Describing the Indefinable
by
Father Lawrence C. Smith
[Editor's Note: Father Lawrence C. Smith, our pastor at Saint Raphael's Chapel in Silver Cliff, Wisconsin, has given me permission to post several essays of his that have been written in the past five years. Father Smith, who is, yes, a much more prolific--and profound--writer than I am, offers a summary here of how to recognize the errors that plague us today in practically every aspect of our daily lives, both ecclesiastically and civilly. His comments are particularly relevant today, the thirty-third anniversary of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Roe v. Wade. I thank Father Smith for permitting me to post these articles on this site. Thomas A. Droleskey]
Liberalism is not a manifestation of human reason. It is an irrational disposition of the human will. Rather than engaging the rational faculties of the human mind in consonance with that which is outside, above, and other, liberalism is the assertion of the human will against the very idea that aught which is outside, above, or other exists, is relevant, or is of ultimate value. Far from cultivating reason, liberalism erodes the capacity of man to admit truth, to seek truth, and to respond to truth. Liberalism’s disproportionate emphasis on the will results in the destruction of rational discourse, the elimination of the power of the will to effect its supposed desires, and the reign of the passions over the human person.
There is no system of thought offered by liberalism. Nothing is proposed by liberalism pertaining to eternal truths. Men accepting liberalism are given no means by which to judge the rightness or wrongness of moral acts. A world governed by liberalism is reduced to reining in the most violent and physically perilous behaviors of its subjects without appeal to transcendent truths, but instead through mere force and threats of force.
This is because the disposition of the will which is liberalism is disordered. Since nothing of supreme truth exists, no objective arbiter of good and evil is available, and the human mind is the source and measure of all reality, there can be had no overarching rule that binds together the disparate human wills raging at cross purposes around each other. Without an ultimate principle by which to order all things, all things are left in disorder, including human society, individual behavior, and man’s very (in)ability to think. Liberalism does not bring about a philosophical discernment of fundamental order to being meant to be fleshed out in human intercourse; liberalism instead is the unleashing of the forces of anarchy and chaos bred from the refusal to admit of a First Cause before man’s existence and a Final Cause to grant man a true raison d’etre.
Authority beyond the individual human will is never acknowledged by liberalism. The past provides no sure guide for human experience. No present authority is recognized as binding on all wills. Deity of any kind is reduced to just another will among the legion wills at war in the universe. None needs submit to any authority undesired by his own will. The only will desired by the individual to be allowed success at attaining its desires is the individual’s own. Not the family, not the state, not a religious body is sufficient to liberalism’s absolute demand for total autonomy of the human will. That will is not led by reason, but by the passions, resulting in the utter inability of individuals to communicate to one another anything of common worth, social significance, or moral necessity.
A false assertion of libertas is at work in liberalism. It is an effort to be unbound to all other forces in the universe other than the force of one’s own will ruled by one’s own appetites, whether those appetites be physical, intellectual, or spiritual. This false freedom ironically results in the nearly absolute diminishment of all freedom, for the men who would assert their wills thus must of necessity eliminate the capacity of other men to assert their wills. Of course, many, though not all, of those other men will not idly stand by while their ability to assert their wills is destroyed, seeking at the same time to confound the efforts of their fellows in the task of individual supremacy over all other individuals.
It has been said that liberalism is a sin. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that liberalism is the condition for all sin. Sin is the negation of being, the denial of divine authority, the separation of one person from all persons. Liberalism provides a rationalization for this unreasonable approach to being. Sin is the seeking of that which is known to be evil while convincing oneself that it is somehow good. Liberalism is in utter denial of the actual existence of good and evil beyond what the individual appetite decrees. Objective truth does not mandate reality and the moral response of the human person thereto; rather, subjective willfulness usurps all prerogatives of judgement to itself at the expense of every other claim of such a right.
Nothing other than satan’s non serviam is operative in liberalism’s assumption of such premises for understanding and acting on reality. The liberal seeks a false freedom predicated on a liberty from the requirement to serve any will but his own. Not the freedom of the sons of God is the desire of the liberal, but the license given to the minions of the devil to reject God, their fellow men, and the dictates of the moral law given by God and governed by men who remain obedient to Him. In this life the liberal fails of his goal by virtue of the fact that it is impossible for him to wholly eradicate the other wills – good or bad – at work in the world. After this life is over, the liberal fails of his goal in being deprived of all freedom, subjected instead to the duress of the torments of hell under satan to which the liberal submitted himself in the world in part and will receive in their fullness for ever in perdition.
