THE INTELLECT IN DANGER OF DEATH
A certain type of man–different from all the other types of men which had ever gone before–has suddenly been placed on a pedestal as a model to the world: the intellectual. Not the man who makes use of his intelligence to understand the outside world and to submit to what it is by essence, but the man who pieces together a new world in conformity with his dream worlds and with the appearance he thinks it ought to have.
What appears to be emerging is an earthly paradise, without precedent in the history of man, with a new humanity as its unmoving center of gravity, according to the wish uttered by the thinkers who inaugurated this modern age in which we live, the handiwork of the human mind alone, in some way divinized. Man is no longer an intelligent being living with a world which does not depend on him and with the divine Principle of this world, but a sovereign being who continually transforms the world in order ultimately to submit it to the domination of his mind.
The present crisis whose effects we are now enduring was only the beginning. Since then it has taken on speed at a rate unparalleled in the rise and fall of all preceding civilizations and which, as we propose, is the first phase of the fall of "man" (e.g., a rational animal living in society, as the ancients defined him) and his replacement by inventions all ultimately doomed to failure, resulting in the end of humanity as such, if no other reaction intervenes. Man today, reduced to transforming the world according to his most material desires under the mask of "humanism," finds himself face to face with a catastrophe daily growing in proportions. His transforming intelligence, fabricating a new world, dominates nearly exclusively.
Yet this crisis which will kill us if no new life is breathed into our morals, especially our intellectual morals, is scarcely mentioned among the scholars who set it in motion and who have pieced together a more and more artificial world all around us, and even within us. On the contrary, when they bow to acknowledge its existence, it is only to urge the patient to re-start the same failed attempts at the same dream-world level. I've read about a group of scholars who have proposed as a cure to the modern contagion spreading all over the planet some kind of new, ultra-specialized machines operated only by an elite of experienced technicians. These machines are already on site. The disease afflicting us touches every aspect of human life and our only hope, according to most of the intellectuals, is to reinforce all of those mechanisms which caused it in the first place. Sooner or later, the truly living will be more and more eclipsed by the machine, the concrete by the abstract, and reality by dream-worlds.
Who even speaks of the real anymore? We want to make our modern pseudo-society function without rites or ceremonies (especially without religious ceremonies), without appealing to patriotic faith, to the nation, but counting on industry and commerce alone (which, for that very reason, we can expect to see an increase in already large numbers of unemployment), which will be less and less enfleshed in mom-and-pop businesses to settle definitively into a few rare gigantic enterprises or in the universal socialist State. Rational language will be reduced to a specialized technical vocabulary accessible only to the privileged few. Everyday language will become pure jargon– "things, stuff, junk, whatever"–because it will no longer be a bearer of reality. Production and consumption will be the sole law of human life according to the advertising communicated by the media. Being a citizen will mean being an unskilled worker, an engineer, a creator of strictly material goods and a buyer of the same, in a never-ending circle.
Everywhere, the self-renewing utopia will replace social reality properly so-called, to the benefit of the new-style "intellectuals" alone, thus provoking an even graver crisis in which it will become impossible to distinguish the prefabricated fiction from the reality that still remains. The unified Europe that blind politicians offer us in place of our homelands, a vast continent on which nobody will really know anybody else, is the utopia within a utopia.
The majority of men today are severed from the social reality thanks to the industrial and commercial engineers; the bankers, whose docile faithful they too often become; the nations, reduced to simple money-managers; all the thurifers of the "new world" emerging in spite of the crises afflicting it. Those governing us today are no longer open to the multi-faceted reality all around them and to its supreme Cause. They are for the most part the vassals of our pseudo-democracy (in word only), that is to say of the union leaders (not the unions themselves) and of the apparent and especially the effective leaders of the political parties (not the parties themselves and even less so the voters of those parties). Since they are no longer incarnated in true social realities (family, region, homeland); since they no longer communicate with those realities which made the world go round not so long ago; since they no longer have any relation except with anonymous individuals on the same road to disincarnation, they no longer dispense anything but sloganeering or else the effective or disguised violence concealed by new, supposedly salvific laws, in order to satisfy their will to domination. The only ones ruling today are those who know how to speak well and the ones who know how to manipulate the masses. This is the return of romanticism under the mask of science or, more exactly, of the new conception of the world fabricated from the sole viewpoint of technical skill and so-called poetic activity, those two builders of the new humanity....
