March 2008 Print

SUMMARY: The history of Modernism up to the Second Vatican Council. Reconstructs a family tree of Vatican II, uncovering the chain of causes that resulted in its novelties. An Everyman's survey of the history of philosophical ideas from Aristotle to Luther. It shows that modernism reached the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Divided into five periods: Christian Truth, Protestant critical modernism in Germany, modernism in France, neo-modernism in Europe, and triumphant modernism in Rome itself.

"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."

These words written by the theologian Josef Ratzinger in his 1969 book Einfuhrung in das Christentum (Introduction to Christianity), and never retracted, expressed some 40 years ago what the Catholic Church has been living since Vatican II. We live the dream of Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard's dream, as articulated in his works, presents for the "sleeping" Church a vision in which mankind will achieve a complete fulfillment of itself by an integration of individual human egos in a final super-ego. Concretely this "integration" will be achieved when there is a general convergence of all religions into a final, syncretist religion which will represent the final convergence of all religions into a universal Christ satisfying to all parties; such is the only possible conversion of the world and the only conceivable religion of the future.

Often when individuals are in a "dream-state," they know that they are merely dreaming. The judgment that one is in a dream-state necessitates a choice: do you continue to dream or do you try to jar yourself into consciousness of the real. The clear point of Fr. Dominic Bourmaud's book One Hundred Years of Modernism is to awaken Catholics from a dream that many recognize to be a nightmare. The first step to getting out of a dream is to recognize that one is dreaming. After this comes the choice.

The dream metaphor to explain the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church is apt in light of the fact that it was René Descartes' example of our frequent inability to distinguish a dream from reality that led him to put all previously gained knowledge under the "doubt." The only thing we can be certain of–at least during the first stage of philosophical awareness–is that what I know are my own ideas. The question which was to cause the wreck of philosophy in modern times was whether or not those ideas that I was sure that I had, conformed to anything in the external world. Ideas became that which we know, rather than that by which we know things. If what we know are mere subjective ideas–what is to become of that grand vision of how things in heaven and earth actually are that we call the Catholic Faith? Can an "idea" be born in a cave at Bethlehem? Die on a cross? If man is relegated to subjective consciousness alone, how can anything be revealed to him?

Birth of Classical Realism

Fr. Bourmaud begins by tracing the development of what has come to be called the philosophia perennis, the perennial wisdom of the ages, which came to be fully articulated in the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with the Natural Philosophers who, St. Thomas states, "could not rise beyond their imaginations," philosophy would leap forward with the identification, by Plato, of essence as that which constituted a thing's nature and was the source of a being's knowability. It was the place of Aristotle to philosophically articulate the obvious: essence is not a self-existent reality, as Plato would have it, but rather, an aspect of things–making them be what they are, making them knowable and, hence, subject to human awareness. Here we touch something which is self-evident, but, strangely enough, recently relegated to oblivion. Aristotle realized that when the human mind knew, it was uniting itself to an essence that existed, in a certain way, in the real concrete thing that was encountered in the world of existing things. It was this essence, entertained by the human mind as an intelligible form, which was the bridge between the mind and the concrete world of nature. Since the intellectually entertained form is the same as the essence embodied and individuated in the real thing existing independent of the mind, we can state that the mind knows things as they are.

It is not only that the concrete thing outside of the mind was the goal or intentional object of knowledge, an encounter with the concrete thing was necessary to actualize the human potential to know. It was in fact that independence and distinctly objective existence of things that made human knowledge possible. God made man to dwell, knowingly, within a cosmic kingdom of Divine Order and Love. There was one aspect of things which particularly attracted the attention of St. Thomas, the existence of things. As Fr. Bourmaud states in his chapter, "St. Thomas and Dogmatic Theology":

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."¹

It was with this philosophical awareness of the act of existence and with it the accompanying knowledge of God as Existence-Itself, that St. Thomas would create a grand synthesis of human and revealed knowledge, philosophy and theology, in his Summa Theologica.

The German Assault on Faith and Reason

If Descartes began his philosophical withdrawal from the external world through his own doubt concerning the certainty of his own knowledge, Martin Luther began his withdrawal from objective and "external" religious authority by a very personal reaction to a scrupulous conscience. Since he never "tasted" the perfect purity of grace, he reacted by denying the efficacy of good works. This rejection of the meritorious nature of human actions and his consequent explanation that all human acts are by their very nature sinful, did much to undermine any confidence he might have once had in the ability of the human mind to encounter an objective "external" truth. This withdrawal of Luther into himself was the beginning of the personal withdrawal from the divinely-staged drama of existence that characterizes the entire "modern" period. The interior self created, in Luther's case, a new theology and Christianity. For such a mind, the stark objectivity of the Catholic scholastic philosophers and theologians could only be seen as a strange venture into the "coldness" of objectivity. Here we have the birth of anti-intellectuality. It will be this anti-intellectuality–a rejection of the mind's true capacity to know the real–that will characterize every stage of the Modernist movement.

Moreover, Luther initiated another Modernist attitude that will, also, mark every Modernist mind: the rejection of Scholastic philosophy and theology. According to Luther:

It is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots....Logic is nowhere necessary in theology because Christ does not need human inventions.²

It took Kant to present a systematic denial of the possibility of knowledge of things-in-themselves. For Kant, things were not things unless they were "thought" by the mind. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that after his philosophy is accepted–and man recognizes that things conform to his mind rather than the mind conforming to things–mankind will no longer be led around by the apron strings of nature." If nature and reality are only nature and reality in so far as they are thought by man, then it is a small step to Hegel's divinization of human thought. Man's thought becomes the "absolute."