As the acceptance of the existence of objective, absolute, transcendent truth is to Catholicism, so is liberalism’s relationship to modernism. Liberalism offers the premises out of which the modernist attempts to demonstrate the reasonableness of his desires and their accomplishment. The liberal disposition of the will is the condition for the modernist after-the-fact effort to justify his willfulness. Liberalism is in itself irrational, predicated on the passions and appetites, on the disavowal of any will over the individual’s, and on the ability of the individual in separation from all others to succeed at effecting his desires so pursued. Modernism is what happens when the liberal tries to make this make sense to others, although it is unclear as to whether the average modernist is fooling anyone other than himself.
Father Smith.
2 January 2006: The Holy Name of Jesus
Holy Family House, Silver Cliff, Wisconsin
So what is modernism then?...
Modernism: Haeresis Saeculi
I. Introduction – Iniquity Indicted
Let us begin with some bald assertions. Modernism is evil. It is a denial of absolute, transcendent truth. It is a product of the deadliest sin, pride. Its practitioners seek to abrogate the dogmas of the Church, unravel the fabric of society, and establish a sovereignty of man over all things – including God. With modernism is confronted an unholy union between man willfully ignorant, darkening his own ability to know God and Jesus Christ whom He sent; and the ancient enemy of God and man, satan bent on the destruction of all things good.
Modernism bears fruit in the objectification of humanity and the exaltation of the material world. It involves a mindset wherein things are loved and man is used, instead of man being loved for the sake of God and things being used toward that end. Most heinous of the countless manifestations of this poisonous doctrine is abortion. Modern man will pay top dollar for an antique thing that has never been used, but demands the right to destroy the unborn infant on the grounds that he is useless. Old things never used carry the greatest value, while new human beings whose only use is to love and to be loved are held of no value. If for no other crime, the anti-reason that is modernity deserves annihilation for this egregious attack on God and His sublime image revealed in man.
Where modernism is making inroads in the thought and lives of mankind, one finds confusion, fear, and hatred. Doubt about eternal verities holds the public imagination. Craven anxiety in the face of manmade structures rules the lives of both the simple and those charged with governing. Senseless violence on the streets, in the home, and in human hearts explodes seemingly at random, at an ever-increasing rate, without means of understanding or abating its devastation.
Mankind is told that the moral law is not a black-and-white contrast between evil and good, but that shades of grey mark the inability of anyone to know definitively how an individual, much less a society, should act. Simultaneously, politicians, entertainers, educators, scientists, and salesmen insist that there are behaviors, mores, and attitudes that must be embraced by all. But this is asserted in a vacuum where no one thinks to explain how any set of values can be “better” in a world where no one (and presumably no one’s ideas or beliefs) is “better” than any one else. There is but one source whence such contradictory, nonsensical, inhuman ideas and actions come: satan and human sin. There is but one antidote to this evil: Jesus Christ, and Him crucified!
These bald assertions would be criticized by some as being alarmist, extreme, and unfounded. Others might allow for the possibility that such problems do exist, but that, at worst, they merely mix a little error with the truth and a simple remedy would be to extract the truth and cling to that. There are some who hold that what is labeled as “modernism” is not only not erroneous, but it is where truth is to be found today. All of these positions can be demonstrated to be misguided (and misguiding) by offering some more bald assertions:
Modernism is of God. It is truth as the Church has come to define truth. Within those things called “modernist” and “modern” can be discovered the path for future evolution of theology and dogma. Orthodoxy, far from being imperiled by modernism, is identical with the progress of modernism.
Sanctity, the goal of the Christian life, is best pursued through an enlightened jettisoning of baggage from the past. The harsh strictures of ancient discipline, the grating insistence on suffering endemic in medieval thought, and the divorce of the ecclesial realm from the gifts offered by and in secular society are obsolete. It is no longer useful for individual Christians to seek self-abasement, to deny themselves the pleasures of modern life, to cultivate disdain for what was quaintly called “the world”. Now the Church is encouraging its members to grow up, to act as mature witnesses of the wisdom found in every human heart, and to shed the shackles of an authoritarian claim to monopoly on truth.
Superstitious fears of hell and satan are harmful to the psychological and spiritual wellbeing of moral agents. A false dichotomy in the truth between good and evil, reducing all questions of the moral life to black-and-white antitheses, misses the richness available through opening oneself to the whole of the human experience. Patriarchal, eurocentric, and elitist definitions of culture need to be set aside in favor of a broad, open-minded, multicultural celebration of all that can be encountered on earth. What is good is to be embraced, with the understanding that each person’s good is going to be a happy uniqueness, not necessarily the same as that which is good for the next person.
The only enemy of this renewal of the Church and this wider sharing of the truth is any mindset that insists on exclusivity, be it of language, of culture, of authority, of ministry, or of ecclesiology. True orthodoxy demands a repentance from the errors of the past that allowed for colonialism, slavery, the abuse of women, the disenfranchisement of the laity, and the persecution of those whose lifestyles do not fit an arbitrary “norm”. Humankind has now reached a joyful day where we are able to know God and her truth by coming to know one another, God-as-creation, and the fundamental multiplicity by which the divine is known throughout the universe and within every truly human way of being. God can not be reduced to a set of stale, static formulas and dogmas; humankind, the divine paradigm, is not to be restricted in belief, in action, in the power and freedom to choose!
