Sunday, July 28, 2019

Where is the New Theolgoy Leading Us?

The late, great Thomist Garrigou-Legrange wrote a rather damaging philosophical piece "Where is the New Theology Leading Us?" in 1946. A Thomistic metaphysician of skill, he identified truth in the new systematic theology as adequatio realis mentis et vitae, (adequation of the real mind and life) instead of the classical definition as adequatio rei et intellectus (adequation of the mind and intellect.)


I had never heard of, nor read Reverend Garrigou-Legrange's article until recently. The recent "changes" to the dogma on the death penalty implemented by Francis and the USCCB, along with all of the raucous deviations that have permeated the church landscape since Francis' election, have forced this Catholic to go back before the Vatican II council to relearn and discover tradition. I've even been devoting time to studying Masonic philosophy so as to be better aware of its insidious doctrines when they crop up under this new pontificate.


Reading through some of Garrigou-Legrange's critique, it became apparent to me that I had encountered this "new theology" elsewhere in my philosophical studies. As Garrigou-Legrange showcases, the metaphysics is the making the mind equal to action or life. Meaning that truth is based, not on reality, but on the shifting sands of human experience. Metaphysically speaking, this throws us back to Heraclitus and the philosophy of perpetual change/relativism. (A self refuting philosophy, but that never stops the enemies of truth.)


We have by now been educated in who the modernists are. They are moral relativists that see the church as an NGO, and have no supernatural faith. Those of us who had our John Paul II goggles on, have slowly had the scales removed from our eyes and have red pilled to understand that, even with his piety, something sinister, "the smoke of Satan" had slipped into the church, unnoticed by the "useful idiots" in the pews (me being one of them.) My eyes are now constantly on the lookout for Masonic philosophy. I no longer look at those in collars without suspicion. Indeed, I feel them out as friend or foe, even with the respect for the authority of their offices. You can almost physically see the demons whispering in the ears of some of our prelates. By their theology, you will know them. But what is that theology?


I have long been of the opinion that culture follows religious tradition and that a philosophy that departs from truth (adequatio rei et intellectus) is ultimately rational justification for a theological outlook. MacIntyre scratched the surface in his After Virtue, of the idea that a philosopher cannot be understood outside of the narrative in which he is found. I postulate that the narrative is always religious. One can see this in philosopher after philosopher that falls outside of the Aristotelian tradition. Philosophy is the handmaid of theology, and it will take it's direction from theology if it is not the rational foundation of theology (as in the Thomistic synthesis).


For instance, (and I realize this is high level so may not be pleasing to the nuance of academics), I do not see much of a jump from sola scriptura to the metaphysics of change. In other words, there is not much of a jump to go from the idea that the individual Christian is the arbiter of scriptural truth to the idea that the individual man is the arbiter of moral and metaphysical truth. Many have connected the dots between the Protestant Reformation and secularism before, but when one assumes religious ideas drive culture, it is quite simple to connect the dots between the self-creator of scriptural truth and the self-creator of moral and metaphysical truth.


Etienne Gilson once criticized Immanuel Kant for implementing his Pietism into his philosophy, stating that the categorical imperative looked a little too much like the Golden Rule. I personally see Newton mixed with Protestantism all over Kant's works. And it's interesting that he is the root of the rotten Hegelian tree that has permeated philosophical thought for two centuries now. That is to say, Kant's realm of understanding and realm of phenomena, and his transcendentalism that cut us off from metaphysical objects, were the principles that lead to Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (leaving aside the less important philosophers he influenced.)


All of these philosophers, whose principles follow from the Protestant narrative, are, to return to Garrigou-Legrange's article, philosophy of action philosophers, or in common parlance, relativists.


So it was surprising to me to read that the new theology was really the outgrowth of atheistic philosophers of action. The dots were connected for me by the 20th Centuries' greatest Thomist. We have heard, as noted above, that the modernists are people within the Catholic Church that have no supernatural faith. Their metaphysical outlook is the philosophy of change, which is the idea that there is no enduring ontology, but instead a permanent becoming, where there are no unchanging metaphysical objects. Nothing endures from experience to experience. To borrow from Nietzsche, there is no connecting lightening and a flash, there is just a doing-doing. There is no being-doing.


The philosophy of change is philosophically problematic and runs aground on non-contradiction. From reading Garrigou-Legrange's account of the new theology, it became obvious that the new theology is instead an anti-theology. With it existing on the metaphysics of action, it really is just atheism wearing a mask. Now the lack of supernatural belief in the modernists is clear. The worldview rests on atheistic philosophy of change, which rests on Protestant theology. The Reformation was indeed a very bad thing and it's rotten fruit are now poisoning the church from within. A God who makes no demands makes for reality that has no demands. A theology that has no teleology makes for reality that has no teleology. With this philosophy of change comes a reality that makes no demands on ones behavior, so it is enticing from the standpoint of the unbridled passions.


The first thing for those of us who are now woke to do is to unmask the untruth where it hides so subtly. The new theology harkens back to the Garden of Eden. There the devil told our first parents that they would know good and evil. This intimate knowledge was his lying gift. The idea that we could measure morality, that we were the makers of morality, that we could measure being instead of being measured by being. The first and last temptation.


Satan is indeed in the church...





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