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Chapter 15 Theological setting of the argument 147. Theological setting of the argument. An analysis of the dizziness or the giddiness and dislocation, that has entered the Church in the twentieth century, could be conducted in purely philosophical terms. In Catholic epistemology however, philosophy is a subordinate discipline that makes reference to a faith that stands above it, and hence a philosophical consideration of things is included as part of a higher view, which philosophy serves without losing its own autonomy. As we have indicated in the opening paragraphs of this book, and as is generally recognized, the crisis in the Church is a crisis of faith, but the link between mans natural constitution and the supernatural life that is made connatural to him, rather than simply superimposed upon him, means that a Catholic enquirer must look for the origins of the crisis in an order deeper than the purely philosophical. Underlying the present confusion there is an attack on mans powers of cognition, an attack that has implications for the metaphysical constitution of being in general and of primal Being as well, that is of the Holy Trinity. We will call the attack by its historically expressive name of Pyrrhonism;1 it is something that attacks the very principle of all certainty, not merely this or that truth of faith or reason, since what it impugns is mans capacity to know any truth at all. There are two points to be made about this wobbling of the axis around which all certainties revolve. First; it is no longer an isolated and esoteric phenomenon, a peculiarity of a particular philosophical school, but something that permeates the mentality of the age and with which Catholic thought has compromised. Second; it affects theology as well as metaphysics because it penetrates to the constitution of created being and therefore to that of uncreated being as well, the former being an analogical imitation of the latter. As love proceeds from the Word within the Trinity, so life proceeds from thought in the human soul. If one denies the priority of thought over life, of truth over the will, one is attempting a dislocation of the Trinity. If one denies the capacity to grasp being, the expansion of the spirit into its primal loving is left unconnected with truth, loses any regulating norm and degenerates into a mere existence. By turning away from the divine Idea, on the grounds that it is held to be unreachable, human life is reduced to a pure mobilism or becoming, devoid of any ideal values. Were it not for the impossibility on God’s side that He should leave his creation to lapse into pure movement, devoid of axiological form, man’s world would be a becoming without substance, direction or goal. A Pyrrhonism that posits a pseudo-absolute alogism (pseudo because thought cannot deny itself) distorts the ontological composition of the Trinity, and reverses its processions, as we have said. If truth is unreachable, the dynamic of life no longer proceeds from the intelligible but precedes it and indeed produces it. The denial of the Idea, as Leopardi2 acutely saw, is strictly, ultimately and irrefutably a denial of God, because it takes away from human life any trace of eternal and indestructible values. If the will does not proceed from knowledge, but produces and justifies itself, the world is deprived of any rational basis and becomes a kind of meaninglessness. If one denies the capacity of our intellect to form concepts corresponding to the real, the more the mind is unable to apprehend and conceive (that is take with itself) the real, the more it will develop its own operation within itself by producing (that is bringing forth) mere excogitations. These latter will be occasioned by something that touches our faculties but is not present in the concept which we form of it. Hence come all the ancient and modern sophisms that trust in thought while at the same time lacking any confidence that we can grasp the truth. If thought does not have an essential relation with being, it is not subject to the laws governing being and ceases to be measured because it becomes itself the measurer. Protagoras of Abderas saying well expresses the independence of thought from being: man is the measure of all things.3 Gorgias of Leontini’s three propositions bear witness to a refusal to grasp the object and to the arrogance of the mind that closes itself upon itself: “Nothing exists. If something existed it would be unknowable. If it were knowable, it would be inexpressible.”4 The arrogance of controversy has manifested itself in every branch of knowledge, particularly at times when a subjective spirit was in the ascendant. Setting aside the extravagances of the Greek sophists and of those who deny the very existence of Christ, I come to the Pyrrhonism of the contemporary Church. 1.