The power and freedom to choose what? Why, abortion, of course! Or euthanasia, or secularism, or erroneous religion, or divorce, or depraved sexuality. When your philosophy denies error in nothing, then nothing can be denied in human behavior. Modernism is the error which judges that nothing can be judged in error – except the principle that absolute truth, objective reality, and permanent moral laws exist and can be known by the human mind.
Pope St. Pius X used the occasion of the promulgation of Pascendi Dominici Gregis to delineate the un-thought which is modernism. Commonly seen as a condemnation of modernism, Pascendi serves the cause of orthodoxy more by defining modernism. St. Pius did not need to condemn modernism because its constituent parts have been condemned by the Magisterium on a number of occasions throughout Church history. Pascendi offers a clear definition of modernism so that it can be recognized, resisted, and refuted.
II. Modernism Means…Madness
What is modernism? In polemical terms, it is the queen of heresies, opposed to Holy Mother Church, the Queen of Truth. Modernism is the synthesis of all errors. It is a sum of parts whose filth can never be a purified whole.
In somewhat less intense language, modernism can be defined as a set of discrete yet interrelated principles that dilute human dependence on divine revelation and, ultimately, deny the need for salvation in Christ. These principles have grown over the centuries with indirect reference to each other, but it is only in the period from the so-called “enlightenment” onward that it is possible to demonstrate that they tend toward a system antithetical to orthodox Catholicism. Pope St. Pius’ definition of modernism can be summed in five broad categories of principles: A) Temporalism, B) Materialism, C) Subjectivism, D) Gnosticism, and E) Protestantism-Secular Humanism-Atheism.
A) Temporalism: the up-to-date (the soon dated) is more ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘relevant’ than the old. The only appeal is to the calendar – today is smarter than yesterday (except, of course, tomorrow will trump today). Transcendent truth is denied.
Implications of Temporalism:
1) Time, the transcendental, exalted to the point of deity, is an earthly reality, not a spiritual reality; it is experienced as history; but if time ends, the gods die, and all is not
2) God does not intervene in history; history and science are free from non-material interference; the absolute is not experienced within the relative
3) Jesus Christ is historical, therefore, not divine
4) The events described in the life of Christ which do not gel with science or the rest of history are mythological
5) His miracles, most of the words attributed to Him, and His resurrection can not be historically verified, therefore, they are mythological or later interpolations by His disciples
6) “If Christ is not risen, then faith is vain.” (see 1 Corinthians 15:13-17)
7) The temporalism of modernism denies Jesus Christ and faith in Him; it is the antithesis of eternal life; it is the payment of the wages of sin
Temporalism at work:
1) Demand that the Gospel be made relevant to the human, rather than the human seeking conformity with revelation
2) “McMansions” devouring cropland while inner cities rot
3) Cult of youth in the culture of death; disposable infants and geriatrics
4) “New and Improved!” which really means to be new is improvement; evolution
5) Free verse, “bleep-blop” music, “Bauhaus” architecture, non-representational visual “art”
6) Software upgrades, new model-years for cars, fashions in clothing; constantly rearranged and redecorated living rooms; change for the sake of change
7) Contemporary liturgy and “worship spaces”; renovations of old churches
B) Materialism: empirical science and philosophic rationalism are the measures of truth. Dogma is placed under the scrutiny of machines and skeptical methodology. Faith in God is excluded in favor of an unexamined faith in technology and the power of certain human minds to grasp reality. The realm of the spirit is denied.
(At first blush, this might seem the foundational principle on which modernism is based. But on further reflection, one must note that it is not merely science and rationalism that rules, but current science and rationalism. The notion of change [it is assumed always for the better] is supported by whatever science agrees with that presumption. Modernism is about nothing if not fixated on change – an ideal that flies in the face of faith in an immutable God and His unchanging Church.)
