produce in its
line of evolution another such apparition of God in the world
(Schleiermacher). Humanity is the union of two natures; God becomes man;
it is Humanity who dies, resurrects, and ascends into heaven; from the
suppression of His mortality as a personal, rational, and terrestrial spirit
proceeds His union with the infinite Spirit of the heavens (Strauss). The
conscious individual can be considered nearly interchangeably either as the
consciousness of God in the world, by a sort of incarnation of God in
humanity, or as the consciousness of the world subsisting in God, by a sort
of concentration of the universe in man (Loisy). In this sense Humanity…is
a mystical Christ, a collective Logos, a Word or manifestation of the Father;
and every member of that society is in his measure a Christ or a revealer in
whom God is made flesh and dwells in our midst (Tyrrell). With the
appearance of men began the history of humanity and of its ascent toward
the perfect union of all individuals, the Omega Point of History, the Super-
Man, whose existence is as certain as it is mysterious (Teilhard). By
revealing the Father and by being revealed by Him, Christ completes the
revelation of man to himself. It is through Christ that the person reaches
maturity, that man emerges definitively from the universe (de Lubac). Man
arises when God desires to be non-God. The Son of God and all men are the
abbreviation, the number of God Himself. The Incarnation is the one
supreme case of the essential actualization of human reality (Rahner).
Human beings created themselves in order to experience love, knowledge,
matter, and action. We must prepare the future of humanity, the New Man, a
being of whom we cannot yet have the slightest notion (Pigani, Channels:
The Mediums of the New Age).
Infallibility of Dogma: In dogma or in Revelation, the object alone is
eternal and immutable in itself, not the form which that knowledge has
taken in human history (Loisy). What the Church says is often absolutely
wrong; but the truth in whose defence she says it is revealed; it is a truth
which is directly practical, preferential, approximative, and only indirectly
speculative (Tyrrell).
Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ, historically, was but a man, but it was useful
to present him to the faithful as God in order that they understand that they,
too, are in some way sons of God (Kant). Since the foundation of religion is
the sentiment of dependence of the Great Whole, the foundation of Christ’s
sensibility is the awareness of His union with God. The divinity of Jesus is
precisely His awareness of it (Schleiermacher). He was in reality a young,
enthusiastic Jew who mocked religious formality and denounced the moral
corruption of his time, and so was put to death (Strauss). We believe in
something that takes place within ourselves; we believe in the divinity in
Christ, Gottheit in Christo, but not in the divinity of Christ, Gottheit Christi
(Ritschl). I believe in him in whom the union of the divine and human
natures was achieved to an exceptional degree, Jesus Christ, whose brilliant
superiority dazzled simple hearts and was symbolized for them in a
supernatural conception (Hébert). The divinity of Jesus is not a fact of
Gospel history whose reality is open to critical verification. In a sense,
Jesus was the Messiah; in another sense, he was not yet the Messiah
(Loisy). He was never truly the Savior. He could not contain in himself all
the wealth of the Spirit which could only be manifested through the work of
the community (Tyrrell). The fact that Christ lived, died, and rose again at a
particular time and in a particular place in history, certainly lends clarity
and a tangible and concrete character to Church piety, but it is also a
weakness because it will always be a fact limited in time and space
(Rahner).
Meditation, Awareness of God: Man understands the harmony of all things when
he understands that the empty world, the non-entity of the self and nirvana-
extinction are the same thing. This understanding is ultimately obtained by
religious and philosophical Zen (meditation), which thinks the “self” as it
truly is, namely, empty, lifeless, and definitively “non-self” (Zen
Buddhism). This sentiment of dependence is the essence of piety and
religion. The divinity of Jesus is His very awareness of it (Schleiermacher).
The apparent realism of the scenes is due to the mystical imagination of St.
John and to the energy of his conviction, which did not allow him clearly to
distinguish, in his religious meditations, the ideal from the real, theory from
History, the symbol from its object (Loisy).
Miracle: The uniform laws which alone help us explain natural events only
exist in our own intelligence, the faculty with which we chop up and
deform reality. The miracle is but a surprising effect of the spirit acting
upon matter (LeRoy). Miracle and prophecy are ancient forms of religious
thought destined for extinction. The apparitions of Jesus after the
Resurrection are a direct argument, but one which we may consider as
uncertain in its meaning. Sense impressions are not a sufficient testimony to
a purely supernatural reality (Loisy).
Religion: This principle of self-sufficiency means that religion is contained in
pure reason emancipated from exterior realities (Kant). Seek the Infinite
and the Eternal in all that is and moves, in all that is active and all that is
passive; unite oneself to the Infinite and the Eternal by a sort of immediate
awareness; possess all things in God and God in all things: behold Religion.
…Religion is the unity of all our being in all of Being, felt ineffably in the
most profound depths of ourselves (Schleiermacher). We must step forward
to assist modern scientific man, walled within his immanent prison, and
offer him a religion tailor-made to meet his needs. Religion is the
spontaneous result of the demands of the human spirit fully satisfied by the
emotive experience of God in us (Tyrrell).
Revelation: All that comes from without ought to be rejected, in particular the
Sacraments and the Church, but also divine Revelation (Luther). This
Revelation is the subjective fruit of the concept of God which springs forth
from the religious sentiment of dependence, in the depths of our
consciousness (Schleiermacher). Divine Revelation that does not take place
in us and does not become intimate to us does not exist for us at all. To
eliminate the self in this instance would not even be possible (Sabatier). The
common idea of Revelation is pure childishness. God reveals Himself in
and through humanity (Loisy). Revelation belongs rather to the category of
impressions than to that of expression; it is not so much affirmation as
experience. Could man read the needs of his own spirit and Conscience he
would need no teacher (Tyrrell). The way in which God produces man’s
inward knowledge of his self and his liberty must be taken as a particular
and original mode of Revelation, which is the underpinning of all other
revelation (Rahner). Luther rethought all of Christianity and was truly a
man of the Church because he was incapable of receiving anything which
did not come from his own experience (Congar). The believer always reads
and interprets Scripture in view of bringing to the community the fruits of
his reading, to enrich the faith of all (Biblical Commission, 1993).
Salvation, Redemption: The Redemption is defined as the passage from a state
of consciousness which is dormant or dead to a state of consciousness
which is fully alive. This passage is the work of faith in Jesus Christ
(Schleiermacher). Since every man is in fact called to live supernaturally, it
must be that the very action which fundamentally constitutes our life is in
fact supernaturally informed by God. Even unrecognized, God is always
there! (Laberthonnière). By an extension of the dogma of the communion of
saints, though they themselves are not in the normal way of salvation,
infidels can be saved because they are an integral part of that humanity
which is to be saved (de Lubac). An atheist can perfectly well be saved as
an anonymous Christian. Whoever totally accepts his own humanity has
accepted the Son of man since, in Him, God has accepted man (Rahner).
God saves the infidels without their knowing the Gospel. Otherwise we
should all have to leave for China (Congar).
Sin: Sin is a sickness affecting our religious sentiment and cutting off
our awareness of God in ourselves; this is the reason why Jesus, in the
intensity of His union with God, can declare Himself to be without sin
(Schleiermacher). Whether or not man historically committed an original
sin is without importance, for the human conscience bears sufficient witness
to our evil tendencies (Kant). At a given moment in time, men–homo
sapiens–suddenly appeared on various points of the globe (Teilhard de
Chardin).
Symbol of the Faith (Creed): The Protestant creeds had a purely symbolic value
(Kant). The Trinity, the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Atonement,
the Resurrection, heaven and hell, angels and devils are all parts of a
multicolored stained-glass window through which was refracted to men
God’s light, pure and colorless (Tyrrell). The symbol of faith (the Creed) is
a symbolic faith. Dogma is a mere symbol and is in fact the symbol of
nothing, for it is but the intellectual, symbolic, and approximative
translation of our religious experience of inaccessible realities
(Schleiermacher). I believe in Jesus Christ, whose brilliant superiority
dazzled simple hearts and was symbolized for them in a supernatural
conception (Hébert).
Tradition: It is the law of life that every organism has its limits of
development, after which it must decay and be content to survive in its
progeny. Judaism lived a glorious life and rose again in Christianity; may
not Catholicism, like Judaism, have to die in order that it may live again in
greater and grander form? (Loisy) The river of Tradition cannot reach all
the way to us if its bed is not perpetually cleared of old silt and sand. What
precisely is this living Tradition? It is the simple expression of dogmatic
relativism automatically rejecting all dogma received from without in any
set form. The ulterior beliefs of the Church need not necessarily be logically
tied to what she has always explicitly believed, starting in the first centuries
(de Lubac).
Truth: It is impious to say that if a thing is true, it is true for philosophy
and for theology (Luther). The supernatural birth of Christ, His miracles,
His Resurrection, and His Ascension into heaven remain eternal truths,
whatever doubt may be cast upon their reality as historical events (Strauss).
Are there eternal and necessary truths? There may be some doubt. Axioms
and categories, forms of the understanding or of the sensibility: all are
becoming, all are evolving; the human spirit is plastic and can change its
most intimate desires (LeRoy). We believe that the truth is life, therefore
movement and growth rather than end-point. It evolves with man, in him,
through him; and that does not prevent its being truth for him; it is such,
indeed, only on that condition. The true and the false are not absolute, well-
defined categories (Loisy). It is always and necessarily we ourselves who
speak to ourselves; who (aided no doubt by the immanent God) work out
truth for ourselves (Tyrrell). Truth is the mind’s correspondence with life
(Blondel). When the spirit evolves, an immutable truth can only subsist
thanks to a simultaneous and correlative evolution of all the notions,
maintaining the same relation between them. A theology which would not
be current would be a false theology (Bouillard).
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[1]Translator’s note: The English expression is Cardinal Keeler’s, then Archbishop of Baltimore and
head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, spoken in conversation with the translator of
the present volume.
[2] This explains why the works consulted are cited indifferently from French, English, Spanish, or
Italian editions. The translations are our own. [Author’s note to the original French edition.]
The present translation of Cent Ans de Modernisme has been produced in close collaboration with
the author, fluent in English but lacking the leisure to devote himself to writing the book a second
 time. From his post at Holy Cross Seminary he has directed and assisted the entire progress of the
work.
Within our resources, we have tried to render the work as accessible as possible to English readers,
providing wherever possible authorized translations of passages cited in the French text as well as
indicating the English editions of works to which Fr. Bourmaud refers. Certain footnotes have
been added to the original text, addressing the English reader in particular; slight modifications
have been inserted to reflect a changing historical context. Seldom are these changes indicated by
a Translator’s note; they represent the joint effort of author and translator.
The translator is grateful to the library director at Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom
College for his untiring assistance in locating English editions of works cited. She owes particular
thanks to the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., for so generously opening the
resources of its library to an unknown translator, “that scholarship might advance.”
[3] Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968), p.85. This
author, generally Thomist in philosophy, despite being tainted with personalism, leaned too much
towards liberalism in politics to merit the title of “anti-modernist,” although we shall borrow
largely from him (Chapters 1 and 5). In his old age he returned to the unbelief of his youth, going
so far as to deny the sufferings of an eternal hell (Approches sans Entrave [Paris: Fayard, 1973]).
[4] Thonnard, Précis d’Histoire de la Philosophie. English translation, A Short History of Philosophy
(New York: Desclée & Co., 1956), p.87.
[5] Albert Einstein, “On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation,” in Ideas and Opinions (New York:
Crown, 1954), p.342.
[6] Rom. 1:20.
[7] Ps. 18:2.