See note at paragraph 16. [Translator’s note.] 148. Pyrrhonism in the Church. Cardinals Léger, Heenan, Alfrink and Suenens. The root of the confusion in the world and the Church is Pyrrhonism, that is the denial of reason. The charge commonly made, to the effect that modern civilization overestimates the power of reason, is superficial. It would be true if one meant by reason the mind’s capacity to calculate and construct, to which we owe technology and our control over the things around us. But that is one of the minds lesser faculties and is said to be found in spiders and apes. If on the other hand one means the capacity to grasp the being of things and their meaning, and to adhere to them with the will, then the present world is much more inclined to alogism than rationalism. In the third syllabus, Pius XII defended verum sincerumque cognitionis humanae valorem ac certam et immutabilem veritatis assecutionem5. against the spirit of the age. Paul VI nobly declared: “We are the only ones who defend the power of reason.6. “In the doctrinal constitution Lumen Gentium, Vatican II repeated the anti-pyrrhonist text of Vatican I: Deum omnium rerum principium et finem naturali humanae rationis lumine certo cognosci posse.”7. Gaudium et Spes also condemns those who “no longer admit any absolute truth.”8. These assertions, however, do not reflect the mentality of a large part of the council and are in contradiction with post-conciliar developments. In the 74th sitting Cardinal Léger maintained: “Many people think that the Church demands a too monolithic unity. In recent centuries an exaggerated unity has been introduced into the study of doctrines.”9. It would seem that the Canadian cardinal can detect a lesser degree of doctrinal unity in the non-recent centuries, when a death penalty existed in some times and places for people who broke that unity, and that he is moreover ignorant of the variety of theological schools that are a feature of the Churchs life throughout history. To this historical judgment, Léger attaches a value judgment of a frankly pyrrhonistic kind: “Certainly the assertion that the Church has the truth can be justified, if the necessary distinctions are made. The knowledge of God, whose mystery is explored in doctrine, prevents intellectual immobility”10 It seems the Cardinal is denying that, whether inside or outside the Church, there are changeless truths, and that in his case Pyrrhonism is based upon the divine transcendence, as if the fact that the infinite cannot be infinitely known by the finite removed all knowledge, when in fact it is knowledges foundation. Next the Cardinal misunderstands the passage in St. Augustine that says we must seek in order to find, and find in order to seek again, which is actually opposed to Pyrrhonism: what is found is one thing, what is sought the next time is another, not the same thing over again as if it had not been found and could not become, in certain conditions, fixed for ever.11. Cardinal Heenan noted the relativist scepticism that generally characterizes the Churchs teachers: “The magisterium has survived only in the Pope. It is no longer exercised by the bishops and it is rather difficult to get the hierarchy to condemn a false doctrine. Outside Rome the magisterium today is so unsure of itself that it no longer even attempts to lead.”12 This statement certainly condemns the renunciation of authority but it also shows the pyrrhonistic uncertainty that has entered the Church’s teaching body. During the fourth session of the council, in a press conference on 23 September 1965 reported by the news agencies, Cardinal Alfrink also notes the phenomenon, but unlike the Englishman, he gives it a positive interpretation, expressing his Pyrrhonism in set terms: “The council has got people thinking and there is hardly a subject in the Church that has not been brought into question.” Lastly Cardinal Suenens said to the French Catholic intellectuals’ week at Paris in 1966; La morale est d’abord vive, dynamisme de vie et soumise, à ce titre, à une croissance intérieure, qui écarte toute fixité.13 It is obvious that the Cardinal is mixing up morality, an absolute and unchangeable demand that imposes itself on man, and one’s moral life that changes in each individual continually from one judgment to the next. Morality is not a subjective dynamism but an absolute rule which is a participation in the divine Reason. 5.
Denzinger 2320. “The true genuine
worth of human knowledge and the certain and immutable attainment
of truth.” 149. The discounting of reason. Sullivan. Innovators’ rejection of certainty. Reason is openly discounted in Jean Sullivan’s book Matinales.14 The author denies the distinction between faith and love, on the grounds that it has no scriptural basis and he hence denies there is a crisis of faith in the Church while not even stopping to realize he is implicitly distorting the Trinity. Indeed one cannot talk about a crisis, that is a discernment, when one has no fixed measure, no means of discerning the difference between faith and non-faith, or when one mixes up opposing ideas in a confused mass and regards them as one. The difference between believing and loving is not, in any case, based merely on Scripture; it rests on mans nature, in which intellect and will are really distinct. Their distinction is derived from the analogous distinction within the Trinity. It is clear from what Sullivan says about the incompatibility of faith and certainty that the ignoring of this distinction means the radical overthrow of rationality: Les croyants s’imaginent que lafoi va avec la certitude. On leur a mis ça dans la têtel Ilfaut se méfier de la certitude. Les certitudes sont généralement fondées sur quoi? Le non approfondissement des connaissances.15 The book contains a great many absurdities both logical and religious. If the author is saying that something cannot be seen and believed simultaneously by the same person, he is merely stating the obvious