Implications of Materialism:
1) Reality is equivalent to the physical universe; only that which can be subjected to empirical testing need be believed
2) That which can not be subjected to empirical testing is of dubious reality; belief in it is unfounded at best, most probably an indication of inability to know reality
3) Empirical testing is the highest authority, from which there is no appeal; if science says so, it is true; if science denies it, it is false
4) The teaching and the teachers of Catholicism must be subjected to the most rigorous standards of testing; where there is disagreement with science, the faithful should not follow the Magisterium or Tradition
5) Whatever is the current norm as understood by society acting on its best science is in keeping with the good of the human person; moral stances that deny such practice are obsolete and even damaging
6) “What is seen is transitory; what is unseen is eternal!” (see 2 Corinthians 4:18)
7) The materialism of modernism denies practices that lead to sanctity, excludes the possibility of sacraments, and has no place for or means to Heaven
Materialism at work:
1) Endemic depression, anxiety, and fear of death – a culture bent on finding happiness in material things and failing
2) Obsession with death – a society that admits death as the ultimate end of all things shapes its culture, medicine, and psyche on both avoiding and aggrandizing death
3) Hedonism – raw acquisition of things is the highest good
4) Planned obsolescence – an economy based on the raw acquisition of things needs to have a constant demand generated for those things through their decay (the excuse for fashion and change for the sake of change)
5) Pragmatometry (see C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength) – a thing’s usefulness determines its desirability; what is most desirable is whatever supports pragmatometry
6) Abortion and euthanasia – the unborn, the sick, and the elderly are not useful, therefore, undesirable
7) “Social Justice” run amok – in the Church there is a sense that the body’s needs are the only needs; scant attention is paid to the intangible realities of sin, grace, repentance, sanctity, and salvation
C) Subjectivism: incommunicable experience and modes of thought are the means and goal of modernism. Those wielding authority do so in a hyper-personal manner, encouraging cults of personality, loyalty to individuals rather than to truth, and factionalism. Although transcendent truth is denied, subjective experience is treated and respected as an absolute phenomenon which no one and no objective critique can gainsay. The “religious experience” is the goal of faith, an experience that is not dependent on a community, is not defined by any except him who is experiencing, and changes as the person changes. Communion (of faith, by knowledge, through sacraments) is denied.
Implications of Subjectivism:
1) Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum! (I think, therefore, I am!) becomes the basis of all epistemology – to know means not what is known, but what I know
2) This knowledge precedes experience, or at best is predicated on nothing but the experience of self
3) Such knowledge is merely human, it is not received from outside of the human person, it is referent to nothing but the human person who knows it
4) Knowledge of God is simply the individual’s knowledge of God, wherein there is no means or need for general revelation, authority in the Magisterium, or ability to translate knowledge and experience in a coherent manner to anyone else
5) The Church is a voluntary grouping of people who agree on the broad boundaries of what constitutes the “religious experience”, but it is not the arbiter of what is an authentic experience, nor the mediator of that experience
6) “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him!” (see Matthew 11:25-30)
7) In the subjectivism of modernism, not only is the human person reduced to an uncommunicative subjectivity, Jesus Christ is incapable of revealing the nature of God to anyone else, and the Church has no Gospel to proclaim. In fact, God Himself is a multiplicity of experiences had by countless people wherein said experiences are mutually exclusive and contradictory; pride, the deadliest sin, is the cause and result of subjectivism
Subjectivism at work:
1) Mass attendance plummets, as does participation in the other Sacraments, most notably Confession and Matrimony; divorce and homosexuality become palatable
2) Evangelism languishes (calls for the “new evangelization” notwithstanding) because of a sense not only that it is not necessary – everyone has a right to their opinions – but that it is impossible – what’s true for you may not be true for me; ecumenism is divorced from seeking Truth
3) Multicultural studies curricula, diversity awareness seminars, feminist studies programs – the “other” is separate and unknowable, not to be united with but to exist alongside
4) Situational ethics, proportionalism, the fundamental option – morality is not fixed on attaining the truth and acting on it, but is ephemeral, based on circumstance, and on the individual(s) involved
5) Houses without front porches, the TV generation, conversation as the “lost” art – not only have the means to communicate been lessened, the inclination to do so diminishes and is reflected in architecture, recreation, and interpersonal relationships (the plunge in marriages among the young is part of this phenomenon)
6) Boredom, loneliness, and sociopathic behavior – individuals do not have the resources to spend time alone, they dislike company – their own or others’ – and they lose the ability to distinguish their desires from what is right; other human beings are not seen as equal subjects of good and evil, but as objects to be used (or avoided or destroyed) for personal pleasure/gain
7) National churches, multilingual liturgies, abandonment of Latin – not only is human experience impossible to communicate, but the tenets, practices, and goals of the faith are restricted by individual temperament, cultural background, and language; Latin is the only language that is not part of the multicultural patchwork
D) Gnosticism: the arbiters of what constitutes todayness are self-appointed and in-bred. Arcane knowledge, slippery rhetoric, and dismissive contempt mark their conversations with the uninitiated. The Magisterium is rarely welcome in their ranks – except for those already co-opted. Credentials take precedence over competence. Universal revelation is denied.