We live amidst man-centered worlds which wrap themselves up in that character of divinity which humankind has always reserved to the realities that transcend it and rule over it. Today men turn less than ever towards the great, authentically social successes of the past or the God who drew them from human nature. They turn towards a world which they built for themselves, unhinged from reality and deprived of all that is above them, and exchanged for an integral man-centeredness where they are the center of their dream-worlds. "Romantic rationalism" [that is, "dream-world reasoning"–Ed.] is no joke. It is hostile to all metaphysics and morality. It uses instrumental reason as its sole foundation, building (it thinks) a perfectly calculated new world corresponding to this primacy of the poetic imagination: strictly human "making" and "building" to replace the reality which poses obvious obstacles. We have greater and greater confidence–in spite of the crisis and because of it–in this world which we are piecing together and of which we hope to be the masters, even as it subjects us to the most obvious slavery....The proof is in our unshaken belief in Democracy with a capital "D" upon which the modern liberals and socialist-communists grow more drunk every day. "Democracy" has no real existence outside of human speech. Despite this, most people today assume it to be the ultimate, transcendent political system, and even, for some, "the voice of God." A number of Pope Pius XII’s encyclicals and allocutions show that democracy is a legitimate regime but only workable within a limited, specific territory. Yet, he could have spared himself the effort; what more and more men are dreaming of today is universal democracy. We have only to read the newspapers to be convinced of it. How could it be otherwise? When regimes founded on family, region, handicraft, country, and homeland disappear, nothing remains but individuals separated from one another, each one going to vote in his separate little polling booth along with their disincarnate conceptions of the pseudo-reality they would like to see emerge. How can you unite such disincarnate individuals, who have broken with the genuine social realities inscribed in their human nature, except through false promises of a perfect future, through unreal dreams and unreal words? This explains all the talk about "democracy" which riddles our contemporary literature–or what passes for literature. It claims that the crisis comes from our not being "democratic" enough and that "universal democracy" will save us from the swamp that is swallowing us up. The least little nation emerging today has to be "democratic" under pain of incurring the most violent criticism. What else do we read every day? What else do we constantly hear from the mass media, ...[which at the same time seems] to require of us no other effort than that of "struggling" to satisfy our own personal needs even should society perish–or what remains of it?
The enormous Social Security debt crushing the majority of countries around the globe comes from the same dream-world sickness. We construct an outrageous bureaucratic structure, a kind of gigantic bureaucratic abstraction destined to provide definitively for the individuals incapable of working any longer for whatsoever reason, and as the crisis increases their number the machine proves unequal to the task. All of this in favor of a dream-world instead of leaving the workers themselves to manage what kind of insurance they choose within associations under their own control. At the same time, however, the individual is becoming incapable of the simple management still remaining to his control and irresponsible in whatever ties him effectively to anyone else. Social Security is gnawing away at the modern socialistic State to the point of emptying it of all substance.
The fact of "deforming information" remains undeniably pertinent to anyone in the least degree observant. We will only speak very briefly here of contemporary religious art or of contemporary art, period. If any aspect of today's dis-society can be held up as proof of my entire analysis, it is art. Art has become hard to understand, incommunicable, and incomprehensible, because it is founded on its sole individual author separated from other men and from the universe. But art is not to be founded on its author as an individual; it is founded on what we have to call the "being with" of the artist who lives with all the other beings around him. The creativity of such an artist allows communication with others whom his work will attract as they discover their own "being with" rather than shutting themselves up in their individuality and closing upon themselves, as the modern world invites them to do. Most modern art "informs" others in perpetually attempting to deform them. The individuality of the artist tries in vain to reach out to others, which by definition it is incapable of doing. It can only horrify, shock, surprise, and, ultimately, close him within himself and his own silent misunderstanding. It is no exaggeration to say that, for the first time in history, even in periods of decadence, art is on the path to extinction. As was to be expected, the majority of art and literature critics have not diagnosed this mortal illness and have even presented it as an undeniable renewal of the intellectual health of modern man. A clear proof of this fact is the near total disappearance of a poetry worthy of the name and capable of uniting the poet and his reader with the poetic universe. Poetry in its contemporary deforming form has had its day.