[8] Physica, VIII, 5-6. From the movement of a drop of water in the sea, Aristotle concludes that
there must exist an immutable mover, for all that moves is moved by another, and the series of
moved movers cannot be infinite, for “an end must be reached.” Never have two (Greek) words
had a greater influence on the history of philosophy.
[9] Thonnard, A Short History of Philosophy, pp.33-34.
[10]Ibid., p.33.
[11]Metaphysics, I, 5.
[12] Thonnard, A Short History of Philosophy, pp.15-16. The final citation is from A. Croiset,
Histoire de la Littérature Grècque (Paris: 1914-29), I, 47.
[13]Metaphysics, IV, 3.
[14] De Corte, L’Intelligence en Péril de Mort (Haut-le-Wastia, Belgium: Dismas, 1987), pp.267-68.
[15] “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.” This expression was decisive in orienting Newman toward the
Catholic Church. Cf. Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, Chapter 3.
[16] Sermon 238, translated by Sr. Mary Sarah Muldowney in Saint Augustine: Sermons on the
Liturgical Seasons (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959) p.243.
[17] Vatican I, Constitution Dei Filius.
[18] I Jn. 1:1.
[19]Confessions, VII, 18.
[20] Rom. 13:13-14.
[21] I Cor. 15:17.
[22] I Cor. 14:8.
[23]In Psalmo 32, Sermo 1, ML 36, 284.
[24]In Psalmo 36, enarrat. 2, n. 2, ML 36, 364.
[25]In Psalmo 90, 2, 1, ML 37, 1159; De Doctr. Christ. 2,6; De Doctr. Chr. 37, ML 34, 35; De Gen.
ad litt.; Contra Faustum 11, 4, ML 42, 249; Confessions 13, 28, ML 32, 864; Epistola 105, 3, 14,
ML 33, 401.
[26] Jn. 21:25.
[27]De Gen. ad litt. 1; Ep. Man. 5, 6, ML 42, 176.
[28] G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1933), pp.105-6.
[29]De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas, near the end; cf. Vatican I, Dei Filius, Ch.10.
[30] Etienne Gilson, Tribulations de Sophie: Trois Leçons sur le Thomisme (Paris: Vrin, 1967), p.40.
[31]Ibid., p.44
[32] Ambroise Gardeil, O.P., Le Donné Révélé et la Théologie (Juvisy, Seine-et-Oise: Éditions du
Cerf, 1935), pp.253-84.
[33] In Labourdette, Dialogue Théologique (Saint-Maximin, Var: Éditions de la Vie Spirituelle,
1947), p.12.
[34] Pius XI, Studiorum Ducem, cited in Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1933), pp.236-37.
[35] Osee 8:7.
[36] Luther near the end of his life, cited in Philip Hughes, A Popular History of the Reformation
(Garden City, New Jersey: Hanover House, 1957), p.104.
[37] Rom. 7:23-24.
[38] Rom. 1:16-17.
[39] Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp.30-34.
[40] Rm. 3:28.
[41] Luther, Sammtliche Werke, in Monsignor Patrick F. O’Hare, Facts about Luther (Rockford, Ill.:
TAN Books and Publishers, 1987), pp.202-3.
[42] Written in June 1522, cited in Maritain, Three Reformers, p.15.
[43] Luther, Smalcald Articles, 1517.
[44] Luther, Le Serf Arbitre.
[45] Maritain, Three Reformers, p.18.
[46] Cited by A. Sabatier, Journal de Genève, May 5, 1896. Cf. Mourret, Histoire de l’Eglise, Vol. 5
(Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1914), p.350.
[47] Cited by Ploncard d’Assac, L’Eglise Occupée (Chiré-en-Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensée
Française, 1983), p.12.
[48] D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1911), “Réforme,”
col.686.
[49] Professor Seeberg of Berlin, in O’Hare, Facts about Luther, p.4.
[50] Braun, in Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, March 30, p.195, cited by O’Hare, Facts about Luther,
pp.5-6.
[51] Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? in Fabro, La Aventura Progresista (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1976), p.97.
[52] In Thomas Neill, Makers of the Modern Mind (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1958), p.197.
[53]Ibid.
[54]Ibid., p.212.
[55] Kant, Fundamental Principles of Moral Metaphysics in David Cooper, World Philosophies: A
Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p.305.
[56] Cf. the writings of Tyrrell. We note in passing, to discredit such a theory, that a thing can only be
practical and useful if it is theoretical, i.e., if it is knowledge of a real thing. Thus the formula
2+2=4 can only be practical for resolving my credit problems if it is theoretically true.
[57] In D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Réforme,” col.675.
[58] See Chapter 17.
[59] See Chapter 8.
[60]Translator’s note: The reader may notice that personal pronouns and possessive adjectives
referring to Jesus Christ are not consistently capitalized throughout the present translation. We
have desired thereby the more faithfully to portray the modernist doctrines cited or described: we
have not used a capital when it seems the modernist author would not have done so. (Curiously,
George Tyrrell, the only English modernist cited, always capitalized pronouns and adjectives
 referring to our Lord, even in the passages most blatantly undermining His divinity. Tyrrell’s
convention has been respected.)
[61]Vie de Jésus, English edition, Life of Jesus (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896), p.420. Renan’s Life
of Jesus, written in 1863, popularized the theories of his German colleague; Renan’s artistic,
passionate style made the work enormously successful.
[62] Strauss, Leben Jesu, II, sect. 141, in Stewart, Modernism Past and Future (London: John
Murray, 1932), pp.213-14.
[63] See Chapter 15.
[64] Characterization of Albert Ritschl in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Réforme,” col.678.
[65] St. Pius X, Pascendi, Dz. 2100.
[66] St. Irenaeus, Contre les Hérésies, in M-C. Ceruti-Cendrier, Les Évangiles Sont des Reportages
(Paris: Téqui, 1997), pp.324-25.
[67]Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, English translation by
Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
[68]Der Christliche Glaube, edited in English by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, The Christian
Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).
[69] In Vacant-Mangenot, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1903-50),
“Schleiermacher,” col.1499.
[70] Characterization of Ritschl and his colleagues in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Réforme,” col.679, 678.
[71] Sabatier, Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, pp.59 and 379, in Rivière, Le Modernisme
dans l’Église (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1929), p.55, and in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la
Foi Catholique, “Immanence,” col.573-74.
[72] Hegel, in Vacant-Mangenot, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, “Schleiermacher,” col.1505.
[73] This is probably the origin of the famous phrase written by de Lubac and taken up by John Paul
II in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis: “By revealing the Father and by being revealed by
him, Christ completes the revelation of man to himself.” (Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of
Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind, translated by Lancelot C. Sheppard
[New York: The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1964], p.189. See Chapter 17
and the commentary of Cardinal Siri.)
[74] Victor Delbos, Le Problème Moral dans la Philosophie de Spinoza, Deuxième Partie: Le
Problème Moral dans l’Histoire du Spinozisme (Paris: F. Acan, 1893), Chapter VI:
“Schleiermacher,” paraphrasing pages 41-43 of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion (Berlin,
1831), in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Immanence,” col.571. Cf. On
Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, pp.102-9.
[75] Paraphrase of Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, §4, in Stewart, Modernism Past and
Future, p.204. Cf. The Christian Faith, pp.12-18.
[76] Characterization of Ritschl and his colleagues, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Réforme,” col.677-79.
[77] Kattenbusch, disciple of Ritschl, in D’Alès, ibid., col.678.
[78] Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.59.
[79] Characterization of Ritschl, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Réforme,” col.678.
[80] Characterization of Schleiermacher, Über die Religion, pp.42-43, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire
Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Immanence,” col.571.
[81] Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.89.
[82]L’Évolution Créatrice. In reality, this book is a collection of numerous articles by Bergson which
had circulated among his many admirers; thus Bergson may very well have influenced the leaders
of the religious movement even from the end of the nineteenth century, as we will show.
[83]Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion.
[84] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell (New York: The
Modern Library, 1944), p.273. Cf. Thonnard, Short History of Philosophy, p.965.
[85] Bergson, Préface à la Philosophie de l’Expérience de W. James; Creative Evolution, pp.12, 141,
204, 252, 261, etc. In this chapter, all of the citations from Bergson, LeRoy, and Loisy are
originally taken from D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,”
col.641-65.
[86]Une Philosophie Nouvelle, English translation by Vincent Benson, The New Philosophy of Henri
Bergson (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1913), p.76; cf. D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique
de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.654.
[87] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.340.
[88] Cf. Thonnard, A Short History of Philosophy, p.965.
[89]Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1901, pp.411 and 1905, p.200, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire
Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.644.
[90] See Chapter 17.
[91] LeRoy, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1901, p.305; Dogme et Critique, p.355, in
D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.645.
[92] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.192, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.636.
[93] Loisy, Quelques Lettres, p.89, in D’Alès, ibid., col.659.
[94] Blondel, Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, June 15, 1906, p.235, in Courrier de Rome, La
Nouvelle Théologie (Versailles: Courrier de Rome, 1994), p.46.
[95] LeRoy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, pp.75-76.
[96]Pascendi (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul), p.50.
[97] The French catechism Pierres Vivantes (Living Stones) gives the same modernist definition of
miracles. (See Chapter 22.)
[98] Loisy, Quelques Lettres, pp.59, 61, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Modernisme,” col.661.
[99] Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.271.
[100]Ibid., p.263.
[101]Ibid., p.271. Cf. D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,”
col.656.
[102] LeRoy, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1907, p.509, ibid.
[103] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, pp.129, 202, in Modernisme, by the Catholic Institute of Paris
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), see pp.23 ff.
[104] Blondel, Lettre sur les Exigences de la Philosophie Contemporaine, in Barbier, Histoire du
Catholicisme Libéral (Bordeaux: Cadoret, 1923-24), III, 368.
[105] Here is the complete citation drawn from L’Action (1893), English translation by Oliva
Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p.357: “Absolutely impossible
and absolutely necessary to man, that is properly the notion of the supernatural. Man’s action goes
beyond man; and all the effort of his reason is to see that he cannot, that he must not restrict
himself to it. A deeply felt expectation of an unknown messiah; a baptism of desire, which human
science lacks the power to evoke, because this need is itself a gift.” Cf. Wagner, Henri de Lubac
(Paris: Cerf, 2001), p.35
[106] In Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.46-50. (See Chapter 19.)
[107]Annales de la Philosophie Chrétienne. The Annales were eventually placed on the Index in
1913, along with the other works of Laberthonnière; he was also forbidden to publish any other
writings, for his submission was not very convincing. On the contrary, “in addition to the common
immanentist doctrine and the consequences for the autonomy of the mind which flow from it, he
uttered the most virulent and audacious invectives against the magisterium of the Church; against
 the theologians who, by their extrinsic teaching on grace and revelation, lower us from the status
of persons to the status of things; and especially against the man primarily responsible for this
devastation, St. Thomas Aquinas, oppressor of souls, the man ‘who,’ according to Laberthonnière,
‘is not even a heretic,’ because he remained completely outside of Christianity.” (Encyclopedia
Cattolica, “Laberthonnière,” in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.168.)
[108] Laberthonnière, Annales, 1903, in Barbier, Histoire du Catholicisme Libérale, IV, 378.
[109] Laberthonnière, in Barbier, ibid., p.377. This theory is identical to Rahner’s notion of the
“anonymous Christian” (see Chapter 15) and to the “good Buddhist” spoken of by the future Pope
John Paul II in Sign of Contradiction (see Chapter 24).
[110] Schwalm, in Barbier, ibid., p.373.
[111] Loisy, Simples Réflexions, pp.16-17, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.237-38.
[112] Loisy, Choses Passées, pp.307-308, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.237.