Implications of Gnosticism:
1) Explanations multiply while meaning is lost (Chesterton says a great deal on this subject)
2) In the name of allowing more participation by “the people”, an explosion of information makes it impossible for an ordinary person to desire participation, much less acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for true involvement
3) Contradictions pointed out are explained away as being inadequately articulated or insufficiently understood by the critics; criticism is impossible for the uninitiated and inconceivable to the true believer; terms are rarely, if ever, defined; traditional terms and formulas are co-opted, redefined, and twisted to carry new and contradictory meanings in order to advance the programme of the modernists while retaining the savor of orthodoxy
4) Desired knowledge is based on knowledge for its own sake, gained by the knower, unknowable by those who have yet to attain that height; the human quest for knowledge is emphasized and is divorced from the Person of God, knowledge is not revealed but won, and possessing the knowledge does not allow or enable the sharing of it
5) Science, theology, and philosophy become necessary in practice for salvation; they are not aids to faith, they are conditions – and measures – of faith
6) “And this is eternal Life: to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent!” (see John 17:3)
7) The gnosticism of modernism exalts the human person, excludes the personal nature of God, and as the subjectivism of modernism makes impossible the relationships between human persons, the gnosticism of modernism makes impossible a relationship with the divine Person; it is the darkening of the intellect born of eating the forbidden fruit – the fruit of Adam’s sin
Gnosticism at work:
1) The “missing link” in evolutionary theory is explained, relied on for “proofs” of the theory, inferred from mere mutation – and never produced; it is an article of faith in science
2) “Separation of church and state” is a constitutional principle not to be found in the Constitution of the United States; it is used to justify abortion, euthanasia, the elimination of public religious observances, and prohibition on certain types of speech
3) “Inclusive language” assumes, falsely, that the masculine in language is incapable of implying the feminine; that this is an injustice; and that it can be applied not only to texts of human origin, but to Holy Scripture as well; there is no linguistic, moral, or theological basis for these assumptions, yet the media, academia, and liturgical texts slavishly obey the “inclusive” principle
4) “Sola Scriptura” is a principle of biblical exegesis not to be found in the Bible; it begs the question of where the Bible came from, who set its canon, and the chronology of its genesis (i.e., the Church precedes the scriptures); further, it can not account for the multitudinous interpretations of the Bible given by the innumerable people who cling to this monistic hermeneutic
5) “Q” source – the missing link of biblical exegesis; no one has produced it, but many have created whole worlds of exegetical “dogma” based on it, much of it self-contradictory
6) The internet, values clarification, sex education in the primary grades – these present an assault of information deluging (and deluding) the mind, the assumption that morality is an each-man-for-himself proposition, and that parents and other “uneducated” people are not competent to teach or understand human nature and proper human behavior
7) “New Age”, “Spirituality not Religion”, Freemasonry – these are movements and catch phrases geared not only to the subjectivistic goal of personal enlightenment, but are usually implicitly, and frequently explicitly, bent on the destruction of the Holy Roman Catholic Church
E) Protestantism-Secular Humanism-Atheism: in a descending spiral, there is a consecutive denial of authentic magisterial authority, spiritual life beyond earth, and, ultimately, God. First the individual is absolute ruler, then society is crowned, and finally mankind is merely subject to the raw, unreined laws of nature. These three are linked and lead from the first, Protestantism, through secularism, and culminate in atheism. Modernism is finally nihilism. God looked on His creation and called it, “Very good!” Modernists, satan, look on creation and remark, “Nothing is good.” Despair leads to a denial of everything. The will to destroy all things is the final condition of the soul.
John Cardinal Newman said in Discourses to Mixed Congregations (cf. A Tolkien Celebration, Joseph Pearce, ed.):
Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? It is your only chance of peace and assurance in this turbulent, changing world. There is nothing between it and skepticism, when men exert their reason freely. Private creeds, fancy religions, may be showy and imposing to the many in their day; national religions may lie huge and lifeless, and cumber the ground for centuries, and distract the attention or confuse the judgement of the learned; but in the long run it will be found that either the Catholic Religion is verily and indeed the coming in of the unseen world into this, or that there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, nothing real in any one of our notions as to whence we come and whither we are going. Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Skeptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession…
(I would add two words to Cardinal Newman’s description of those who unlearn Catholicism: damned apostates.)