and repeating a philosophical truism. But if he is saying one cannot have certainty about something that is believed, he is departing from Catholic doctrine. It is a Catholic dogma that faith involves certainty, and so is the proposition that such certainty is not the privilege of mystical or simple souls, but a light common to all the faithful. Secondly, Sullivan overthrows any sound gnoseology when he reverses the relation between certainty and the deepening of one’s knowledge. Certainty is the subjective state of the knower precisely inasmuch as he really is a knower; ignorance is a lack of knowledge and doubt is less than full knowledge. Sullivan’s views remind one of the impious calumnies of Giordano Bruno, set forth in his “Dialogues” on holy stupidity. They are accompanied by another more fundamental error to the effect that certainty and faith block the possibility of acting, so that, in the author’s ill-found phrase, vivre c’est perdre lafoi.16 He maintains that any kind of stability in thought makes it impossible to enter into communion with other minds, and that our own minds should be kept permanently open to any and every point of view. Catholic teaching holds instead that communion involves something that remains the same amidst the movement of life. It also says that life proceeds from thought, not thought from life, just as theologically the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Word, and not vice versa. Human activity is in fact driven by the belief that one possesses truth, and the history of philosophy proves the fact. The Ephectics of antiquity and all other systems that advocate flight from action, seek to reduce our certainties so as to deprive us of motives for action, their optimal goal being a complete lack of certain knowledge that will bring us to the safe haven of complete spiritual ataraxy or detachment. Certainty is a mental state that follows from a deepening of knowledge, not from shallowness as Sullivan alleges. He denies the existence of any depth that cannot be surpassed, any fundamental principle, any absolute. Pyrrhonism goes hand in hand with its twin, mobilism, and like it, leads to blasphemy: Vivre c’est aussi perdre la foi et s’apercevoir qu’on est possede par...C’est pourquoi rencontrer Dieu c’est le renier à l’instant même.17 This is just trivial love of paradox, but behind the literary device of paradox there is a denial of the Word and, as Leopardi accurately saw, a denial of God. 14.
It was reviewed at length in I.C.I., No.506, September
1976, p.40, the most widely read publication of the newfangled sort
in France. 150. The discounting of reason, continued. The Padua theologians. The Ariccia theologians. Manchesson. Let it not be thought that we have picked out and exaggerated one or two cases in order to prove that Pyrrhonism has penetrated the Church. We have pointed them out as symptoms, not as oddities. The widespread mentality they indicate can be gauged from the actions of whole bodies of thinkers, not just from notable individuals. The Congress of Italian Moral Theologians in Padua in 1970 adopted this proposition: “Since the exercise of reason is systematically included in a particular historical set of circumstances, it cannot be exercised in universal terms. “ This really does mean the destruction of reason and thus of everything else, including congresses of moral theologians. The Pyrrhonism of the Ariccia Congress of Theologians, presided over by Cardinal Garrone, the Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education is analogous. The Osservatore Romano reported it without criticism.18 The dominant view was “no proposition can be held to be absolutely true. “ There are, it was alleged, no rational prolegomena to theology “because the word of God justifies itself and interprets itself.” The contradiction of the Church’s theology here is less fundamental than the contradiction of its philosophy Firstly, since man is a rational creature, his faith cannot be something devoid of reasonableness. Secondly, the word of God would only justify itself, as it is here alleged to do, if it carried with it convincing evidence, since only evidence, immediate or mediate, can justify an assertion. But in fact such evidence is lacking where the message of faith is concerned and it is accepted precisely through faith, and not on the basis of convincing evidence. Thirdly, to say that the word of God interprets itself is a mere concatenation of words, not a meaningful statement. To interpret means literally to place oneself in the middle between a word and its hearer, between the intelligible and the person exercising intellection. The interpreter is a third who mediates between two other things, and so the word of God cannot be said to stand between itself and something else. The Ariccia theologians go on from the relation between philosophy and theology, straying into the field of the relation between subject and object and state frankly that “to speak in the categories of the man of our time, the theologian must take account of the anthropological shift, which consists in an inversion of the relationship between subject and object and in the impossibility of apprehending the object in itself.” That is an explicit formulation of Pyrrhonism and the destruction of Catholic doctrine. Faith presupposes reason. It involves submission by the reason but a submission willed by reason itself. The theological congress’s theories are regressive and take philosophy back to pre-Socratic positions. That they were accepted by a congress of Catholic theologians presided over by a cardinal means either that an abuse of language has occurred or that Catholic theology no longer exists. Pyrrhonism drops its last veil in the conclusion that: “For there to be a valid and effective meeting with contemporary man, one must know the transcendental condition, that is the general structure, of the man of today. “ If words mean anything, this is to say that “transcendental” means the same thing as “empirical.” This Pyrrhonist vein has not been exhausted in the more recent post-conciliar period, and continues to crop up in official and semi-official statements. The colloquium held at Trieste in January 1982 at the Centre for Theology and Culture, the proceedings of which were published with an introduction by the local bishop, ended by adopting this thesis: “An absolute reason of an idealist or Marxist sort [or any other sort] that unfolds itself in the concrete events of human history does not exist; there is rather an historically given reason, the forms of which change with the changing of cultural contexts. There can be no question of readopting a totalizing metaphysical, philosophical and theological view.”19 This is to invalidate reason, repudiate Providence, deny metaphysics and set aside God. Yves Manchesson of the Institut Catholique in Paris puts the Churchs role in the world in these terms, in a description of the state of the Church in France after the liberation: L’Eglise essaie de déchijfrer les signes des temps, pense ne pas avoir reponse à tout, cherche moins a préciser une vérité en soi qu’une vérité pour tous les hommes.20 These expressions of the respected author seem to us a mere compounding of words. First of all, the Church has never claimed to be the depository of all truths, since there is a whole world of knowledge that God has left to man’s investigation and debate: et mundum tradidit disputationi eorum, ut non inveniat homo opus quod operatus est Deus ab initio usque ad finem.21 This sphere comprises what might be called extra-moral matters that do not involve human axiology and teleology, that is matters that do not concern mans ultimate destiny. But the Church is, on the other hand, the depository of all truth without which man cannot fulfill his destiny and the destiny of the world. Secondly, there is a prodigious carelessness about the meaning of words in talking about a truth that is not true in itself, but is nonetheless a truth for all men, since the latter is surely an instance of the former, that is, a truth that stands and lasts independent of its being apprehended by finite minds. It is not the consent of man that gives truth its value, as some dare to assert today; it is the truth that bestows value on human opinions. A truth can exist in relation to man only if it is in itself independent of man: per prius it exists in itself and per posterius it is true for man. 18.
O.R., 16 January 1971. 151. Dialogue and discussionism in the post-conciliar Church. Dialogue in Ecclesiam Suam. The word dialogue represents the biggest change in the mentality of the Church after the council, only comparable in its importance with the change wrought by the word liberty in the last century. The word was completely unknown and unused in the Church’s teaching before the council. It does not occur once in any previous council, or in papal encyclicals, or in sermons or in pastoral practice. In the Vatican II documents it occurs 28 times, twelve of them in the decree on ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio. Nonetheless, through its lightning spread and an enormous broadening in meaning, this word, which is very new in the Catholic Church, became the master-word determining post-conciliar thinking, and a catch-all category in the newfangled mentality.1 People not only talk about ecumenical dialogue, dialogue between the Church and the world, ecclesial dialogue, but by an enormous catachresis, a dialogical structure is attributed to theology, pedagogy, catechesis, the Trinity, the history of salvation, schools, families, the priesthood, the sacraments, redemption, and to everything else that had existed in the Church for centuries without the concept being in anybody’s mind or the word occurring in the language. The movement from a thetic manner of talking, which was appropriate to religion, to a hypothetic and problematic style, is apparent even in the titles of books, which used to teach, but now enquire. Books that were called Institutiones or “manuals” or “treatises” on philosophy, theology or any other science have been replaced by “Problems in philosophy,” “Problems in theology,” and manuals are abhorred and despised precisely because of their positive and apodictic nature. It has happened in all areas: no more nurses’ manuals, but problems in nursing; not drivers’ manuals but drivers’ problems and so on, with everything moving from the certain to the uncertain, the positive to the problematic. It is a decline from an intentional appropriation of real objects by means of knowledge (signified by the syllable no in nosco, I know) to a simple throwing of the object before the mind (prohallo in Greek, from which we get problem). In August 1964, devoting a third of his first encyclical Ecclesiam Suam to dialogue, Paul VI equated the Church’s duty to evangelize the world with a duty to dialogue with the world. But one cannot help noticing that the equation is supported neither by Scripture nor the dictionary. The word dialogue never occurs in Scripture and its Latin equivalent colloquium is only used in the sense of a meeting between chief persons and of a conversation, never in the modern sense of a group meeting. Colloquium on three occasions in the New Testament means a dispute. Evangelization is a proclamation not a dispute or a conversation. The evangelization the Apostles are commanded to undertake in the Gospel is immediately identified with teaching. The very word angelos carries the idea of something that is given to be announced, not something thrown into dispute. It is true that Peter and Paul dispute in the synagogues, but it is not a question of dialoguing in the modern sense of a dialogue in search of something, setting out from a position of ostensible ignorance, but rather a dialogue in refutation of errors. The possibility of dialogue disappears, in their case, the moment the disputant is no longer open to persuasion, whether