The same is true of the formative mission which the modern State has claimed for itself. It has become deformative. The US National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams known as the "nation's report card" tested 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005. Only 35% of high school seniors read at a "proficient" level; only 16% of black students and 20% of Hispanic students were proficient. Only 29% of whites, 10% of Hispanics and 6% of blacks were proficient in math. Factor in dropouts and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black children starting in first grade, 1 in 8 will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and 1 in 33 able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, 1 in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only 1 in 20 able to do the high-school math. [The education establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud.–Ed.] Modern pedagogy is not in the least concerned. It forges ahead toward the establishment of an intellectual disorder of the worst kind by inventing new writing and counting machines to replace and perfect the human brain. I can see the effects in some of my grandchildren who are subjected to these methods and whose parents are obliged day after day to repair the spelling and mathematical damages. Pedagogical dictatorship has advanced by leaps and bounds in the deformation it manages to impose on helpless, obedient minds. The State has never seemed to worry. More and more, it concentrates purely on the economic crisis which is staggering it and which it often only accentuates. [Under President Bush, US Department of Education funding has risen 92% in six years, from $35.5 billion in 2001 to $68 billion in 2007. In the last 25 years, taxpayers have raised their annual contribution to education by over 65% in inflation-adjusted dollars.–Ed.]. In many schools, the idea of a homeland, for example, is ridiculed and presented as a form of xenophobia or racism....[L]anguage, which is but a means at the service of thought, is henceforth the be-all and end-all, a deformer of the reality to which it is meant to submit.
Who can fail to see that modern youth, cut off from their natural relation with the real world all around them and with its transcendent God, is closing itself off and abandoning itself to drugs that foster an isolation of the individual within his pure individuality, separated from everything else? This kind of pathological deforming "information" is directly tied to the first. Our poor youth are deprived of everything but their "Me" emptied of all relation to whatever is not itself and bored of their daydreams. They are imprisoned within themselves. Set loose in a realm of mere economics, of mere production and consumption of things–food, drink, clothing, medicine, leisure, etc.–they are continually urged to digest all of the deforming informations raining constantly down upon them. In a dis-society more and more focused on the isolated individual, deprived of all spiritual and physical bonds with its peers, it is understandable that physical pleasure, first of all, and then the cerebral pleasure of illusion should play a more and more significant role, considering that pleasure as such is indissociable from the "Me" and closes man in upon himself.
However, it is within the Catholic Church that the deforming information, cut off from its constitutive relation with supernatural revelation, is the most evident, along with its immediate consequence: a rupture with the nature of man and of that society in which he is born and develops. Nature and supernature go hand in hand: you cannot have one without the other. Where is the supernatural to be incarnated, if not within what is natural to man: his intelligence, his will, his very flesh? How is nature to attain its fullness of existence if not by the supernatural, which is grafted onto it as onto a solid foundation, in realizing all of its potential? The notions of "nature" and "supernature" have vanished, with rare exception, from the vocabulary of today's churchmen at every level of the hierarchy. How is it possible to restore the nature of man denatured by the purely economic mindset imposed by the political leaders? How could the supernatural ever be solidly incarnated within it? Clerical verbalism continually tries to replace the divine transcendent realities; their long-winded, verbose informations inevitably twist their way into a deformation of something as essential as the theological virtues. In most cases, today's theologians no longer even speak of them, nor do the modern clergy, blindly obedient to their leaders.