Implications of Protestantism et al:
1) Reality is denied, empiricism notwithstanding; the ultimate despair that results from these errors results in a hatred of being; that which is receives condemnation; empiricism teaches that all changes, nothing remains constant, everything is mutable – thus there is nothing that is what it seems, nothing that is transcendent and lasting; all evolves into what it is not, what is not; this is called “progress”
2) Transcendentals (other than time) become negotiable – the good, the beautiful, the true, the just become, first, the subjects of democratic consensus, then the matter of irresolvable arguments, and, last, the excuse for warfare
3) Death and non-being is defined as the ultimate reality; death is also the ultimate evil; seeking it and avoiding it provide the tension from which life is made, e.g., the use of contraception, “extreme” sports, euthanasia, cloning, “reality” television
4) Violence, disease and war are secondary evils because they lead to death; they are avoided at whatever cost, e.g., “political correctness” in speech, the proposed national I.D. card, the anti-sovereign activities of the EU and UN, Second Amendment rejection, AIDS activism without reference to morality
5) Since matter is all that matters, violence done to the soul is not violence at all – abortion is about the woman’s body, not the child with a soul; divorce is about the right to remarry, not the nuptial bond established by Christ with His Church; ecumenism is about the visible churches no longer excommunicating one another, not the order of the universe in which God ordains man toward His truth
6) “I AM WHO AM!” (see Exodus 3:13)
7) The Protestant, secularist, atheistic mindset is that of a world that is completely self-referential; nihilism results. The Cartesian “Sum!” is done in by the materialism and temporalism of modernism. “I am!” from man must be qualified: “I was not before, I am now, I will not be in the future.” Modernism’s subjective gnosticism denies an external experience of the divine, relying on the experience of the divine “I”. If he who says, “I am!” must someday admit, “I am not…” then the experience of God must end, there is no eternal life, there is no eternal life-giver. Breaking with absolute truth is to destroy the human relationship to eternity, to be immersed in time, to be as fleeting as the moment – permanently separated from God who simply IS. That which is timely must run out of time.
Protestantism et al at work:
1) Untrammeled individualism – fewer (and later) marriages, more divorces (and annulments), older men ordained, families living very far apart, neighborhoods without neighbors
2) Low birth rates in the Western world, high infant mortality in the Third World – the virtue of self-control is neglected, the spiritual aspect of marriage ignored, and the power and value of abstinence is vehemently denied
3) Rights separated from the good – selfish interests are placed above seeking the highest good, the highest good is denied to exist, laws restrict rather than promote human interaction. Abortion is the example of this at its worst.
4) Robotics, cloning, “labor-saving” devices – as machines become more man-like, men become more like machines. Eventually machines will be used in the manufacture of men
5) Global suburbia – everywhere looks like anywhere. Human beings bent on the destruction of humanity have not only depersonalized persons, but localities are losing their distinctions; iconoclasm and stark barrenness in church buildings
6) Loss of leisure time – time spent quietly alone is now a punishment (“time-outs” for children, solitary confinement for adults); there is a demand for frenetic activity to save people from the emptiness between their ears and within their chests, which no amount of filling the stomach or genitalia can satisfy (see Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, and C.S. Lewis’ “Men Without Chests” from The Abolition of Man)
7) Funeral services outside of the Mass – no point is seen in going to church in life, none is found in being there in death. No reference to beatitude is desired, only psychological “healing” is sought. Needless to say, there is nothing mentioned of prayers for the dead. Many parishes are experiencing a large reduction in Mass offerings for the deceased.
At root, modernism is an ontology based on accidents. Being is reduced to a complex of duration-matter-change. In classical philosophical terms duration is analogous to substance, matter to essence, and change to action. There is nothing that is not in time. There is no immaterial being. All is subject to change. Change affects knowledge, knowledge of the divine will, the Church and her teaching, moral law, and human being. Mutability is the arena of all existence. Nothing and no one is permanent.
Modernism is a pathology that begins with an attitude of skepticism and unbelief directed toward reality that, in the end, is aimed at the self. The self, the world, and God fail to survive this rabid faithlessness. Modernism is founded on the idea that the temporal provides the only context for the only reality, namely, material existence. Empiricism shows that matter is mutable; reason extrapolates that the mind applying empiric techniques also is mutable. Nothing, ultimately, is beyond change, beyond being changed into what it is not.
This does not, however, constitute a passive reception on the part of human being. The modernist thinker applies his understanding of the universe to the life he lives in the world. There is an impact on his politics, his economics, and his interpersonal relationships. Although the modernist assumes that communication is an awkward futility, modernism does attempt to spread itself. Not, albeit, through what the Catholic might recognize as evangelism, but by what is more aptly described as thuggery.
Modernism is fixated on the new. It sees the old as competition. Furthermore, the old not only competes, but it restricts what the modernist calls his freedom. The old, for the modernist, must be eliminated for the sake of ego, progress, and liberty. Each of these three is both a motive force for the modernist and a goal to be more fully achieved.
What is new can kill what is old with impunity. First, because it is in the way of the goods of ego, progress, and liberty. Second, because the new can exist without the old, whereas the old can not be without the new. Third, the only arguments against such unprincipled behavior are themselves old and, therefore, discounted a fortiori. (The concepts of tautology, non-sequiturs, and circular logic are based on old ideas, useless as weapons against the confirmed modernist.)
Problems arise when the newer new appears on the scene. It will see the older new as a competitor and will in its turn seek to eliminate that. The line of reasoning that makes this possible is finally self-defeating, but that point is ignored as the battle is waged. Only an appeal to that which the old new supplanted could offer hope of resolution, and both the old new and the newer new reject that.