through his obstinacy or his incapacity. This can be seen, for example, in St. Paul’s refusal of dialogue on one occasion.2 Just as Christ spoke with authority: Erat docens eos sicut potestatem hahens,3 the Apostles preached the Gospel in an authoritative manner, not looking to validate it by dialogue. In the same place Christ’s positive way of teaching is contrasted with the dialogues of the scribes and pharisees. The heart of the matter is that the Church’s message is not a human product, always open to argument, but a revealed message designed to be accepted rather than argued about. After having equated evangelization with dialogue, Ecclesiam Suam denies that evangelization, or preaching the truth, means condemning error, and it identifies condemnations with coercion. The theme of the council’s opening speech thus returns.4 “Our mission,” the encyclical says, “is to announce truths that are undeniable and necessary to salvation; it will not come armed with external coercion, but with the legitimate means of human education.” This is a legitimate and traditional manner of approach, as was proved by the fact that immediately after the encyclical’s publication, Wisser’t Hooft, the Secretary of the World Council of Churches, hastened to state that the Pope’s ideal of dialogue as a communication of truth without a reciprocal reply, was not in accordance with ecumenical ideas.5 1In the Osservatore Romano of 15 March 1971, Cardinal Roy said dialogue was a new experience for the Church and for the world. On 15-16 November 1966, on the other hand, the Osservatore said that the Church had always practiced dialogue (mixing it up with controversy and refutation of other arguments) and that if there had been times when it did not practice it, “they were more or less depressed periods.” 2 Acts, 19:8-9. The new fangled dialogue is based on “the perpetual problematicity of the Christian subject,” as the Osservatore Romano puts it,6 that is, on the impossibility of ever getting to anything that is not itself problematic. In short it denies the old principle, recognized in logic, metaphysics and morality, that anagke stenai.7 Dialogue first runs into trouble when it is made to coincide with the Church’s universal task of evangelization and heralded as a means of spreading truth. It is impossible for everyone to dialogue. The possibility of holding a dialogue depends on the knowledge one has of a subject, and not, as is alleged, on the fact of one’s liberty or the dignity of one’s soul. The right to argue depends on knowledge, not on man’s general ordering towards the truth. Socrates said that on matters of gymnastics, one should consult an expert in gymnastics, on horses an expert on things equine, on wounds and diseases an expert in medicine and on the running of society an expert in politics. Expertise is a result of effort and study, of reflecting on things methodically and steadily rather than nastily and extempore. Contemporary dialogue presupposes, however, that any man is capable of dialoguing with anyone else on any subject, simply in virtue of being a rational creature. The demand is therefore made that the life of the temporal community and the Church should be arranged so that everyone can participate; not as the Catholic system envisages, by each person contributing his knowledge and playing his own proper part, but by everybody giving his opinion and deciding on everything. The paradox is that this right to argue is being extended to everyone at the very moment when the knowledge that gives an authentic title to join the argument is getting scarcer and feebler even among the Church’s teachers. The next blunder relates to the onus of proof. It is assumed that dialogue can and should satisfy all the objections of an opponent. Now for one man to offer himself to another with the aim of giving him complete intellectual satisfaction on any point of religion is a sign of a moral failing. It is rash for somebody who has asserted a truth to proceed to expose himself to a general, extempore and unlimited discussion. Every subject has many facets; he is familiar with only some, or even one of them. Yet he exposes himself as if he were ready for every objection, impossible to catch off guard, and as if he had anticipated every possible thought that could arise on the matter. Dialogue labors under yet another difficulty from the side of the inquirer, because it rests on a gratuitous presupposition that St. Augustine perceptively detected in his day. An intellect can be capable of formulating an objection without being capable of understanding the argument that meets the objection. This fact, that an individual’s intellectual strength may be greater in raising objections than in understanding replies, is a common cause of error. Ecce unde plerumque convalescit error, cum homines idonei sunt his rebus interrogandis quihus intelligendis non sunt idonei.8 This disproportion between an intellect’s asking a question and understanding a reply is a result of the general difference between potency and act. Refusal to recognize this difference leads to an illogical conclusion in politics: everyone has by nature a capacity to be able to rule, therefore everyone can rule. It also leads to the illogicality implicit in dialogue: everyone has by nature a capacity to know the truth, therefore everyone actually knows the truth. In the first book of his Theodicy, Antonio Rosmini also teaches that an individual should not trust his own intellectual powers to solve the questions that arise regarding the workings of divine Providence: no individual can be certain that his own intellectual strength is up to meeting all the objections that might face it. This uncertainty as to a person’s intellectual capacities is what Descartes ignored in his method, when he imagined that the power of reason was equally strong and equally exercisable in each individual. 6 O.K., 15 January 1971.
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