Dom Gerard, a Benedictine monk, corroborates our analysis. "I am convinced," he wrote not long ago, "that the divine transcendence has been lost in the mist for 30 years and that those who no longer remember it have abdicated the dignity of sons, zealous for their Father's honor." The situation of the Church since Vatican II shows us that this modern heresy, which puts in parentheses the most essential theological truths, is sapping away all supernatural belief, to the Olympian unconcern of the higher clergy. The finality of this new, abstract Christianity, put out of touch with its essential and existential orientation on the God of Revelation, is man in general and the temporal goods with which he must henceforth be provided. It is no longer a question of man considered as a member of a family, of a region, of a homeland–these notions have practically disappeared from the ecclesiastical mind along with the duties they imply and the ties they bind. It is a question of the conceptual Man born of the French Revolution, of communism and of Freemasonry, whose themes have been so completely adopted as to form an effective alliance with their deforming informations–in many cases, with no real criticism from the Catholic hierarchy.
Against the dream-worlders, the modern Church no longer has any of the protections that duly obeyed laws constituted. Anarchy reigns, crowned–especially in France–by the dictatorship of a high clergy that has firmly opted for Democratic Man and whose members, like vulgar politicians, appeal to the individual abstracted from all of his eternal social conditions to grind him down and force him into the mold of pseudo-religious deforming information in order to master him. The excommunication declared by Msgr. Boucheix against the traditional monastery of St. Magdalene and the one thundered, with the help of the police, against the parish community of Port-Marly, whose priest was violently dragged away from the altar where he was celebrating Mass, prove to us that the French clergy is dominated by a communistic "fascism" that dares not say its name. These measures of force are approved by the Cardinal Primate of the Gauls, His Eminence Albert Cardinal Decourtray (1923-94). Deforming information is henceforth the official language of the French clergy.
It is tending to become that of the universal Catholic clergy as well, under the direction of the present pope [then Pope John Paul II–Ed.], whose entire philosophy, underlying his theology, is founded on the primacy of the individual camouflaged as a "person," contrary to the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions of the Church of all time. Pope John Paul II is undoubtedly a pious priest, but his piety is above all an individual sentiment which is seriously threatening to transform the teaching of the Gospel if it remains unfortified by philosophical and theological realism, as proven by the example of Vatican II, the massive introduction of the New Mass throughout the Catholic world, and the attenuation (if not the elimination) of the differences between Catholic and Protestant rituals. The Pope very silently supports the interdiction of the traditional Mass imposed by the bishops, especially the French bishops. With the same tacit approval, he supports the interdiction cast by the heterodox clergy upon the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the Catechism of Saint Pius X. He supports all that Jean Madiran criticizes in the modern clergy with "its complacency with socialism, its approval of the CCFD [The Catholic Committee Against Hunger and for Development], its mindless campaign for immigrant voting rights, and its public alliance with radical left-wing Freemasonry (November 1985)"–acts which have completely undermined its moral and religious authority, emptying and closing down numerous churches, seminaries, and monasteries.
Once again, deforming information, the negation of the supernatural, human–too human–pseudo-creationism, and unhealthy clericalism have triumphed without there having been any kind of official struggle on the part of the papacy to contain the disaster.
What we need is a new St. Pius X to reinvigorate the Catholic Church and settle it back on the solid foundation of Tradition. The proof is in the ecumenical gathering at Assisi (1986) set in motion by Pope John Paul II. Qualified representatives of the various Christian and pagan religions assembled to announce–as we have always known–that belief in God is a normal phenomenon in the life of humanity and that it is necessary to restore it. Such a "council" obviously empties the Catholic religion of all supernatural character revealed to her alone. The information spread by this "synod" is certainly a dissimulation of the historical fact that the Catholic Church is the only one to possess divine truth. Tragically, it informs and deforms at the same time, with all the authority which still remains to the modern popes since Pope Paul VI.
Let us repeat unceasingly: it is vital that we resist and that we cling to the integral human nature that we possess and to the Supernatural that has been revealed to us. Let us pray unceasingly.
Translated for the first time into English exclusively by Angelus Press from L'Intelligence en péril de mort (Dismas, 1987), pp. 9-22. In behalf of our readers, some editions were made for clarity and relevance by Mr. James Vogel and Fr. Kenneth Novak. NAEP statistics gleaned from "Dumbing- Down of America" by Patrick Buchanan (posted March 3, 2007) were used in substitution for the dated and less applicable French material.
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