In the midst of this, the older new finds itself at odds with both the old and the newer new. It will lash out at each and both. Modernism becomes a present hateful of its past and fearful of its future. The modernist hates what he was, the lost and never to be regained; he denies what he must become, condemning the reality of aging as an unmitigated failure. It is no little irony of modernism that the modern “hate crime” of “ageism” is defined, condemned, and experienced by the growing number of greying baby boomers who coined the phrase, “don’t trust anyone over thirty”.
Modernist America is in the throes of this struggle. A generation is in our midst which has aborted its young and now euthanizes its elderly and sick. A slightly younger generation warehouses its children in day care and mothballs its parents in nursing homes. Our youngest adults (and many children) use contraception as readily as their concupiscence moves them to fornicate, while their parents infest suburbia and their grandparents who can escape Iowa overrun Florida and Arizona.
No loyalty across generations operates in this morass of antagonisms. Loyalty is not to be given to employer or employee, to hometown, to parish, or to neighborhood. Other human beings are reduced to being less than enemies, to being mere strangers. Enemies represent the known and despised; strangers are beneath notice altogether. Parents do not know their children’s friends, interests, or activities; children do not know their parents’ expectations, their families’ histories, a sense of home; communities do not know stability, have no personality distinct from others, and compete not to draw citizens but to attract commerce.
Ask a modernist parent how he would feel if his child were to cohabit before marriage and that parent likely will say, “I don’t care.” The child does not hear, “I don’t care if you live with a person of the opposite sex, fornicate, and sever your relationship with God.” The child hears, “I don’t care about you.”
Ask a modernist child why he elects to do drugs and get drunk as a minor and he likely will say, “I don’t know.” His parents do not hear, “I don’t know right from wrong, I don’t know what my boundaries are, ‘cause you never told me – I don’t know if anyone cares if I live or die so long as I stay out of jail.” The modernist parents hear, “I don’t know how to answer that without getting in more trouble so I’m not going to say anything at all.”
Mom and Dad wait for the child to leave home. The child rushes off to college or to a job as soon as possible. Family, society, and the Church are perilously weakened.
Impotence describes the modernist life. The modernist family can not entertain itself, converse with one another, or even live together (divorce rates, chronic address changes, and empty dining rooms attest to this). The modernist society can not feed itself, define itself, or maintain communities (urban sprawl, the “doughnut-hole” phenomenon in city centers, and population explosion in the south and southwest and depopulation of the mid-west and northeast attest to this). The modernist church can not feed itself (note the so-called vocations “crisis”); express itself (note the explosion of mission statements, ministry by meetings and professionalism instead of profession of vows and public professions of faith); or find itself (it is lost among the lapsed and “recovering” Catholics, empty pews on Sunday, empty desks in the schools, hospitals sold by religious orders, and parishes closed by dioceses).
Materialism is the remedy always sought by the modernist. Families pay strangers to raise their children, buy protection from their neighbors with security systems on the front door and a deck at the back of the house, and pay for things to express affection. The modernist society pays for professional politicians rather than citizens coming forward to govern; buys an army rather than an authentic patriotism growing from a love of God our Pater expressed in love of our homeland, our patria, willing to defend our patrimony with blood if necessary; and pays for charity rather than reducing taxes and encouraging citizens to help one another. The modernist church pays people to pray (liturgists, musicians, lay chaplains); pays people to do corporal works of mercy (pastoral associates); and pays people to raise the children (youth ministers, catechists, D’sRE).
Father Smith, 2001
***
Error as such is not the motivation in these men and their followers, willing or unwitting as they may be. Man must have reason or go mad. Modernism provides a matrix, somewhat internally consistent, that allows sufficient rational justification for aberrant behavior, the true goal of this enterprise…
…Modernism is the system by which sinners make sense of disordered lives. It attempts to give rational form to the chaos of sensualism. If this list seems heavily weighted toward sins of the flesh, it is not because such appeals to the minds of those decrying error, but because such sins are the masters of those who propound error. It is a (mill)stone’s throw from the abominations and depravities approved at present in the world, and the eventual demand that all license be allowed….
…Modernism dissolves the traditional standard by which priorities can be ordered; material wealth establishes the most forceful appetite as the new standard for setting priorities….
Father Smith, 2002
(This Kind Of) Resistance is Futile; or
With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends; or
If You Can’t Beat Them, Be Them
“Conservatives are just liberals in slow motion.” The wife of a friend of mine is fond of repeating this wonderfully apt, succinct, and pithy summation of the false dichotomy that is modern politics. Choosing between Republicans and Democrats is a matter of diversity rivaling a Soviet election, the options in Mexico other than the PRI, or the viable alternatives to Microsoft available to PC manufacturers. Five-hundred channels on satellite television does not mean that there is anything on worth watching; a two-party system does not mean that two political philosophies are operative. Pepsi and Coke have more differences than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis.