[113] Cf. D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.664-65.
[114] Monsignor Battifol, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.97-98. Until the
condemnations of 1903, Loisy maintained an honorable situation which nothing had seriously
jeopardized.
[115] His Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard (Creed of the Savoyard Vicar), written as early as
1894, is perhaps the most perfect theological expression of modernism (see the end of Chapter 12).
Duchesne supposedly led him to “touch with his hand the contradictions in the Resurrection
testimonies,” writes Houtin, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.142. The same Duchesne
made highly equivocal remarks after the condemnation of Hébert’s Souvenirs d’Assise (Memories
of Assisi), although he later retracted these remarks, cf. ibid., pp.151-52.
[116]Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes; French title: La Prédication de Jésus Concernant le
Royaume de Dieu.
[117] Loisy, in Ratté, Three Modernists (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967), p.62.
[118] Cf. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P., Au Service de la Bible, (Juvisy, Seine-et-Oise: Cerf, 1967),
pp.364-68, in which he lays out the postulates of the historico-critical method.
[119]Choses Passées.
[120] In Poulat, Histoire, Dogme et Critique dans le Crise Moderniste (Tournai, Belgium:
Casterman, 1979), p.365.
[121]Revue d’Histoire et de Littérature Religieuses.
[122] Loisy, Mémoires, II, 397, in Ratté, Three Modernists, p.120.
[123]La Révélation Primitive.
[124]Les Preuves et l’Économie de la Révélation and La Religion d’Israël.
[125]Les Mythes Babyloniens et les Premiers Chapitres de la Genèse.
[126] Cf. Thonnard, A Short History of Philosophy, pp.769-70. In his religion, humanity is god,
constituted by the ensemble of men and especially of the geniuses whose lives are useful to
progress. This being, of which each man is but a part, dominates us and merits our adoration.
Poetry allows one to associate earth and air with humanity (the positive Trinity is: humanity, the
great being; earth, the great fetish; air, the great medium). This religion has its priests, who are the
sociologists, and its rites, whose detailed ceremonial Comte outlined. It is a materialist atheism or
pantheism where, in the words of Comte, “The great notion of Humanity…will eventually and
irrevocably eliminate that of God.” See also D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Positivisme,” col.51-52.
[127] Adolf Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, English translation by Thomas Bailey Saunders,
What Is Christianity? (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Son’s, 1901).
[128]L’Évangile et l’Église and Autour d’un Petit Livre.
[129] Cf. Loisy, L’Évangile et L’Église, English translation by R. Joseph Hoffmann, The Gospel and
the Church (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp.59-62. For the following passages, cf. Rivière,
 Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.150-90, passim; Barbier, Histoire du Catholicisme Libéral,
pp.392-403.
[130] Cf. The Gospel and the Church, pp.64-65.
[131] Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, p.122.
[132] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.130.
[133]Ibid., p.155.
[134] Loisy in the following passages, respectively: Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.190, in D’Alès,
Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.654; Les Évangiles
Synoptiques, I, 826; Simples Réflexions, p.211; Quelques Lettres, pp.71, 74, 150, 162 (in Rivière,
Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.150-90, passim).
[135]Choses Passées, pp.243-44, ibid., p.171. He is very specific about what kind of a reform it
should be: “First of all, an outline and an historical explanation of Christian development;
secondly, a general philosophy of religion and a first essay toward an interpretation of dogmatic
formulae, official creeds and conciliar definitions, intended to adapt them, by a sacrifice of letter to
spirit, to the facts of history and the mentality of our contemporaries.”
[136] The modernist George Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter (London: Longmans, Green, & Co.,
1906), pp.88-89.
[137] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.190.
[138]Ibid., p.207.
[139] Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, p.176.
[140] Loisy around the same time in Études Évangéliques (Paris, 1902) in Rivière, Le Modernisme
dans l’Église, p.164.
[141]The Gospel and the Church, p.151.
[142]Ibid., p.103.
[143]Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.117.
[144]Ibid., p.17.
[145] In Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.195-96.
[146]The Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, edited by M.D. Petre (London: Edward Arnold,
1912), I, 105. For the following citations from Tyrrell and for the overview of Tyrrell’s theology,
cf. Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église; D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.675 and following; and Ratté, Three Modernists, pp.145-251.
[147] Ratté, ibid., p.159.
[148] Tyrrell, Autobiography, II, 414.
[149]Grande Revue, October 10, 1907, p.666, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.685.
[150] Tyrrell, Letters, selected and edited by M.D. Petre, (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1920),
p.300. Cf. Ratté, Three Modernists, p.235.
[151] Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, p.145; cf. Tyrrell, Autobiography, p.399.
[152] Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), p.270.
[153]Rez-de-chaussée; entresol; premier étage: ground floor, mezzanine, and second storey. Tyrrell,
Autobiography, II, 416.
[154] Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdis, p.277.
[155]Ibid., p.281.
[156]Ibid., p.280-283.
[157] “Hilaire Bourdon” (Tyrrell), L’Église et l’Avenir [The Church and the Future], 1903, “printed
for private circulation only.” In Ratté, Three Modernists, p.196.
[158] Tyrrell to Wilfrid Ward, Autobiography, II, 218.
[159] Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter, pp.78, 79.
[160]Ibid., p.79.
[161] Tyrrell, George Tyrrell’s Letters, p.59. Loisy said essentially the same thing: “As scientific
definitions of religion, which is what they [the dogmas] were meant to be, they are necessarily
outdated in the present time, since they are works of ignorance as far as today’s science is
concerned.” (Quelques Lettres, p.71, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Modernisme,” col.683)
[162] Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdis, p.210. Sabatier spoke in the same terms: “The accounts
of the birth of Jesus are only poetry, but how much more religious and truer is this poetry than the
definitions of the Quicumque.” (D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Modernisme,” col.681)
[163] “Bourdon,” The Church and the Future, in Ratté, Three Modernists, p.197.
[164] Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdis, p.19. Here we have one of the motives behind the new
“theological” term, People of God, which Ratzinger slipped into the writings of the Council. The
supreme democratic authority of the People of God only came into its own after Vatican II, under
the name of “collegiality.” (Cf. Chapter 21.)
[165] Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter, pp.88-89.
[166]Ibid., pp.76-77.
[167] “Bourdon,” The Church and the Future, in Ratté, Three Modernists, p.196.
[168] Tyrrell, Autobiography, II, 206.
[169] Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads, pp.259, 260.
[170]Ibid., pp.265-66. We can see where Fr. de Lubac found his famous expression, frequently
employed by John Paul II: “By revealing the Father and by being revealed by Him, Christ
completes the revelation of man to himself.…It is through Christ that the person reaches maturity,
that man emerges definitively from the universe...” (Catholicism, p.189. Cf. Chapters 17 and 24).
[171] Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter, p.72.
[172]Ibid., pp.245-53, 256.
[173] Hébert’s title alludes to a segment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Émile, the first enunciation
of Catholic modernism as we know it. [Translator’s note.]
[174] In Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.143.
[175]Pie X et Benoît XV, pastoral letter of February 2, 1915, on the papacy, p.5.
[176] “A delicate, brilliant, poetic mind, with no great powers of thought; a romantic and a
conservative” who had in fact been a great admirer of Joseph Sarto, then patriarch of Venice (cf.
Michel Fontbel, Fioretti de saint Pie X [St. Cénéré: Tequi, 1986]). He was a close friend of Tyrrell
and probably did not believe in the divine institution of the Church (cf. Rivière, Le Modernisme
dans l’Église, p.284).
[177] P. Sabatier, Les Modernistes, p.33, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.327-28.
[178] In Michael Davies, Partisans of Error: St. Pius X Against the Modernists (Long Prairie, Minn.:
The Neumann Press, 1983), p.101.
[179] Its preparation was confided to a Roman theologian. After a first, fruitless attempt by
professors from the University of Freiburg, the Vatican handed the project over to Fr. Joseph
Lemius, O.M.I. He delivered his study to Cardinal Merry del Val in four days. His work was to
serve as the basis for Pascendi (cf. Chiron, Saint Pius X: Reformer of the Church [Kansas City:
Angelus Press, 2002], pp.206-7).
[180]Le Programme des Modernistes.
[181] Loisy, Simples Réflexions, pp.23 and 276, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, pp.371-72.
[182] Loisy, Quelques Lettres, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.221.
[183]Choses Passées, p.90, in Rivière, ibid.
[184] Dr. Schörs, professor at the University of Bonn, in Rivière, ibid., p.499.
[185] Houtin, p.111, in Rivière, ibid., p.275.
[186] L. de Grandmaison, Études, 1923, in Rivière, ibid., p.548.
[187] Billot, De Immutabilitate Traditionis (Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1922); Fr. Gardeil, Le
Donné Révélé et la Théologie, pp.150-65; Poulat, Histoire, Dogme et Critique dans la Crise
Moderniste, pp.219-20; Vacant-Mangenot, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, “Tradition,”
col.1341-49.
[188] Lebreton, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.672.
See in particular Céruti-Cendrier, Les Évangiles Sont des Reportages, which gives numerous
examples of the double standard employed by modern exegetes.
[189] Dz. 1800.
[190] St. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, Chapter 23, Number 55, adopted by Vatican I in its
Constitution Dei Filius. English translation from The Church Teaches (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books,
1973), p.34.
[191] In Ploncard d’Assac, L’Eglise Occupée, p.22.
[192] In Bainvel, “Histoire d’un Dogme,” Études, December 5, 1904, pp.612ff. These truths are
therefore susceptible of a certain progress not only in their formulation, but also in their content. It
is question here of a theological development by way of theological conclusions, in a passage from
implicit to explicit (for example, Christ died for all, therefore for the non-predestined) or in a
passage from virtual to actual (for example, Christ is intelligent, therefore He had the faculty of
smiling). Cf. Gardeil, Le Donné Révélé et la Théologie, pp.161 and 185-86.
[193] LeRoy, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1901, p.305; Dogme et Critique, p.355, in
D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.645.
[194] LeRoy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, pp.75-76.
[195] LeRoy, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.644.
[196] Loisy, in Ratté, Three Modernists, p.62.
[197] Tyrrell, Autobiography, I, 105.
[198] Tyrrell, Letters, p.59.
[199] Blondel, Lettre sur les Exigences de la Philosophie Contemporaine, in Barbier, Histoire du
Catholicisme Libéral, p.368.
[200] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, pp.129 and 202, in Catholic Institute of Paris, Modernisme,
pp.23ff.
[201] Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads, pp.259, 260.
[202] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p.340.
[203]Ibid., p.271.
[204] LeRoy, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1907, p.509, ibid.
[205] Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, p.176; cf. Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.163.
[206] Loisy, Études Évangéliques, in Rivière, ibid., p.164.
[207] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.190, in Rivière, ibid., p.177.
[208] Loisy, ibid., p.117, in Barbier, Histoire du Catholicisme Libéral, p.399.
[209] Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter, pp.88-89.
[210] LeRoy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, pp.75-76; cf. D’Alès, Dictionnaire
Apologétique de la Foi Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.654, and Revue de Métaphysique, 1901,
p.305, ibid., col.645.
[211] Loisy, Autour d’un Petit Livre, p.192, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.636.
[212] Loisy, Quelques Lettres, p.89, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Catholique,
“Modernisme,” col.659.
[213] Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdis, p.281.
[214]Ibid., p.210.
[215] Loisy, Quelques Lettres, pp.162, 74, 150, 71, in D’Alès, Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi
Catholique, “Modernisme,” col.661.
[216] Loisy, in Ratté, Three Modernists, p.62.
[217] Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads, pp.259-60. See also Through Scylla and Charybdis,
p.208.
[218] Loisy, Études Évangéliques, in Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l’Église, p.164.
[219] Tyrrell, The Church and the Future.
[220] Tyrrell, Autobiography, II, 206.
[221] Tyrrell, A Much Abused Letter, p.72.
[222] Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, pp.8-9.
[223] Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.162.
[224] Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic
Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p.286.
[225] Amorization, hominization, Christogenesis, Christofication, pleromization, excentration, etc.;
the litany of vague neologisms could go on and on.
[226] Testimony cited by Henri de Lubac, La Pensée Religieuse de P. Teilhard, English translation by
René Hague, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Desclée & Co., 1967), p.228.
[227]Le Phénomène Humain and Le Milieu Divin.
[228] Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène Humain, in Fr. Frénaud, Estudio Crítico sobre Teilhard
(Buenos Aires: 1964), pp.6-9.
[229] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Milieu Divin, English translation by Bernard Wall, The Divine
Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p.27. Cf. p.30: “[T]he power of the Incarnate Word
penetrates matter itself; it descends into the deepest depths of the inferior forces. And the
Incarnation will be complete only when the part of chosen substance contained in every object–
spiritualised first of all in our souls and a second time with our souls in Jesus–has rejoined the
final Centre of its completion. Quid est quod ascendit, nisi quod prius descendit, ut repleret
omnia.” Cf. Frénaud, ibid., p.18.
[230] Teilhard de Chardin, ibid., p.117.
[231] Opuscule Le Christique, English translation by René Hague, “The Christic,” in The Heart of
Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1979), p.93. “But if, on the other hand, and as the
facts make certain, the Universe–our Universe–does indeed form a sort of biological ‘vortex,’
dynamically centred upon itself, then we cannot fail to see the emergence at the system’s temporo-
spatial peak, of a unique and unparalleled position, where Christ, effortlessly and without
distortion, becomes literally and with unprecedented realism, the Pantocrator” (ibid., p.94). Cf.
Dom Frénaud, Estudio Critico, p.19.
[232] Joseph Ratzinger, Einführung in das Christentum, English translation by J.R. Foster,
Introduction to Christianity (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), p.178. Ratzinger comments here
upon a text from Teilhard, explaining it in the same pantheist sense. Cf. Courrier de Rome, La
Nouvelle Théologie, p.101, English edition: SiSiNoNo (Kansas City: Angelus Press, June, 1994),
pp.19-20.
[233] Cited by Garrigou-Lagrange; see Chapter 19.
[234] The public at large knew only much later that Teilhard de Chardin had been for twenty-five
years the platonic lover of the sculptress Lucile Swan, a divorced Protestant, according to
Mantovani in Avvenire, February 14, 1995, p.17.
[235] Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et Teilhard de Chardin (Paris: Fayard, 1964), pp.72-74.
[236] This theory is a form of polygenism and makes short work of the dogma of original sin, which
demands on the contrary a single couple at the origin of humanity.
[237] In Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Trojan Horse in the City of God (London: Sands & Co., Ltd.,
1969), appendix, p.227.
[238] Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, p.54; cf. Frénaud, Estudio Crítico sobre Teilhard,
pp.14-15.
[239]The Heart of Matter, pp.52-53, 54, in Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et Teilhard de Chardin,
p.163.
[240] Letter of January 14, 1954, ibid., p.168.
[241]Comment Je Crois, text dated from 1934, cited by L’Osservatore Romano, July 1, 1962,
introducing the Monitum of the Holy Office; English translation by René Hague, “How I Believe,”
in Christianity and Evolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, Inc., 1969), pp.99, 103. Cf.
Philippe de la Trinité, ibid., p.190.
[242] Meinvielle, De la Cábala al Progresismo (Buenos Aires: Cruz y Fierro, 1983), conclusion.
[243] Such at least is the view of the Mahayana school, that adopted by Zen Buddhism. Their claim,
an echo of Heraclitus, is that movement alone exists and that things and persons, as substances, do
not. The world is essentially empty (sunyata) and what we take for things depends as much on the
monistic Great Whole as it does on human thought. Man understands the harmony of all things
when he understands that the empty world, the non-entity of the self, and nirvana-extinction are
the same thing. This understanding is ultimately obtained by religious and philosophical Zen
(meditation), which thinks the “self” as it truly is, namely, empty, lifeless, and definitively “non-
self” (in Cooper, World of Philosophies, pp.40-44 and 214-22).
[244] In Catholic doctrine, everything stands or everything falls. The Redemption is correlative to the
dogma of original sin. One of the ways in which St. Augustine proved the existence of original sin
was, paradoxically, from the starting point of faith in the Savior of the human race.
[245] Meinvielle, De la Cábala al Progresismo, passim; Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent (Bouère:
Dominique Martin Morin, 1982). All of the Oriental religions, whether Buddhist or Brahmanist or
Hindu, profess a generous syncretism and so today include a number of more recent contributions,
considerably modifying their creeds.
[246] Theosophy rejects the existence of a personal God, Creator of all things. According to this
theory, God is identical and consubstantial with the world, and matter with spirit. Moreover, it
distinguishes Christ in the singular (the anthropomorphic God who, in their view, is but a wise
man, a kind of Buddha) from the universal Christ. See Hugon, Les Vingt-Quatre Thèses Thomistes
(Paris: Téqui, 1927), pp.80-86; “Connaissance Élémentaire du Nouvel Âge,” Action Familiale et
Scolaire, supplement to No.94, pp.52-53.
[247] He writes in L’Union Créatrice: “[My] conception insinuates that Creation was not absolutely
gratuitous, but represents a work nearly entirely motivated by interest. All this redolet
manicheismum….It is true, but, sincerely, is it possible to avoid these pitfalls–or rather these
paradoxes–without resorting to purely verbal explanations?” (Frénaud, Estudio Crítico sobre
Teilhard, p.15).
[248] Erik Pigani, Channels: Les Médiums du Nouvel Âge (Paris: L’Âge du Verseau, 1989).
Emphasis ours.
[249] Blondel, December 5, 1919, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.175.
[250] Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, pp.179, 175, 176; cf. Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle
Théologie, pp.100-1, and SiSiNoNo (Kansas City: Angelus Press, June 1994), pp.19-20.
[251] Fr. Charles Boyer in Henri de Lubac, Mémoire Autour de Mes Œuvres, English translation by
Anne Elizabeth Englund, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the
Circumstances That Occasioned His Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp.170-71.
Cf. also p.108. Cited in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.92.
[252] See Chapter 24.
[253]La Sapienza della Croce, April-May 1996, p.137, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie,
p.120. English translation taken in part from SiSiNoNo, Angelus Press edition, August 1994, p.21.
[254] F. Brunelli, Principi e Metodi di Massoneria Operativa, pp.66 and 84: “The initiation preaches
and instructs: Death to reason! Only when reason is dead will be born the new man of the Era to
come, the true initiate. Only then will the walls of the temples be able to come crumbling down
because the dawn of a new humanity will have appeared in the east.…All of these [religious]
disputes will disappear with the rejection of logic and of the principle of contradiction.” (In
Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, [Versailles: Courrier de Rome, 1996], p.409.)
[255] J. Mitterand in René Valvève, Teilhard l’Apostat, p.52, in Courrier de Rome, ibid., p.417.
[256] Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, English edition, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), p.417 (German reference: p.365).
[257] Heidegger, L’Époque de l’Image du Monde, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église,
p.240.
[258] In Foulquié, L’Existentialisme (Paris: Que Sais-Je Collection, 1974), p.70.
[259] Sartre, L’Être et le Néant, English edition, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E.
Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), p.283, in Foulquié, ibid., p.70.
[260] Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, in Foulquié, ibid., p.70.
[261] Sartre, L’Âge de la Raison, English edition, The Age of Reason, translated by Eric Sutton (New
York: The Modern Library, 1947), p.63. Cf. Foulquié, ibid., p.81.
[262] Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mouches, English edition The Flies, translated by Stuart Gilbert (New
York: Vintage Books, 1976), pp.117-19. Cf. Foulquié, ibid., p.60.
[263] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp.565-67. Cf. Foulquié, ibid., p.63.
[264]Ens, intellectus et voluntas convertuntur, according to Fabro, La Svolta Antropologica de K.
Rahner (Milan: Rusconi, 1974), pp.142 and 190.
[265] Heidegger, Being and Time, p.269 (German edition: p.226).
[266] Heidegger, Chemins Qui Mènent Nulle Part, in Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, p.103.
[267] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp.3-5; cf. Foulquié, L’Existentialisme, p.68. This “objectivity”
of the phenomenon does not have an ounce of reality: it exists merely in a subjective state, that is
to say, as an object present in the knowing subject.
[268] He uses his own particular jargon to explain what he means: the human being [Dasein]
transforms things in a state of chaos [Seiendes] by giving them true being [Sein], that is, being
with a human signification.
[269] See Chapter 18.
[270] Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.239.
[271] Heidegger, in Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, p.104.
[272]Ibid.
[273] Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, pp.85, 105.
[274] Sartre, L’Existentialisme Est un Humanisme, English translation by Philip Mairet,
Existentialism and Humanism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1977), p.56. Cf.
Verneaux, Leçons sur l’Athéisme Contemporain (Paris: Téqui, 1964), p.49.
[275]Surnaturel.
[276] See Chapters 22 and 24.
[277] John Paul II at the death of Henri de Lubac, L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition,
September 9, 1991, p.16.
[278] “Return to the sources” or “retrieval and renewal in Catholic thought.” See the Eerdmans
Publishing Company English edition of Exégèse Médiévale.
[279]Sources Chrétiennes.
[280] See Chapter 19.
[281]Histoire et Esprit.
[282] Cf. Corpus Mysticum, pp.274-75. Wagner (Henri de Lubac) indicates that this book accuses
scholasticism of inventing a new theological method, leaving aside the traditional symbolism in
favor of a new-found dialectic soon to become the dialectic of substance and accident. Ultimately,
scholastic theology is little better than rationalism. See Labourdette’s commentary in Dialogue
Théologique, p.123.
[283] De Lubac, Apologétique et Théologie, in Wagner, ibid., p.50.
[284]Le Drame de l’Humanisme Athée, English edition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950).
[285] De Lubac, At the Service of the Church, pp.32-33. As for Pico della Mirandola, de Lubac (in
L’Alba Incompiuta del Rinascimento [Milan: Jacabook, 1977]) praised him as the pioneer of the
 new age of peace and universal understanding. In reality, Pico popularized cabalistic syncretism
and denied the principle of non-contradiction (cf. Innocenti, Influssi Gnostici nella Chiesa d’Oggi
[Rome: Sacra Fraternitas Aurigarum in Urbe, 2000], p.21).
[286] Cardinal Lustiger, shortly after de Lubac’s death.
[287]Lettre sur l’Apologétique in de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, pp.18-19. Cf. Courrier de
Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.52.
[288] “That past did not constitute our ‘pre-theological’ stage, and likewise the future will not see us
the possessors of a completed theology of the Church which leaves our successors nothing to do
but repeat our formulations of it. However great the number and value of the theological tasks
completed, there will be no closed circuit of doctrine which puts an end to discussion and
reflection alike and discourages the raising of new questions. Such a Utopia fits in with neither the
nature of revealed truth nor that of the human intelligence…” (Méditation sur l’Église, English
translation by Michael Mason, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986),
p.27; cf. Wagner, Henri de Lubac, p.166.
[289] Innocenti, Influssi Gnostici nella Chiesa d’Oggi, p.19; cf. de Lubac, At the Service of the
Church, pp.32ff.
[290] “In spite of great differences of understanding and of function, all members of the human race
enjoy the same essential equality before God. As ‘unbelievers’ are, in the design of providence,
indispensable for building the Body of Christ, they must in their own way profit from their vital
connexion with this same Body. By an extension of the dogma of the communion of saints, it
seems right to think that though they themselves are not in the normal way of salvation, they will
be able nevertheless to obtain this salvation by virtue of those mysterious bonds which unite them
to the faithful. In short, they can be saved because they are an integral part of that humanity which
is to be saved.” (Catholicism, p.125; cf. Wagner, Henri de Lubac, p.157).
[291]La Pensée Religieuse de Teilhard de Chardin.
[292] Msgr. André Combes, Études Philosophiques, August 1965, as repeated in La Pensée
Catholique, No.84, p.47. “Striving to reduce an oak to the dimensions of the acorn from which it
came is an enterprise doubly ludicrous when undertaken by an evolutionist. In order to accomplish
this impossible wonder, the historian changed himself into a prestidigitator.…He does not reveal to
us the religious thought of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin but only the thought of de Lubac on the
question. It is actually a gem of a document. It could serve brilliantly in our seminaries as a model
to illustrate how not to work.” Msgr. Combes was famous as an expert in the critique of history.
Cf. also Philippe de la Trinité, Rome et Teilhard, pp.208-9.
[293]Paradoxes (Paris, 1959), in Wagner, Henri de Lubac, p.133.
[294] De Lubac: “Nothing less adequately expresses the truth than the extrinsicist doctrines
[doctrines received from authority] which maintain in the Church only a unity resulting from
constraint–unless it be a unity resulting from indifference, having no other link than a visible
transmission and a visible authority. They transform the obedience of faith into a faith which is
mere obedience.” (La Foi Chrétienne, English translation by Brother Richard Arnandez, F.S.C.,
The Christian Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p.197; cf. Wagner, ibid., p.55.
[295] Flick, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.49.
[296] Ratzinger, L’Osservatore Romano, July 2, 1990, p.5. “Their core remains valid, but the
individual details influenced by the circumstances at the time may need further rectification.”
[297]Ecclesia Dei Afflicta, July 1988, against Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer.
[298] Blondel, Action, p.357. Cf. Wagner, Henri de Lubac, p.87.
[299] In Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.57. See the condemnation of this thesis in
Humani Generis of Pius XII, §26 (English edition: Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare
Conference, 1950).
[300] De Lubac, Catholicism, p.189; cf. Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.103; John Paul
II, Redemptor Hominis, 8, 2. See also Théologies d’Occasion, p.68; Gaudium et Spes, 22, 1;
 L’Athéisme et le Sens de l’Homme, p.96-112, in Wagner, Henri de Lubac, p.92.
[301] Joseph Cardinal Siri, Gethsemane: Reflections on the Contemporary Theological Movement
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1981), p.58.
[302] Russo, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.159.
[303]Pascendi, p.42.
[304] “The enterprise is similar to that which permits, through radiography, the discovery, behind the
canvas of a master-painter, a Van Eyck or a Rembrandt, the successive phases of a tableau: first the
patina, then the repairs or the additions of later painters, and finally the original canvas and even
the various stages of the tableau, all the way back to the artist’s sketch.” (X. Léon-Dufour in Le
Nouveau Testament (Desclée, 1976), II, 188, in Le Sel de la Terre, No.10, p.25.)
[305] Rudolph Bultmann, Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition [History of the Synoptic Tradition],
(1921).
[306] John F. McCarthy, The Science of Historical Theology (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books and
Publishers, 1991), pp.107-140.
[307] Pierre Gibert, Petite Histoire de l’Exégèse Biblique (Paris: Cerf, 1997), introduction.
[308] Henri de Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale, English translation by Mark Sebanc, Medieval Exegesis,
Volume I: The Four Senses of Scripture (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1998), p.267.
[309] Ignace de la Potterie, “Pour Découvrir l’Exégèse Spirituelle Aujourd’hui?” 30 Jours, No.12,
1993, pp.72-73. Cf. Le Sel de la Terre, No.10, p.13.
[310] The work came into being by chance. I had just written a book on Origen: History and Spirit.
…I was left with a few unused texts. After a while, I suddenly found myself with two volumes,
then a third, then a fourth volume–all arranged rather vaguely, without a plan, and with enormous
blanks in it.” (De Lubac, Entretien Autour de Vatican II, p.88, in the review Le Sel de la Terre,
No.12, p.37.)
[311] De Lubac, At the Service of the Church, pp.83-84; cf. the review Le Sel de la Terre, No.12,
p.37.
[312] Daniélou, Études, April 1946, p.10, in Labourdette, Dialogue Théologique, p.25.
[313] Boyer, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.159.
[314] Thus, the Paschal lamb prescribed by Moses signifies the sacrifice of Christ. In fact, the words
“Paschal lamb” have only one literal sense, which refers to one and only one thing: the immolation
of that animal by the Hebrews. Secondly, a spiritual sense, the sacrifice of Christ, is attached to the
fact of immolating the lamb. Thus, the sacrifice of Christ is tied directly to the historical fact and
not to the text.
[315] Accordingly, de Lubac praised the work Herméneutique, Structuralisme et Exégèse, by Van
Esbroeck: “A young Bollandist of eminent knowledge and lively intelligence has boldly published
a little book to explain that my Medievals, such as I have presented them, were capable of
reconciling the two contrary systems of Ricœur and Lévi-Strauss” (in Entretien Autour de Vatican
II, p.90, cited in Le Sel de la Terre, No.12, pp.39-40).
[316] Paul Ricœur, Du Texte à l’Action, English edition, From Text to Action: Essays in
Hermeneutics, II, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp.105-43; see Le Sel de la Terre, No.12, pp.14-27. These
ideas were not explicitly voiced by de Lubac himself but were present in the writings of all his
friends and disciples–Balthasar, Ignace de la Potterie, and John Paul II, among others, who have
no scruple about using Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy.
[317] See Chapter 23.
[318] Chapter 21 will show his overwhelming influence on the Council.
[319] Everything in this chapter is drawn from Rahner’s own works or authorized commentaries,
including: Fabro, La Aventura Progresista and La Svolta Antropologica de K. Rahner; Cardinal
Siri, Gethsemane; Spadafora, La Tradizione Contro il Concilio: L’Apertura a Sinistra del Vaticano
2 (1989); Meinvielle, De la Cábala al Progresismo; Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église; La
Tradizione Cattolica, No.40 (Rimini, 1999). Our principal reference, and our source for passages
from Rahner himself when not otherwise indicated, will be Ferraro’s El Naufragio del
Progresismo [Shipwreck of Progressivism] (Peru: Arequipa, 1999).
[320]Geist in Welt, English translation by William Dych, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).
[321] Professor Honecker rejected the thesis on the grounds that it “falsified St. Thomas Aquinas’s
teaching by crediting him with views he did not hold.” See Vorgrimler, Karl Rahner Verstehen
[Understanding Karl Rahner], p.78, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.375.
[322] Rahner, Spirit in the World, pp.253ff.; cf. Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, pp.388ff.
[323] Rahner, ibid., p.69. In Latin, “idem est intellectus et intellectum et intelligere.”
[324]Ibid., pp.35, note.
[325]Ibid., p.70.
[326]Ibid., p.69.
[327] Rahner hijacks the Thomistic adage: “ens, verum et bonum convertuntur”–being, truth, and
good are equivalent. Heidegger says the same thing: the essence of truth is liberty. Rahner, Höres
des Wortes, English edition, Hearers of the Word, translated by Michael Richards (New York:
Herder and Herder Inc., 1969), p.102.
[328] Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, pp.399-407, citing Rahner, Höres des Wortes, from the
Spanish edition Oyente de la Palabra (Barcelona, 1967), pp.125, 128 and 129. Cf. Hearers of the
Word, pp.98-103.
[329] Rahner, Hearers of the Word, p.101.
[330] In Ferraro, Il Naufragio del Progresismo, pp.422-28. Ferraro cites Rahner’s Curso
Fundamental sobre la Fe, the Spanish edition of Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den
Begriff des Christentums [Madrid, 1979], p.185.) Cf. the English edition, Foundations of Christian
Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, translated by William V. Dych (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1978), pp.148-49.
[331] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.44.
[332]Ibid., p.57.
[333] Rahner, Spirit in the World, pp.186, 180-83.
[334]Ibid., p.183.
[335] Cf. Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), p.108. (See below.)
[336] Karl Barth, Dogma, Vol. I (Geneva: 1954) in Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, p.91.
[337] Rahner, “El Dios Trino,” in Mysterium Salutis, Vol. II, Ch. V (Madrid: 1977), p.278; the
following analysis of Rahner is originally taken from Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo,
pp.96ff., and pp.178-83. English readers will find useful Rahner’s The Trinity, a translation by
Joseph Donceel of the article in German on the present theme, “Der Dreifaltige Gott als
Transzendenter der Heilsgeschichte,” in Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus, Vol. II of the series
Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss Heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik. For the present citation, cf. The
Trinity, p.22; for a definition of Rahner’s terminology, cf. pp.1, 2: “Economic Trinity: the divine
persons as they are revealed and act in salvation history”; “Immanent Trinity: the divine persons
with respect to one another.”
[338] Rahner, “El Dios Trino,” p.316; cf. The Trinity, p.46: “This mystery [of the three Persons in
one God] is essentially identical with the mystery of the self-communication of God to us in Christ
and in his Spirit.” Cf. also The Trinity, p.64.
[339] “El Dios Trino,” p.286; cf. The Trinity., p.24: “And we are sure that the following statement is
true: that no adequate distinction can be made between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine
of the economy of salvation,” and p.35: “God relates to us in a threefold manner, and this
threefold, free, and gratuitous relation to us is not merely a copy or an analogy of the inner Trinity,
but this Trinity itself, albeit as freely and gratuitously communicated.”
[340] “El Dios Trino,” p.99; cf. The Trinity, p.86.
[341] “El Dios Trino,” pp.292-93; identical text in The Trinity, p.47.
[342] “Then we can assert, in the full meaning of the words: here the Logos with God and the Logos
with us, the immanent and the economic Logos, are strictly the same.” The Trinity, p.33.
[343] “El Dios Trino,” p.302; cf. The Trinity, p.35.
[344] “El Dios Trino,” p.283; cf. The Trinity, pp.32-33.
[345] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.223, 224.
[346] Rahner, “El Dios Trino,” p.284.
[347] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.222.
[348] Rahner, Concilium, Vol. 3 (German Edition, 1982), p.212.
[349] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.178ff.
[350] Karl Rahner, Escritos (Madrid, 1964), p.190, in Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, p.182.
Cf. Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.445-46: “Taking a hypothesis about which ultimately we
have no exact knowledge, if we presuppose that in the dynamism of God himself matter has
transcended itself into subjectivity, unlimited transcendentality and freedom in other places in the
cosmos besides our earth, and if we assume that in fact this transcendentality in other places is also
borne by God’s self-communication in grace, for grace is the reason for creation, then we could
move towards the idea that the material cosmos as a whole, whose meaning and goal is the
fulfillment of freedom, will one day be subsumed into the fullness of God’s self-communication to
this material and spiritual cosmos, and that this will happen through many histories of freedom
which do not only take place on earth.”
[351] Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. I, English translation by Cornelius Ernst, O.P.,
Theological Investigations, Vol. I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, “Current Problems in
Christology” (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), pp.164-65, 183.
[352] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.191.
[353]Ibid., p.195.
[354]Ibid., p.224.
[355]Ibid., pp.224-25.
[356]Ibid., p.218.
[357] In other words, man is God’s existence outside of Himself, His “out-standing.”
[358] Rahner, “El Dios Trino,” p.349.
[359] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.225. Cf. The Trinity, pp.89-90: “If God wishes to
step freely outside of himself, he must create man.”
[360]Ibid., p.217.
[361]Ibid., p.121.
[362]Ibid., p.21.
[363]Ibid., p.223.
[364]Ibid., p.225.
[365]Ibid.
[366] Cf. ibid., p.187.
[367]Ibid., p.228.
[368]Ibid., p.283.
[369] Rahner, in Fabro, La Svolta Antropologica de K. Rahner, p.198; cf. Ferraro, El Naufragio del
Progresismo, pp.302-23.
[370] Rahner, “Teologia dall’Esperienza dello Spirito,” La Tradizione Cattolica, No.40, p.728. Cf.
Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. XII (first part), English translation by David Morland,
O.S.B., Theological Investigations, Vol. XVI, Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology (New
York: Crossroad, 1983), pp.4, 206, 220.
[371] Rahner, ibid., pp.718-19; cf. Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, 472.
[372] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.150.
[373] Rahner, “Teologia dall’Esperienza dello Spirito,” La Tradizione Cattolica, p.715. Cf.
Experience of the Spirit, pp.52-59.
[374] Rahner, Saggi di Cristologia et Mariologia (San Paolo Edizione, 1967), p.569.
[375] These libertarian principles bore their fruit in Rahner’s disciple, Hans Küng, with his
outrageous insubordination towards Church leaders. Rahner rapidly dissociated himself from this
troublesome pupil who was discrediting his ideas.
[376] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.290-91.
[377] Cf. Rahner, Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, pp.55-56.
[378]Ibid., p.104.
[379] According to the theories of the personalist philosophy, man creates himself insofar as he acts
freely. Man is a “transcendent” being, that is to say an incommunicable individual with his unique
 experiences, and it is doubtful whether his nature remains the same for the duration of his
existence. This vagueness is what enables human “nature” to be disengaged from the natural law
and opens the floodgate to exceptions. Hence there can be a clash between the natural law and
human “nature”! This existentialist morality is the permissive morality preached by Häring, the
factotum of today’s moral theology, with the approval of his friend Rahner: the denial of natural
law, creative liberty, situation ethics, and the new medical ethics.
[380] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.102.
[381] Fabro (La Svolta Antropologica de K. Rahner, p.190) deduces that this new “transcendental”
anthropology sets itself up as an absolute science based on the totally unfounded principle that
being, mind, and will are all the same thing! When man identifies “I want” with “I think” and then
with “it is,” what more does he need to dethrone God?
[382] Hegel, Philosophie der Religion (Leipzig: 1925), I, 22, in Ferraro, El Naufragio del
Progresismo, p.376.
[383] He found this means in the teaching of his fellow Jesuit, the Belgian Fr. Maréchal, who claimed
that the egological transcendental experience is ultimately one with the experience of realist
transcendence (Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.19-21). It boils down to saying that if God is
possible, then He exists; if God is thought, then He is real (ibid., p.149). Cf. Ferraro, El Naufragio
del Progresismo, pp.410-12.
[384] Fabro, La Svolta Antropologica de K. Rahner, texts collected by Innocenti, Influssi Gnostici
nella Chiesa d’Oggi, p.48.
[385] Siri, Gethsemane, p.86.
[386] Balthasar, cf. Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.19-20. He claimed that many
others think as he does, in particular Ratzinger and John Paul II (see Ch. 19 of the present work).
Cf. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.443-44.
[387] This broader Church, voted into being by Vatican II, which sees means of salvation in other
religions of the world, not only differs from, but is actually opposed to the people of God in
Scripture, as Ratzinger pointed out in 1966.
[388] Jean Puyo, Jean Puyo Interroge le Père Congar: Une Vie pour la Vérité (Paris: Centurion,
1975), p.175. To Congar do we owe the ecumenical decrees of Vatican II (see the end of Chapter
21).
[389] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.62.
[390] Rahner in Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, p.459.
[391] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.121.
[392]Ibid., p.301.
[393] Walter Kasper, Jesus der Christus, English translation by V. Green, Jesus: The Christ (London:
Burnes & Oates, 1976), pp.50-51; cf. Ferraro, op. cit., p.428. (See Chapter 23 for the doctrinal
positions of Kasper.) Cardinal Siri expresses the same misgivings about Rahner’s position in
Gethsemane, p.79.
[394] Rahner, Saggi di Cristologia, p.129.
[395] Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. II, English translation by Karl-H. Kruger, Theological
Investigations, Vol. II, Man in the Church, “Membership of the Church According to the Teaching
of Pius XII’s Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi” (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1963), p.82.
[396] Rahner, “Fundamentos de la Protología” in Mysterium Salutis, Vol. II, in Ferraro, El Naufragio
del Progresismo, p.270; cf. Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, p.55: “Without reflection
he accepts God when he freely accepts himself in his own unlimited transcendence.”
[397] In Ferraro, ibid., p.190. Above and beyond the general heterodoxy of Rahner’s thinking due to
its existentialist and egological structure, Rahner speaks of the “triple God” and of “Catholic
polytheism” in a way unforgivable for a theologian.
[398] J. Ankerberg and Weldon (The Facts on the New Age Movement, p.20, cited in “Modernisme,”
in the review Action Familiale et Scolaire, p.22) summed up the New Age creed as follows: “Man
 is in himself good and divine; so he contains within himself all he needs for time and eternity;
salvation consists in the development of psychic powers and higher states of awareness. This is
achieved by introspection and by practicing New Age techniques, in such a way as to attain once
and for all the awareness of one’s own divinity; sin is the ignorance of one’s own divinity; Jesus
Christ is one of the masters of the New Age, an example of what an enlightened individual can do
once he has realized that he is God; God is an impersonal energy penetrating everything.”
[399] Fabro, La Aventura Progresista, p.319.
[400] Pius XII, AAS 38, 1946.
[401] In Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.162.
[402] Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, p.5.
[403]La Théologie et Ses Sources.
[404] Daniélou, Études, April 1946: “Finished, the age of theoretical speculations which are separate
from action and do not involve life. Like Marxism or existentialism, our thought will be actively
involved.” Scholastic theology rooted in the “immobile world of Greek thought” puts “reality in
the essence more than in the subject” and therefore “is ignorant of the dramatic world of persons.”
Its great sin was to have treated God as an “object” whereas He is the subject par excellence (in
Labourdette, Dialogue Théologique, pp.25, 36-37).
[405] 1946, IV, 385-401.
[406] On another occasion, when Teilhard de Chardin is criticized for his theological errors, de
Lubac took up his defense, decrying “the ignorance of his adversaries on the actual state of science
and on the problems it engenders” (in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.61).
[407] Cited in extenso in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.177-95.
[408] De Lubac, Surnaturel, pp.264-75.
[409]Comment Je Crois. Some of Teilhard de Chardin’s expressions were extremely audacious: “If,
as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in
a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the
world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness)–that, when all is said and done, is the
first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe…I surrender myself to an ill-defined faith in a
world that is one and infallible–wherever it may lead me.” Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and
Evolution, pp.99, 103 (in Frénaud, Estudio Crítico sobre Teilhard, p.21).
[410] In Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, 177-195.
[411]Ibid.
[412] Doumergue, in Barbier, Histoire du Catholicisme Libéral, IV, 363.
[413] Narfon, in Barbier, ibid., p.366.
[414]Humani Generis, §§25-27.
[415]Ibid., §32.
[416] Parente, in John Auricchio, The Future of Theology (New York: Alba House 1970), p.324.
[417] In Martina, Vatican II: Bilan et Perspectives 25 Ans après, pp.56-57, in “Modernisme,”Action
Familiale et Scolaire, p.45.
[418] In Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.61.
[419] Selected correspondence, in Robert Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography (London:
Collins, 1967), pp.298-99.
[420] In Leprieur, Quand Rome Condamne (Paris: Plon-Cerf, 1989), cited in Retrouvons le Vrai
Concile: Les Pionniers du Vatican II (Paris: Savoir et Servir, 1994), pp.104-10.
[421]Ibid.
[422]Ibid.
[423] Cardinal Pacelli to Count Enrico Gabazzi, in Monsignor Roche, Pie XII Devant l’Histoire,
pp.52-53, cited by LeRoux, Peter, Lovest Thou Me? (Glasysdale, Victoria, Australia: Instauratio
Press, 1998), p.1.
[424] Heidegger, Being and Time, p.417 (German reference: p.365).
[425] In Foulquié, L’Existentialisme, p.70.
[426] Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, in Foulquié, ibid., p.70.
[427] Ricœur, From Text to Action, p. 124; see Le Sel de la Terre, No.12, pp.14-27.
[428] Rahner, Hearers of the Word, pp.98-103. Cf. Ferraro, pp.399-407, who cites the Spanish
edition, Oyentes de la Palabra, pp.125, 128-29.
[429] Rahner, Hearers of the Word, p.183.
[430] Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la Métaphysique?, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église,
p.239.
[431] Heidegger, in Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, p.104.
[432] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp.220-21ff. Cf. Curso Fundamental sobre la Fe,
p.216.
[433] In Ferraro, El Naufragio del Progresismo, p.470.
[434] Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p.62.
[435] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp.3-5; cf. Foulquié, L’Existentialisme, p.68.
[436] Rahner, ibid., p.69. In Latin, “idem est intellectus et intellectum et intelligere.”
[437] Rahner, Spirit in the World, pp.35, note.
[438]Ibid., p.70.
[439]Ibid., p.69.
[440] In Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, p.104.
[441] Siri, Gethsemane, pp.84-86.
[442] Daniel Olivier, Les Deux Visages du Prêtre (Paris: Fayard, 1971), p.106.
[443] Caprile, Il Concilio Vaticano II, Vol. V (1968), in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie,
p.12.
[444] Paul VI, at the closing of the Council, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.416.
[445] Louis Bouyer, Dom Lambert Beauduin: Un Homme d’Église, p.180, in Retrouvons le Vrai
Concile. Les Pionniers de Vatican II, p.115.
[446] The generic idea of a divinity or of religion is no more real than “humanity.” The universal
does not exist in concrete reality, as Aristotle so eloquently proves against Plato, which is the
reason why the desire to found the universal religion is an absurdity. It was the project of the
Deists, kept alive in our day by the Freemasons.
[447]L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition, January 26, 1978, p.1.
[448]Lumen Gentium. This formula was apparently suggested to Ratzinger by the Protestant pastor
Wilhelm Schmidt.
[449]Documentation Catholique, April 2, 2000, p.311.
[450]Unitatis Redintegratio.
[451] Such is the opinion of Cardinal Ottaviani, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.123.
On the opposition between Cardinals Ottaviani and Bea prior to the Council, see Courrier de
Rome, Église et Contre-Église, pp.122-23.
[452] Congar, Une Vie pour la Vérité, p.149.
[453]Lumen Gentium, §15.
[454] Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., De Revelatione per Ecclesiam Catholicam Proposita
(Rome: P. Ferrari, 1918), II, 436-37.
[455]ICI, May 15, 1969, in Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: L’Esprit et la Lettre du Concile (Paris:
Savoir et Servir, 1995), p.44 and following for the substance of these paragraphs.
[456] Siri, La Giovinezza della Chiesa (Pisa, 1983), p.205, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-
Église, p.48.
[457] Ralph Wiltgen, S.V.D., The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books and
Publishers, 1985), p.136.
[458] The most contested of the schemata, the schema on religious liberty, ultimately received only
70 votes of Non placet against 2,308 votes of approval.
[459] René Laurentin, L’Enjeu et le Bilan du Concile (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p.357, from Guimaraes, In
the Murky Waters of Vatican II (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books, 1999), p.27. The Brazilian author has
undertaken the publication of a collection of eleven volumes (for a total of 3-4,000 pages)
precisely to point out the ambiguity of the spirit behind the letter of Vatican II. In this, the first
volume, he cites a great many witnesses in testimony to the equivocacy of the Council, including
Döpfner, Ruffini, Silva Henriquez, de Lubac, Franzini, Bea, Philips, and Congar.
[460] Jean Guitton, Dialogues avec Paul VI, English translation by Anne and Christopher Fremantle,
The Pope Speaks: Dialogues of Paul VI with Jean Guitton (New York: Meredith Press, 1968),
p.171.
[461]Documentation Catholique, January 6, 1963, col.37, in Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: L’Esprit et
la Lettre du Concile, p.52.
[462] Visser’t Hooft, in Lucien Meroz, Una Voce Helvetica, November 1982, p.16, in ibid., pp.52-53.
[463] Monsignor Roche, secretary to Cardinal Tisserant, in ibid., p.9.
[464] Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, pp.167ff.
[465]Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: L’Esprit et la Lettre du Concile, p.18.
[466] Jean Guitton, Paul VI Secret, p.123.
[467] “Arise, you children of our fatherland,” the first words of the French National Anthem, the
Marseillaise.
[468]Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: Les Pionniers de Vatican II, p.83. Such was also the opinion of the
rector of the theology department at the Gregorian University, Juan Alfaro: “He was the greatest
inspirer of Vatican Council II” (in Innocenti, Influssi Gnostici nella Chiesa d’Oggi, p.68).
[469] “Rahner has spoken, therefore it is true.”
[470]30 Jours, No.3, 1993, p.26, in Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: Les Pionniers de Vatican II, p.84.
[471] Vorgrimler, Karl Rahner Verstehen, pp.191ff., in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église,
p.391.
[472] Vorgrimler, Karl Rahner Verstehen, p.188, ibid., p.390.
[473] Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, pp.80-81.
[474] Preparatory schema of the decree Dei Verbum.
[475] Cardinal Bea, as early as 1961, had worked to convince the Biblical Commission to accept
Bultmann’s Form History as part of the text which was to become Sancta Mater Ecclesia (April
11, 1964). It is significant that the title of this instruction was “The Historical Truth of the
Gospels”: not the historicity of the Gospels but the truth which can be drawn from the Gospel
story, something quite different. This seemingly minimal verbal nuance well shows the
surreptitious and insidious methods of the modernists. See Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-
Église, pp.33-34.
[476] Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, p.92.
[477]Episkopat und Primat.
[478] Karl Rahner, in Congar, Bilder Eines Lebens, p.67, in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-
Église, p.398.
[479] Congar, Bilder Eines Lebens, p.68, in Courrier de Rome, ibid.
[480] Schillebeeckx, Jésus, May 1993; Henrici, in Communio, November-December 1990.
[481] In Raymond Dulac, La Collégialité Épiscopale au Concile Vatican II (Bouère: Dominique
Martin Morin, 1979), p.145.
[482] Cited by the Bulletin du Centre de Documentation du Grand Orient de France, No.48,
November 1964, in Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: L’Esprit et la Lettre de Vatican II, p.69.
[483] Dz. 1689-90.
[484]Dignitatis Humanae, §2.
[485]Retrouvons le Vrai Concile: L’Esprit et la Lettre de Vatican II, p.86.
[486] Mt.16:18.
[487] Pius VI in 1786 against Eybel, who claimed that “Christ willed that the Church be administered
after the model of a republic.…The power of the pope is limited to the sole prerogative of
supplying for the negligence of the others.”
[488] Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, p.232.
[489] “It is the experts who are running the Council.”
[490] Dulac, La Collégialité Épiscopale au Concile Vatican II, p.156.
[491] Romano Amerio, Iota Unum (Kansas City: Sarto House, 1996), No.234.
[492]Ibid., No.232.
[493] Congar, Une Vie pour la Vérité, p.220.
[494] Cf. Theological Commission, March 6, 1961; Secretary General of the Council, November 16,
1964.
[495] Msgr. Henri Delassus, La Conjuration Antichrétienne (Lille: Desclée de Brouwer, 1910), III,
1040-46.
[496] Frappani-Molinari, Montini Giovane. See the review Courrier de Rome, March 1994, which
speaks of the relationship between Cardinal Siri and Msgr. Montini, a philocommunist.
[497] Amerio, Iota Unum, No.78.
[498] Jean Guitton, The Pope Speaks, pp.80-81.
[499] Guitton, Paul VI Secret, pp.110, 114, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.82.
[500]Documentation Catholique, July 8, 1945, col.498-99, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle
Théologie, ibid.
[501] Martina, Vatican II: Bilan et Perspectives, p.39, in ibid.
[502] Msgr. Roche, Pius XII devant l’Histoire; cf. the Montini-Stalin accords of 1942, in the review
Courrier de Rome, September 1984, April 1986, April 1995.
[503]Humani Generis.
[504] Guitton, Paul VI Secret, in the review Courrier de Rome, July-August 1993.
[505] Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.90.
[506] Latourelle, in Martina, Vatican II: Bilan et Perspectives, introduction, ibid., p.91.
[507] Bugnini, La Riforma Liturgica (Rome: Centro Liturgico Vincenziano, 1983), pp.297-99.
[508] See Chapter 15.
[509] Spadafora, Leone XIII e gli Studi Biblici (Rovigo, 1973), pp.215-67.
[510] Küng wanted Christians to be both “catholic” (universal) and “protestant” (critical). To achieve
this end, aside from denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, he demanded that Rome “change the
style of leadership, the method of papal election and of episcopal appointment, obligatory celibacy,
the participation of the laity, the ordination of women, the liberation of the moral conscience,
including in matters of contraception” (cf. Molnar, Le Dieu Immanent, p.96).
[511]La Croix, March 19, 1983.
[512] Msgr. DeFois, rector of the Catholic University of Lyons, L’Osservatore Romano (French
language), October 4, 1988, in the review Action Familiale et Scolaire, “Le Modernisme,” pp.77-
78.
[513] Yves Marsaudon, L’Œcuménisme Vu par un Franc-Maçon de Tradition (Paris: Vitiano, 1964),
p.60.
[514] Cited by Pius X in Pascendi.
[515] Prologue by Paul VI to the Motu Proprio Integrae Servandae of December 7, 1965, in
Documentation Catholique, 1966, No.1462.
[516] In 30 Jours, March 1993, p.70.
[517] Amerio, Iota Unum, No.63.
[518]L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition, January 22, 1970, p.3; cf. Amerio, Iota
Unum, No.64.
[519] Amerio, ibid., No.65.
[520] Cardinal Gut, Documentation Catholique, No.1551, p.18.
[521] See Regimini Ecclesiae Universae, August 15, 1967, particularly §§18-28, and Pastor Bonus,
August 15, 1988, which refers to the previous document.
[522] According to them, the chair of Peter is vacant because Rome teaches heresy in decrees of the
magisterium which, if they truly came from the pope, would be infallible. However, the first
condition for pontifical infallibility is the intention to bind the universal Church, an intention
which has vanished de facto since 1968.
[523]L’Osservatore Romano, December 23, 1976.
[524] In a discourse of December 24, 1965, the Pope described the Catholic Church as a leaven of
distinction but not of division between men, a distinction which is “like those we encounter in
language, culture, art, and profession.”
[525] Lateran Council IV.
[526] “It is definitely question here of a fundamental restoration, of a remolding and, on certain
points, a veritable new creation” (Documentation Catholique, No.1493, May 7, 1967).
[527] Jean Guitton, Paul VI Secret, p.158.
[528] Jean Guitton, December 19, 1993.
[529]Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, April 3, 1969, first edition, in Les Nouveaux Rites de la
Messe (Centurion, 1969), pp.23-24.
[530]Bref Examen Critique, in Salleron, La Nouvelle Messe (NEL, 1981), p.104.
[531]La Croix, May 30, 1969.
[532] “L’Intercommunion,” Documentation Catholique, No.1555, January 18, 1970, p.96. Br. Roger,
of Taizé said that the New Mass follows the structure of the Lutheran Supper. Davies, in Pope
Paul’s New Mass, pointed out its resemblance with Cranmer’s Anglican rite, but he stressed above
all its exaltation of man (pp.137ff.).
[533] In Amerio, Iota Unum, No.7.
[534]Ibid.
[535] Y. A. Ferre Benimeli and G. Caprile, Massoneria e Chiesa Cattolica, p.91, in Courrier de
Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.417.
[536] Rosario Esposito, Le Grande Concordanze fra Chiesa e Massoneria, p.420, in Courrier de
Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.418.
[537]Enchiridion Vaticanum, cited in Courrier de Rome, Église et Contre-Église, p.416. English
translation taken from Closing Speeches: Vatican Council II (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1965),
p.10.
[538] The death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict
XVI took place during the translation of the present work into English. To reflect the new reality,
we have introduced only the bare minimum of changes to the text. The present chapter chronicles
a certain period in the life of Joseph Ratzinger and his influence on criticism in the Church of John
Paul II, without claiming to foresee, or even less to judge, what manner of pope Benedict XVI will
be. The author can only echo the sentiment expressed by His Excellency Bishop Fellay, Superior
General of the Society of Saint Pius X, that the Cardinal’s accession to the Sovereign Pontificate
does offer a gleam of hope that we may find a way out of the profound crisis which is shaking the
Catholic Church.
[539] “I am convinced that the damage that we have incurred in these twenty years is due not to the
‘true’ Council but to the unleashing within the Church of latent polemical and centrifugal forces;
and outside the Church it is due to the confrontation with a cultural revolution in the West….” The
answer is not to “turn back” but, on the contrary, “to return to the authentic texts of the original
Vatican II.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, Rapporto sulla Fede, English
translation by Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive
Interview on the State of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp.30-31. See also
Hans Küng, “Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Wojtyla, and Fear at the Vatican: An Open Word after a
Long Silence,” in The Church in Anguish: Has the Vatican Betrayed Vatican II? (San Francisco:
 Harper & Row, 1986), pp.58-90, for an interesting assessment of the change in the “former
reformer” delivered by a prominent neo-modernist.
[540] Walter Kasper, Jesus: The Christ, p.140.
[541] Ratzinger, “L’Interprétation Biblique en Question” [Questioning Biblical Interpretation], in
L’Esegesi Cristiana Oggi (Piemme, 1991).
[542] Paul VI, L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition, April 18, 1974, pp.2-3. In this text
he echoed the praise bestowed as early as 1964 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission under
Cardinal Tisserant, known for his nefarious role at the Council.
[543] Henrici, in 30 Jours, December 1991, in La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.95-96.
[544]Il Sabato, June 6, 1992.
[545] Kasper, Jesus: The Christ, p.90. Word for word, he revives Loisy’s thesis of the Paschal cycle,
supposedly the version of the glorified Christ reworked by later Christian communities. Decidedly,
there is nothing new under the (modernist) sun.
[546]Ibid., p.139.
[547]Ibid., p.91.
[548] Cf. ibid., p.164: “The title of Son of God therefore is understood [in the Old Testament] not as
natural-substantial but functionally and personally. The New Testament must be understood first of
all in the lights of the tradition of the Old Testament.…The concrete, historical interpretation of
the Son of God predicate means that Jesus’ divine sonship is understood not as supra-historical
essence but as reality which becomes effective in and through the history and fate of Jesus.”
[549] Cf. ibid., p.169: “[I]n the school of Paul and in the Johannine writings an explicit confession of
Christ as God is reached.”
[550] Cf. ibid., pp.148, 251.
[551]Einführung in das Christentum.
[552]Ibid., pp.168-75. For the following three citations, cf. La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.100-1.
[553]Ibid., pp.175-76.
[554]Ibid., pp.179.
[555] These official documents were published by the International Theological Commission in 1975
and 1988, and by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993 (Documentation Catholique, January
2, 1994, No.2085).
[556] “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.”
[557]Documentation Catholique, ibid., p.26.
[558] In the document “Unity and Diversity in the Church.”
[559]Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), in the chapter entitled,
“‘Proof’: Is It Still Valid?” pp.32-36. He cites the philosophers of hermeneutics, Ricœur, Lévinas,
Éliade, and Buber. The Calvinist Ricœur espouses the spiritual exegesis of Fr. de Lubac but with
an even more radical twist. (See Chapter 17.)
[560]Documentation Catholique, No.2085, p.27.
[561] † 2005.
[562] In reality, papyrus 7Q5 had already been identified in the time of Paul VI by Fr. O’Callaghan as
containing a fragment of St. Mark (Mk. 6:53). This extraordinary news was met with silence by
Paul VI on the initiative of the future Cardinal Martini, since it toppled the historico-critical
method and, in the name of science, preached a return to Catholic doctrine. See also 7Q4, which
corresponds with I Tim. 3:16 and 4:3. See Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew d’Ancona, The Jesus
Papyrus (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), pp.49-69, as well as O’Callaghan and his
recent book, Los Testimonios Más Antiguos del N.T.
[563]Documentation Catholique, No.2085, pp.29, 31.
[564] The Roman document acknowledges: “Some value this plurality of methods and approaches as
an indication of richness, but to others it gives the impression of much confusion” (Documentation
Catholique, ibid., p.15; translation taken from Origins, Jan. 6, 1994).
[565]Documentation Catholique, No.2085, pp.38-39.
[566] Ratzinger, in L’Esegesi Cristiana Oggi. In fact, the Biblical Commission, in its 1993 document,
states clearly that it is but an organ of research and of expert consultation, not a teaching body; cf.
Ratzinger’s introduction, Documentation Catholique, No.2085, pp.13-14.
[567]Documentation Catholique, No.2085, pp.34-35.
[568]Ibid., p.35. Official Vatican translation taken from www.catholicculture.org.
[569] We mention, among others, Zerwick and Lyonnet, who ratified the doubt of the Biblical
Commission concerning the messianic prophecy contained in Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, a virgin will
conceive and bear a child.…” They also deny the primacy of Peter proclaimed in Matthew 16:17-
19: “Blessed are you, Simon…,” and refuse to see Romans 5:12 in the sense of original sin, as
defined by the Council of Trent. McCool denies Mt. 13:1-8 and Mt. 18:23; Descamps denies Mt.
5:32, Mt. 19:9, and Jn. 6:69-71; Léon-Dufour interprets the Resurrection of Jesus in a meta-
historical sense. Cf. Spadafora, Leone XIII e gli Studi Biblici, pp.215-67.
[570]Audiences Générales, July 21 and 28, August 4, 1999, Documentation Catholique, No.2210,
p.760, in Le Sel de la Terre, No.31, p.192.
[571] In La Nouvelle Théologie, pp.19-20, 23.
[572] Message of John Paul II, October 31, 1992.
[573]Newsweek, November 3, 1980.
[574]La Sapienza della Croce, April-June 1966, p.137. See above, end of Chapter 15.
[575] De Lubac, Entretien Autour de Vatican II, p.48, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie,
p.123.
[576]De la Cábala al Progresismo, conclusion.
[577] Malinski, Mon Ami Karol Wojtyla, in Leroux, Peter, Lovest Thou Me?, p.77. See pp.4-8 of
Leroux for the following references concerning the spirit of John Paul II.
[578] Alain Woodrow, Le Monde, October 18, 1978.
[579]Documentation Catholique, No.1965, p.1888.
[580] To André Frossard, N’Ayez Pas Peur, English translation by J.R. Foster, “Be Not Afraid!” Pope
John Paul II Speaks Out on His Life, His Beliefs, and His Inspiring Vision for Humanity (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p.71; cited in Leroux, Peter, Lovest Thou Me?, p.76.
[581] Frossard, p.46, in Leroux, ibid., p.77.
[582] Wojtyla, in Malinski, Mon Ami Karol Wojtyla, p.189, cited by Leroux, ibid., pp.6-7.
[583] De Lubac, Entretien Autour de Vatican II, pp.46, 48, 106, in Retrouvons le Vrai Concile:
L’Esprit et la Lettre de Vatican II, p.73.
[584]L’Osservatore Romano, June 10, 1981, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.120.
English translation from SiSiNoNo, August 1994, p.21.
[585]L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition, September 9, 1991, p.16.
[586] A double revelation, a double faith, a double redemption, a double Church, a double mission.
See for example Dörmann’s scholarly work in four volumes, proving that behind apparently
Catholic words there hides a neo-modernist doctrine.
[587]A Sign of Contradiction (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p.16, in Fr. Johannes Dörmann,
Pope John Paul II’s Theological Journey to the Prayer Meeting of Religions in Assisi, Part I
(Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1994), pp.49-50.
[588]A Sign of Contradiction, p.91, in Dörmann, ibid., p.60. Elsewhere, he again distinguishes
clearly between justification (personal salvation) and the Redemption: “all men from the
beginning of the world until its end have been redeemed and justified by Christ and His Cross”
(ibid. p.65).
[589]Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp.34-36. Italics in the original.
[590]Ibid., p.193.
[591]Redemptor Hominis, §10 (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1979).
[592]Redemptor Hominis never uses the qualifier “Roman” to designate the Church of Christ, which
is typical of the modernists, who sin more often by omission than by commission, the better to
muddy the waters.
[593]Ibid., §8, italics in the original.
[594]Veritatis Splendor, Vatican translation (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993).
[595] January 1, 1999, supplement to L’Osservatore Romano, December 16, 1998.
[596]Redemptor Hominis, §11.
[597]Ibid., §7, citing Lumen Gentium, § 1.
[598]Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p.147.
[599]Dominum et Vivificantem, §50.3, in Dörmann, Part II, Vol. 1, pp.103-4.
[600] G.K. Chesterton explains that “the refusal of the Christians [to be mere participants in the
Roman pantheon]…was the turning-point of history.…Nobody understands the nature of the
Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the
whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions” (The
Everlasting Man [New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1925], p.214).
[601] Ps. 95.
[602] Rom. 1:19ff.
[603] Acts 17:17.
[604] Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, §82.
[605] John Paul II, December 22, 1986.
[606] John Paul II, May 11, 1986, in Courrier de Rome, La Nouvelle Théologie, p.118. English
translation from SiSiNoNo, Angelus Press edition, August 1994, pp.19-20.
[607] John Paul II, L’Osservatore Romano, English language edition, December 9, 1992, p.2.
[608]Gaudium et Spes, §22; Redemptor Hominis, §8.
[609]Documentation Catholique, No.2220, February 20, 2000, p.167.
[610] Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, §13.
[611] Mt. 16:17-19.
[612] Gal. 2:14.
[613] See the citation from Bossuet at the end of Chapter 13.
[614] Madiran, in Itinéraires, No.277, goes even further: “Pluralism is a system.…It is the smiling
face of anti-dogmatism, which is the very substance of Masonic sectarianism. For ‘pluralism’
means systematic and obligatory plurality in matters of dogma and hence the destruction of
dogma.…Founding liberty of thought and religious liberty upon pluralism is therefore an
absurdity. Nor is it merely a manner of speaking; it is a trap, deliberately designed to make you fall
into it.”
[615] Ploncard d’Assac, L’Église Occupée, p.196.
[616] Yves Marsaudon, L’Œcuménisme Vu par un Franc-Maçon de Tradition, p.126.
[617] Armando Corona, Grand Master of the Great Lodge of the Equinox and of the Springtime,
Hiram, April 1987.
[618]Dignitatis Humanae, §2, Vatican translation.
[619] Paul VI, Il Popolo, December 9, 1968.
[620] Gen. 3:15.
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Being
 Aristotle and the Philosophy of Being
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Being
St. Augustine and the Revelation of the Son of God
St. Augustine and the Revelation of the Son of God
St. Augustine and the Revelation of the Son of God
St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology
St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology
St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology
St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology
Assessment of the Christian Heritage
Assessment of the Christian Heritage
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Kant and the Philosophy of “Maybe”
Kant and the Philosophy of “Maybe”
Kant and the Philosophy of “Maybe”
Kant and the Philosophy of “Maybe”
The Mythical Gospel of Strauss
The Mythical Gospel of Strauss
The Mythical Gospel of Strauss
The Mythical Gospel of Strauss
Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Assessment of Protestant Modernism
Assessment of Protestant Modernism
Assessment of Protestant Modernism
Assessment of Protestant Modernism
Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
 Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Teilhard de Chardin: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Heidegger’s Egological Existentialism
Heidegger’s Egological Existentialism
Heidegger’s Egological Existentialism
Heidegger’s Egological Existentialism
Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
 Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
Rahner’s “Anthropological Inversion”
The Condemnation of Neo-Modernism by Pius XII
The Condemnation of Neo-Modernism by Pius XII
The Condemnation of Neo-Modernism by Pius XII
The Condemnation of Neo-Modernism by Pius XII
Assessment of Neo-Modernism
Assessment of Neo-Modernism
Assessment of Neo-Modernism
Assessment of Neo-Modernism
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger
Another Paul: John Paul II
Another Paul: John Paul II
Another Paul: John Paul II
Another Paul: John Paul II
Another Paul: John Paul II
Another Paul: John Paul II
Conclusions
Conclusions
Conclusions
Conclusions
Conclusions
A Brief Lexicon of Modernism
A Brief Lexicon of Modernism
A Brief Lexicon of Modernism
Bibliography
Bibliography
Bibliography
 Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Christian Heritage
Chapter 1: Aristotle and the Philosophy of Being
Chapter 2: St. Augustine and the Revelation of the Son of God
Chapter 3: St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology
Chapter 4: Assessment of the Christian Heritage
Part II: Protestant Modernism
Chapter 5: Luther: The Father of Protestant Modernism
Chapter 6: Kant and the Philosophy of “Maybe”
Chapter 7: The Mythical Gospel of Strauss
Chapter 8: Schleiermacher’s Religion of the Conscience
Chapter 9: Assessment of Protestant Modernism
Part III: “Catholic” Modernism
Chapter 10: Bergson’s Evolutionary Philosophy
Chapter 11: Loisy’s Evolutionist “Gospel and Church”
Chapter 12: Tyrrell’s Symbolic Theology
Chapter 13: The Condemnation of Modernism by St. Pius X
Chapter 14: Assessment of “Catholic” Modernism
Part IV: Neo-Modernism
Chapter 15: Teilhard de Chardin: The Prophet of the Cosmic Christ
Chapter 16: Heidegger’s Egological Existentialism
Chapter 17: Spiritual Exegesis According to de Lubac
Chapter 19: The Condemnation Of Neo-Modernism By Pope Pius XII
Chapter 20: Assessment of Neo-Modernism
Part V: Modernism Triumphant
Chapter 21: Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution
Chapter 22: The Gravedigger of Tradition, Paul VI
Chapter 23: The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger[538]
Chapter 24: Another Paul: John Paul II
Chapter 25: Conclusions
A Brief Lexicon of Modernism
Bibliography