What is truly amazing about the beginnings of Modernism, as presented in One Hundred Years of Modernism, is the egotism of the leaders of the movement. From Luther insisting that "the angels themselves cannot judge my doctrine," to Kant–s belief that he had permanently liberated man from external nature, to Hegel's assumption that Absolute Spirit had achieved its fulfillment in his own thought, we perceive the arrogance of the Modernist personality.

From Oxymoron to Movement

If the "Catholic" Charismatic Movement had its source in an outbreak of "speaking in tongues" at a Protestant fundamentalist church in Topeka, Kansas, so too the clergymen who generated "Catholic" Modernism first took their inspiration from sources equally alien to the Catholic mind and sensibility. For their view of revelation, Scripture, and dogma they looked to the 19th-century German Liberal Protestant exegetes and theologians Strauss, Schleiermacher, and Bultmann. For their understanding of conscious "reality" they looked to the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson.

Of the primary "Catholic" Modernists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the life and thinking of Fr. Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) is the most characteristic. His trek from rural French farm boy to secular excommunicated professor at the College of France, from simple piety and faith to a pantheistic worshipper of humanity, tells us much about the natural intellectual trajectory of Modernistic notions. St. Pius X, in Lamentabili, listed 65 errors of the primary Modernist thinkers, 50 of them were taken from the writings of Loisy. As is normally the case with those who end up ejecting Church authority and infallible dogma, Fr. Alfred Loisy began his departure from orthodoxy with good motives in mind. He was under obedience to his superior at the Catholic Institute of Paris, Louis Duchesne, when he was instructed to study the works of the agnostic French sceptic Renan in order to better refute his errors. This study, along with his increasing familiarity with the French Liberalism (i.e., embrace the Revolution) and his conversion to the radical man-centered position of Kant, caused the young priest and scholar, by 1886, to view the Catholic Faith as an obstacle to the intellectual development of humanity. Loisy began to read Sacred Scripture according to the requirements of skeptical German exegetical technique and subjectivist philosophical presuppositions. What he ended up with was an understanding of the Sacred Scriptures as latent with mythological additions to the basic story of the "empirical" life of Christ. It was the evolving consciousness of, shall we say, the "People of God," which produced the Jesus Christ of the Gospel account and of Catholic dogma that we now have it.

Having "debunked" the account of Our Lord as given to the Church by Scripture and dogmatic Tradition, Loisy, after the condemnation by St. Pius X in Pascendi and Lamentabili in 1907 and his own excommunication in 1908, the Jesuit George Tyrell, in a worship of Humanity–an abstraction that is truly "inhuman" for concrete man, along with being idolatrous. To quote Auguste Comte, whose religion of Humanity Loisy sought to revive at the College de France after the excommunication, "The great notion of Humanity...will eventually and irrevocably eliminate that of God."³ Note, if we start viewing God and mankind as mere "notions," Comte is probably right! To understand how low the Modernist mind can fall, including the minds of those souls that have been dedicated and consecrated to His service, we only need to read the disparaging remarks of Fr. George Tyrell, S.J., concerning the "modern irrelevance" of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Revelation:

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?⁴

The Church as Super-Ego

Any Catholic who believes that Modernism was some arcane problem dealt with a long time ago by St. Pius X and having little relevance in today's "conservative" post-John Paul II Church, needs to read Part V of Fr. Bourmaud's book, which includes such chapters as, "Vatican II: The Ecumenical Revolution"; "Paul VI: The Gravedigger of Tradition"; "The Non-Historical Gospel According to Ratzinger" (written prior to Josef Ratzinger's accession to the papacy); and, finally, "Another Paul: John Paul II." After reading these chapters, every Catholic trying to be faithful to what every authentic Catholic has always been faithful to will realize that the question for our own juncture in the Modernist crisis is not whether or not things are beginning to look similar to what the Church has always done, but rather, whether the doctrine being taught is similar to what has been taught semper et ubique (always and everywhere).

When reading this book, we must not neglect the somewhat difficult chapter on Karl Rahner. Here we see Modernism not only attempting to transform the meaning of the Church and the Redemption, but much more, we find an "anthropological inversion" in which God requires man in order to attain His Trinitarian existence. Can there be any difference starker, from a religion that speaks of man needing God, even for his basic act of existence, to a religion of God needing man in order that He be Son and Holy Ghost. As Bucer promised, "Take away St. Thomas and I will dismantle the Church!" Let us all use our Catholic egos to fight against absorption into the super-ego of global Modernism.

 

Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and another in Philosophy from Christendom College. He also received his master's degree and doctorate in Philosophy from Fordham University. He and his wife Kathleen are the parents of six children. He teaches at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, and for the Society of Saint Pius X at Immaculate Conception Academy, Post Falls, Idaho.

 

¹ Fr. Dominic Bourmaud, One Hundred Years of Modernism: A Genealogy of the Principles of the Second Vatican Council, translated by Brian Sudlow and Ann Marie Temple (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2006), p. 37.

² Ibid., p. 54. Citation comes from Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp. 30-34.

³ Ibid., p. 125, Note 13.

⁴ See, George Tyrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), p. 270. Cited in Bourmaud, p. 138.