This past week in California politics and the national media make this painfully obvious to everyone except politicians, the electorate, and analysts commenting on American civic life. The fact that both of California’s current governors accept child murder as a moral option, confiscatory taxes and usury as distributive justice, and sodomy as a basis for the family and society, does not qualify in the minds of most people as proof that the United States is a monolith of thought demanding government of mammon, by mammon, and for mammon. Sure, there are disagreements about how best to render all things unto mammon, but few to none desire aught but the absolute sovereignty of mammon.
Rush Limbaugh is learning this lesson the hard way – that is, if he is learning it at all. Mr. Limbaugh is very wealthy. He makes his money insulting the likes of Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Messrs. Rather and Jennings work for CBS and ABC respectively. Those two conglomerates broadcast on networks with hundreds of radio stations. Many of those same stations carry Mr. Limbaugh’s show. Limbaugh, Rather, and Jennings are millionaires whose incomes come from the same source, the stupefied American consumer.
(A quick aside: quite a few of the aforementioned radio stations broadcast an advertisement touting the value and virtue of “free” programming on the radio. They do this knowing full well that Americans are blind and deaf to the fact that they pay a huge premium on advertised merchandise to cover the cost of the advertisements that convince them to buy things they neither want nor need. The ad admonishing them to listen to “free” programming is geared towards raising ratings and thereby raising advertising rates which will result in higher retail prices. The worst things in life are not free, but they claim to be. Kinda like American “citizens”, a.k.a. wage slaves.)
Millions of American media consumers, media celebrities, and politicians screamed that Rush Limbaugh should be banned from another media outlet, ESPN (owned by Disney, which also owns ABC, which employs Peter Jennings). This is because Mr. Limbaugh made what many characterized as racist comments on a cable television football show (cable has as one of its biggest players in program production and distribution as well as in system ownership Viacom Corporation, which owns CBS, which employs Dan Rather). Disagreeing that he is a racist, but desiring not to upset his friends at ESPN, Mr. Limbaugh resigned from his position on the football show.
During the same week that he was being self-censored from the airwaves on television, Mr. Limbaugh on radio came to the repeated defense of gubernatorial candidate, child-murder endorser, usury advocate, homosexuality cheerleader, perpetrator of public impurity, and purveyor of cinematic violence, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mr. Limbaugh thinks Mr. Schwarzenegger is an improvement on Gray Davis because Schwarzenegger will let people have more money to pursue the happiness of immorality to which their peculiar personal proclivities might lead them, “free” of government interference. Evidently, sin is O.K. so long as one’s bank account is unaffected.
Many of the listeners to Mr. Limbaugh’s radio program begged to differ with his assessment. He insisted that making progress on fiscal matters is all that matters. The reign of error may go on in California until the books are balanced.
So, in Rush Limbaugh’s estimation, one must acquiesce to the demands of the self-appointed thought police when charged with the crime of uttering politically incorrect free speech; and residents of the most populous state in the country must just grin and bear it when lewd behavior, legalized theft, and demonic violence are imposed on them. ESPN must not be aggrieved, but God and His children may be offended while we wait for Silicon Valley to recover from the dot-com bust. While decency is put on hold, Proposition 13, Proposition 187, the same-sex union law, no-fault divorce, and repeal of the automobile-tax increase will occupy our collective attention to civic responsibility.
Until when?
Conservatives stood by when God was forbidden as sovereign in this nation’s constitution. They went along with the introduction of contraception then abortion then sodomy as legal activities in this country. Divorce and its attendant devastation of the family and society receives no censure from conservatives. Commerce on Sunday, the income tax, the property tax, compulsory public education, and the dissolution of the family farm are rarely acknowledged as profound violations of conservative principles. Which liberal objectives will conservatives absolutely forbid in theory, and battle to the bitter end to defeat in practice?
Liberals do not seem to mind getting rich while pursuing their principles; conservatives do not seem to want their principles to get in the way of pursuing riches. I guess that is the difference between liberals and conservatives. If they can not share a love of principle, at least they can share a love of money.
But, liberals, do not despair! In the same way that you bully, bad-mouth, and brow beat conservatives into agreement on sodomy, abortion, divorce, and the welfare state, eventually you will get their agreement on politically correct “free” speech – speech as free as air at most gas stations, as free as health-care plans you pander to the masses, as free as the programming on the radio. If the liberals keep doing what they keep doing (nuking anyone who dares disagree with them in public), and the conservatives keep doing what they keep doing (caving into liberal demands for compromise on principles and abandoning conservative principles without a fight), then it is only a matter of time before they are doing the very same things, the liberals just a little sooner than the conservatives. And the cost of all this freedom? A little time, a little money, and a whole lot of souls.
Father Smith
Sacerdos vagus
11 October 2003: The Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary
