The popular treatment of Theology of the Body has been focused around the most obvious areas, the promotion of chastity and purity, and to a lesser extent, marriage but I would argue that John Paul II’s theology of the body is a new, complete synthesis of Catholic teaching in the manner of what St. Thomas Aquinas did with his Summa theologiae.  This first series will approach John Paul II’s insights in a manner of a mini-catechism in order to try to illustrate its wide reaching implications.  Here is a summary of the series:

Episode 1 (Mar 10): “Theology of the Mystical Body”

This first episode explains the purpose of the series and how it will progress to include a brief overview of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and its significance for the Church.

Episode 2 (Mar 24): “Know Thyself”

This episode discusses the meaning of man as made in the image of God, emphasizing why understanding the Trinity is essential for understanding what makes us tick and how we ultimately will find our happiness.

Episode 3 (Apr 14): “This Valley of Tears”

This episode explores creation and the Fall and what this means for our personal experience of goodness and of sin.  It looks at how the Fall affects our relationship with God and with others, and what the challenges are for having a fully Christian life of joy.

Episode 4 (Apr 28):  “Jesus’ Body”

This episode looks at the Incarnation Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ from a fresh perspective.  It explains these events in order to highlight their universal significance while at the same time providing insights into the human condition and the meaning of life.

Episode 5 (May 12):  “Christ’s Body”

This episode investigates various doctrines concerning the Church from the perspective of marriage based upon John Paul II’s analysis of Ephesians 5.

Episode 6 (May 26):  “Offer It Up”

This episode explores the significance of the liturgy & the Sacraments from the perspective of the human person and his place in the cosmos.

Episode 7 (Jun 9):  “It’s Not Hard, But It Is Humanly Impossible”

This episode discusses the moral life by looking at the interplay of grace and human action in achieving self-mastery and joy in this life in order to prepare for the next.

Episode 8 (Jun 23):  “Earth in Heaven”

This last episode of the series explains the Last Things from the perspective of what it means to be human; i.e. what the Last Things mean with respect to a body as well as a soul.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.

This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It is particularly troubling to consider the spiritual sympathy between Alinsky, a Jewish agnostic/atheist, who was a vulgar ruffian and an agitator of the lowest sort, with Maritain, whom many have assumed to have been a personal bastion of orthodoxy and a lock-step Thomist (do you have an excuse for this, Ralph McInerny?). Maritain was, of course, a close friend and confidant of Garrigou-Lagrange, whom Lefebvrists to this day revere and honor as the one and only twentieth century Catholic theologian worth his salt, and a Catholic philosopher whose idea of a fully Christian, political humanism — an “integral humanism,” as he called it — had a profound effect on the post-conciliar papacy. Indeed, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI makes copious use of this expression, which was greatly favored by Paul VI, and which derives ultimately from the pen of Maritain. Maritain is also a favorite, it should be pointed out, of the so-called “neo-conservative” Catholics Michael Novak and George Weigel.

It is instructive to recount a pertinent section from Jean-Luc Barre’s biography of Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, which was a best-seller in France (it went through several printings in the mid ’90s) and which was translated into English by Bernard E. Doering, who himself wrote a book on the close relationship of Maritain with Alinsky entitled The Philosopher and the Provocateur.

Barre points out that Maritain was among the first continental Catholics to express an appreciation for the idea of democratic America, including its principled separation of Church and State, and it is in the context of this love for the “American idea” that Maritain’s relationship with Alinsky is perhaps best understood.

Maritain considered Alinsky to be one of his closest friends, “an indomitable and dreaded organizer of ‘People’s Organizations’ and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox” (quoted from Maritain by Barre on p. 402).

Maritain had met Alinsky during the Second World War and was immediately taken with his “savvy” work in the cause of economic and social justice. Barre describes their mutual sympathy as founded on a profound “shared taste for subversion and irreverence…and a similar confidence in the people” (403). It should be remembered that, on the one hand, Maritain was greatly distrusted by many Church hierarchs prior to the council as a “Marxist.” Indeed, in visiting America, he could find little support among the hiearchy, and in the universities he could find even less support among the authorities, because there was, even in those days, a global antipathy to Thomism. This made him, in Barre’s words, a “desparado,” and a kindred spirit to Alinsky. On the other hand, Maritain was himself, like Alinsky, committed to what he took to be the “democratic ideal” that everyone should be free to question and challenge authority. How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council.

And did Saul Alinsky ever look up to Maritain! This is, I suppose, a reminder of the attractive character that the life of grace imparts to the human soul, an attractiveness so compelling that even hardened atheists recognize its appeal. In saying this, I should point out that I would not in any way, in recounting this story, wish to impugn Maritain’s holiness. At any rate, Alinsky was, to quote Barre, a “personage who was known for being aggresive and rude [but] was nothing but modesty and deference toward the intellectual who had come from France and of whom he asked one day, with unexpected timidity, for a signature on a photograph of Maritain” (403).

Indeed, Alinsky loved Maritain as a father. He told Maritain, in seeking to explain his desire for Maritain’s autograph, that he was not prone to idol worship: “…[but] what I am trying to say is that a picture of you with some personal statement on it would be one of my most cherished possessions. There I have said it” (403). Alinsky even dedicated his now-infamous Rules for Radicals to Maritain, with the inscription: “To my spiritual father and the man I love, from his prodigal and wayward son” (403).

Maritain seems to have seen in Alinsky’s work the possibility of imprinting the Christian ideal on movements for social justice and of shaping the creative energy of contemporary history. In a point of particular sympathy, Maritain saw in Alinsky’s community organizations the advent of “mediating structures” between the individual and the State that could buffer the individual from domination by the State.

But herein lies the troubling question of Maritain’s Catholic alliance with Alinsky, which would serve as a model for the post-conciliar Church in the U.S. and which should call the whole socio-political strategy of the post-conciliar Church in America into question. How could Maritain not have seen that Alinsky’s community organizations, his “buffers,” were in fact ordered to becoming functionaries of the State, its repressive arms of authority? Like all American agitators whose work operates in the trajectory of Marx’s nihilism, Alinsky awaited the day when a fully socialist political power would reign in the nation’s capitol. That day has now come, of course, as Saul Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, and his heir to control of the community organizations in Chicago, Barack Hussein Obama, has now ascended to the presidency of the United States. Community organizations and “buffers,” such as SEIU, have now become potential instruments of governmental coercion.

Maritain could not see that Alinsky’s “community organizations” were always meant to be substitute churches which were ordered by their very essence to the derogation of the proper authority of the most important of the natural and supernatural mediating societies, namely, the natural family and the Catholic Church. Maritain could only see in Alinsky’s work the coming-into-being of new guilds, along the lines of the medieval guilds, that could put a check on the greed and radical individualism that underlies so much of the practice of free market capitalism. He thought that these organizations could embody the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, so that the grave social injustices of capitalism could be held in control without tyranical federal intervention. But he failed to realize that these organizations were in fact meant by Alinsky to be stepping-stones to the advent of, and eventual workers for, a centralized power structure that would coercively bring about his dreary, ugly, a-religious concept of social justice. Maritain seems to have failed, in other words, to recognize that it is perilous indeed to make common cause with those who have rejected the religious essence of man. Social justice without a truly Christian, religious foundation is a perversion of social justice.

And Maritain’s naivete in this regard is nothing if not representative of the attitude of most of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the post-conciliar age. Perhaps the pre-conciliar hierarchy exercised prudence in keeping its distance from Maritain’s social “do-goodism,” which eventually would aid and abet those forces in society that seek the destruction of the natural family and of the authority and freedom of the Church.

So, what are we to make of this alliance between Maritain and Alinsky? In whose service was it formed?

I would like to end this brief post with a further question and a thought: If Barack Obama is Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, does that make him in some twisted sense Maritain’s spiritual great-grandchild? The Catholic inspiration of history is so subtle that it often eludes our grasp, and sometimes, upon grasping its influence, we might very well think it better to have remained ignorant of it!

Why is it that we see so many problems with CCHD and the organizations that they fund?  While they have cleaned up their act considerably from the days that they openly and wantonly funded groups at odds with Church teaching, they still have not been adequately successful in purging themselves of past demons.  I propose that the reason for this lies in CCHD’s roots.  CCHD is essentially formed around the ideology of the architect of community organizing, Saul D. Alinsky.

Saul Alinsky is a complex figure who formed his ideology from a variety of sources especially from Marxism.  However, one cannot say that he was purely aligned with Marxism, though he did seem to most consistently espouse the gradualism of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist.   Gramsci promoted a gradualist sort communist revolution that relied on infiltrating the “oppressing” source of power and using the dialectic process in a transformative approach rather than fomenting bloody revolution.

Alinsky’s thought is summarized in his two books, Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971).  In these, he lays out his philosophy of life and his approach to community organizing.  For those wishing a quick look at his thought, let me point to one sympathetic treatment of his thought and another  not so sympathetic.  Interestingly enough, you get the same basic insights  from both.  Some points that seem to stand out with respect to Alinsky’s thought is that when it comes to the good of the community (in Alinsky’s view of good) that the end always justifies the means. In fact, Alinsky eschews the idea of following one’s conscience if it means not promoting what he understands to be the  good for the masses:

He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to ‘be corrupted’ for them. (Alinsky 1972: 25) (cited here).

It also seems to be the case that pragmatic activism is the only acceptable approach to change.  Pragmatic activism means that one cannot do nothing and so if there is only one option open to achieving an end, regardless of what it is or what one’s conscience tells him about this option, it must be taken if the “powerless” may be said to benefit.  Pragmatic further means that it must be able to achieve the end; an idealist approach that has little chance of working is also to be shunned.

Alinsky also seemed to be strongly influenced by the Marxist view of power and its dialectal “truth” that conflict was the necessary means by which two opposing views would be reconciled.  As such, a fundamental principle of community organizing is that the organizer must be committed to agitating.  He must create conflict where there is none, if there is going to be change.  For Alinsky, change is structural change in the organization of the community and organization of the community is defined in terms of who holds power.  If held by the elite it must be gradually wrested away from them and given to the “powerless.”

Alinsky was not against radicalism.  He was simply a pragmatic gradualist.  He thought that one needed to work within the system in order to transform it into a radically new structure.  Thus, while Alinsky’s sentiments for bettering the lives of the poor and downtrodden was noble, his Machiavellian-Marxist philosophy left him and his followers open to the attitude that anything goes in the struggle for power if the end can be characterized as giving power to the powerless and the end is achievable.

So what does Saul Alinsky’s philosophy have to do with CCHD?  Alinsky is known as the father of community organizing.  Lawrence J. Engel, in an article  published in Theological Studies, talks about Alinsky and his influence on CCHD.  Engel  shows that Alinsky must be considered not only the father of community organizing but also the father of CCHD.  Engel writes of Father P. David Finks of the Diocese of Rochester, active in Alinsky’s FIGHT organization and arguably one of the founders of CCHD:

Thirty years later, Finks recalled his own work during the late 1960s: “[T]he NCCB Urban Task Force, the Catholic Committee for Urban Ministry, my years on staff at USCC/NCCB, the organization and selling to the bishops of the Campaign for Human Development–all were an attempt to make available and find support for Alinsky’s approach to community organization, empowerment of USA citizens from the bottom up, and what his IAF successors now call church/congregation-based organizing. As for me, I loved Saul. He stood me on my head and showed me a radically different way to see the world, the church, and democratic politics.”(110) The influence of Alinsky is evident in Finks’s own words and is also confirmed by the priests who worked closely with him in the 1960s. John McCarthy recalls that Finks “idolized Alinsky” and that community organization was “all Finks would be able to talk about.”(111) Charles Burns of the Urban Task Force staff remember that “Finks worshipped [sic] the ground Alinsky walked on,” and that Alinsky was “his father.”(112)

CCHD was, and one might argue must still be assumed to be,  thoroughly imbued with Alinsky’s Machiavellian philosophy and his metaphysic of power dialectics.  Certainly those community organizing institutions that CCHD funds are to varying degrees infected by Alinsky’s defective philosophies.  Is it any wonder that ACORN is as corrupt as it appears to be?  Can we be surprised at what these Alinskyite organizations can justify and work for when what is always right is whatever some organizing leader claims would benefit the powerless and when one’s conscience is no justification for not acting on such.

Alinsky’s ideology is built upon a false view of reality and distorted view of the human person.  It is based upon moral relativism which can justify just about anything as a good.  It is founded upon agitation, ridicule (which is one of Alinsky’s 13 primary tactics for community organizers) and the premise that life is about a struggle for power.   Ultimately, this ideology’s underlying anthropology cannot account for the authentic needs of the human person.  It cannot consistently identify or work for the common good.  Even when it might happen to do so accidentally,  it’s methods will ultimately damage those it intends to support by fomenting a mentality which assumes the only way out of a difficult situation is to do battle in some deceptive manner, with those “in power.”

A Catholic approach to community organizing, rather recognizes that authentic structural transformation comes about not through deception and seizing power but through individual conversion and human solidarity.  It recognizes also that subsidiarity is a co-principle with solidarity.  This means that long term solutions are found in helping those in need to recognize that part of any solution is working for the holiness of both the “powerful” as well as the “powerless.”  It realizes that situations and societies are authentically transformed not through conflict but through selfless cooperation.

It recognizes that those being served must be an integral part of any solution meant to serve them, and this includes setting the goals and the strategies for achieving them.  It is not that confronting unjust situations might sometimes be necessary but a Catholic approach may not succumb to the ideology that confrontation is a normal, even necessary approach.

Neither can a Catholic approach fall into the adjunct heresy that life is a struggle for power. Authentic power is not the forcing of one person’s or group of people’s will over another’s.  Rather, authentic power occurs only when love triumphs.  God is love who is the source of all authentic power.  When one views the other as an enemy to be defeated, authentic power is suppressed.  When one views the other, even an oppressor, as a fellow sinner who Christ died for one will be better prepared to discern the proper approach for a particular situation.

Because CCHD was founded upon a counter-Catholic ideology, I would argue that CCHD must be disbanded.  The Church must also eliminate its material support of any organization formed around Alinsky’s  ideology.  It is true that we must support efforts that help others “learn to fish” but the Church cannot support corrupt, ideological movements in order to achieve such noble ends.

It is time to abandon this failed experiment called CCHD and devote the available resources to building a new Catholic apostolate dedicated to promoting authentic human flourishing.  This new apostolate should base itself upon the social teachings of the Church, built upon an authentic understanding of the human person and how the truth of man demands a social interaction according to the co-principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.  The social encyclicals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are the most mature articulation of this.  Anything short of this will risk contaminating authentic efforts at social justice with tactics arising from a relativist, amoral ideology.  If we continue with the status quo, we cannot expect anything but more of the same.

Kennedy, like others before him, thought himself free to publicly proclaim the meaning of being Catholic assuming that he was exempt from public rebuke.  I suspect that part of this comes from the predominant American heresy that says religion is a completely private, individualistic affair.  In other words, no one can tell me what “my faith” means.  Thus, wayward Catholic politicians regularly proclaim that they can do whatever they wish and still be “good” Catholics.  I would argue that this heresy has been unintentionally abetted by the previously dominant pastoral strategy of US bishops.

Bishop Tobin’s public action is the latest in a trend among US bishops that recognizes that this one-sided strategy has borne more ill fruit than good.  The relativist assumptions of politicians such as Kennedy, that because they claim the Catholic faith then it is whatever they define it to be, has had a corrosive affect on US Catholics by and large.  This last election I think has been a turning point.  Here we had a politician who publicly promised to do everything he could in order to put laws and policies in place which would bring about the greatest expansion in history of the killing of unborn innocents, who at the same time garnered a majority of “Catholic” votes.  The confusion among Catholic voters could not be more manifest.

This last election has made it clear that the private approach must have its limits.  Its affect has been to allow many Catholics to assume, as do the politicians, that faith is simply personal opinion.  The lack of sufficient public rebuke for obstinate politicians has led others to reach the conclusion, perhaps in an unarticulated way, that while perhaps not a good thing abortion is certainly not an evil on the level of murder. This confusion must be remedied.

Other than one grammatical error, I find Bishop Tobin’s missive to Rep. Kennedy to be a model for the right pastoral response.  Kennedy has rightly been silenced.  His complaints that the discussion about his faith is something that should remain in private (though he himself previously made it public) demonstrates his faulty expectations of free public reign on his part with silence on the part of his bishop.  Bishop Tobin’s approach will not only serve to help to correct Kennedy’s false public witness but it also will serve as a warning that politicians may not speak with impunity about what it means to be a Catholic when they contradict Church teaching.

It is true that wayward Catholic politicians have souls in need of salvation and that this is part of a bishop’s responsibilities.  However, many bishops are coming to recognize that there are many other souls being led astray with a one-sided strategy that looks only at the conversion of the politician.  It is still a matter of prudential judgment when it is time to go public.  Nevertheless, there is a growing realization that eventually taking the issue public is a necessary matter of public witness.

“serious emotional reactions that produced physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances (including disturbing dreams), effects on interpersonal relationships and moral anguish.”

If one only quickly skims the article he might leave with the impression that this is a confession of a repentant abortionist.  It is not.  Rather,  the article, it seems to me, is an attempt to bring the suffering of abortionists into the public sphere in the vain hope that public expression of the truth of the violence of abortion will some how provide healing to those who continue in the destruction of unborn lives.

This article, it seems to me, is this doctor’s attempt to justify what she realizes at some pre-conscious level to be a grave moral transgression.  However, it is more effective in revealing the tortuous thinking that our times have brought us.  She relates an experience of running from a D&E abortion where she had just reassembled the parts of the baby she had dismembered, to another room in which she was trying to help save the life of a premature baby of the same age.  She asked the question about the moral difference between the two situations, in which she said it would be unthinkable to do to the prematurely born baby what she had just done to the unborn one.  Her answer was based upon the location of the baby and, “most importantly,” the hopes and wishes of the mother for the baby.

It is the mother’s will which determines whether it is legitimate to kill a child or not.  Instructive also is that this doctor talks about the discord between her experiences of abortion and her chosen values:

“caught between pro-choice discourse that, while it reflects our values, does not accurately reflect the full extent of our experience of abortion and in fact contradicts an enormous part of it, and the anti-abortion discourse and imagery that may actually be more closely aligned to our experience but is based in values we do not share.”

This doctor’s axiology is very post-modern.  It is the mother’s will that determines the status of the baby.  It is this capriciously chosen value disconnected from a contradictory reality, even when that reality is confirmed by her own personal experience, that allows this tormented soul to justify continuing to destroy lives: those of the unborn, of the mother, pf the father, of their families, and of all of those involved in the abortion industry.  This is indeed, a very perverse axiology and this is the value system of those who are trying to bring us “humane” healthcare reform.  Be afraid…be very afraid…

I. The Whigs: Modern and Postmodern

Yet, I am of the opinion that for all of the anti-intellectual petulance of the New Atheism that Hart laments, it is good that these men (are their any women among them?) are bringing out into the open the fact that the Whig myth of history remains the driving narrative of Anglophone culture. The postmodern, postcolonialist turn in the humanities might have temporarily blinded us to this fact. What does it mean to speak of a “Whig myth of history?” A bit of etymology is in order. In a well-known interview with Zenit, Tracey Rowland, herself a noted postmodern Catholic theologian, defined the term “Whig”:

Originally the word “Whig” came from the Scottish word “Whiggamor” for a cattle driver — though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th century.

Their counterparts, the Tories — a word derived from the Gaelic for “outlaw” — consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants. They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701].

Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics. Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism, which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism.

In addition to what Rowland says, it should be noted that the view of history that emerged in a Whig context was anti-Catholic and rabidly secular. It equated the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages and saw the Church as an enemy of progress. The Whig vision of history was the predominant understanding of history taught in England and America, in the universities and on all levels of public education, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The postmodernists, who gradually took control of the humanities departments in the western universities in the last half of the twentieth century, presumed themselves to have exposed the Whig narrative as a mere fable, whose sole purpose, they argued, was to provide a justification for the exploitation and subjugation by European civilization of traditional cultures throughout the world. But, it must be admitted, none of the postmodernists or postcolonialists had any deeply-set objections in principle to modern, western colonialism as such. They simply did not much care for the West in its Christian religion, on the one hand, or its economic capitalism, on the other — not that these two are necessarily intertwined.

The advent of modern Europe was rightly connected by the postmodernists to some sort of Christian inspiration, however heretical in its theological foundation that inspiration may have been. The Whig vision of history was itself seen as a product of vestigial Christianity. With the continued fading of Christian belief, and the expansion in the twentieth century of socialist colonialism, the need to wage a prophetic rejection of the Whig fable diminished.

Already, by century’s end, the shibboleths of the postmodern rejection of modern colonialism could themselves be seen as ideological constructions, and it was clear that in fact a new Whiggish colonialism was in place that had brought the expansion into the “Global South” of a permutation of the domineering, western ideological tradition. Only this time, the colonialism involved scientific eugenics and the transgression of the natural family. Western Europe was well-underway, in other words, in exporting its sexual nihilism to the “Global South,” and the postmodern postcolonialists, it turned out, were little more than the new Whigs, proudly advocating a western-derived, secular ideology of history and progress as a justification for the worldwide subjugation of traditional religious moral values pertaining to marriage and the family.

Whether the contemporary academy basks for the moment in the light of modernism or postmodernism, underlying it all is the deforming secular ideology of Whiggish progress. Whether it is manifested in the capitalism of Adam Smith, or in the reactionary relationalism of Karl Marx, or in the post-Marxian, misaptly described “postcolonialist” form of idolatry that just is identity politics and revolutionary, proselytizing sexual transgression, the Whig vision of secular progress is the unifying, underlying root condition of the contemporary universities and of the secular cultural imperialism that they have spawned.

II. Hart’s Response

The incoherencies of postmodernism are well-known, and its relativism is rejected by those whose intellectual predilection is for science rather than the humanities. This is actually, in some respects, a relatively noble characteristic of the New Atheism. Perhaps we might conclude, then, contra Dr. Hart, that Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett in fact make more respectable adverseries for Christian apologists than Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucalt, or even Friederich Nietzsche.

Well, perhaps that is taking things too far. At any rate, Hart has undertaken the evisceration of the vulgar and logically inconsistent outpourings of a Christopher Hitchens, or a Samuel Harris, in Atheist Delusions, though by placing his focus not on their actual works but on the over-riding cultural situation that makes their productions possible. He lays bare, in other words, the cultural ignorance that makes possible the New Atheism. 

Though he does not use the term “Whig,” he in fact goes straight at the Whig ideology that each of the New Atheists presumes. Hart confronts it in all of its popular manifestations. One of the most important aspects of this is his putting to rest the Whiggish myth of the origins of science. He has a wonderful chapter on this topic. In showing the Christian origins of modern science, his argument seems to derive, at least in part, from the work of Stanley Jaki.  Hart’s demonstration is not nearly as thorough as Jaki’s – after all, Jaki dedicated his whole career to this topic. And, unlike Jaki, Hart admits that it is not necessarily a knock-down point for Christian apologists to demonstrate the roots of modern science in Christian theology. The “progress” of science has been, in many ways, an annihilating, anti-humanist force, so Christians should be careful about proudly laying claim to its origination. Still, it is worthwhile to trace his argument for the Christian origins of science. Perhaps all of those high-school boys nowadays, who are natural targets for for the New Atheism, could benefit from a basic presentation in this regard: which they will not, unfortunately, receive at any point during their formal education.

III. Contra The Whig Myth of Science

In order to have a clue about where science takes its origins, one has to take the logic of history with much greater seriousness than Whig ideology allows. First of all, one must dispel the myth of an interminable “Christian Dark Age” existing in the West from the period of the conversion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine, in the 4th-5th centuries A.D., to the time of the Florentine Renaissance of the 15th century A.D. No serious scholar of history has such a facile view about a presumed Christian Dark Age, nowadays, and yet, in popular culture, such a view still fascinates a great many people. This is mainly so, I suppose, because it is the basic notion of history that the generally educated masses still get in their grade schools and high schools and in their undergraduate textbooks at college or university. And, of course, it is the view of things that masturbatory and snickering sophomore men in college get from watching those oh-so-clever Monty Python productions.

The basic premise of the history of science that is propounded from the prism of Whig ideology is that the victory of Christianity under Constantine killed the Greco-Roman pursuit of science and high philosophy. Christianity, so the argument runs, values only blind obedience to authority and not the life of reason. The fideism of Christianity, then (so it is claimed), was the destructive agent that buried pagan wisdom, and it was only in the Renaissance, with the disinterment of the great pagan philosophers, that reason could once again flourish. It was only then that Christianity could finally be cast off and modern science take its origin.

No competent historian of science nowadays gives any weight to this sort of account of things, and, yet, it is the basic premise of so much that pours forth from the pens of the New Atheists. Pierre Duhem, a physicist and eminent scholar of science, had destroyed this myth over a century ago. Even lesser lights in the study of the history of science, who yet decisively shaped the field, such as Alexander Koyre, and who were even anti-Christian, realized that the Whig history of science was very much in need of demythologization.

Hart puts to rest the Whiggish mythical understanding of the history of science with the very basic and irrefutably logical point that “scientific thought does not lurch from one mind to another across gulfs of time, nor do great scientists suddenly and miraculously emerge from the darkness, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” (p. 58) In other words, the advent of Copernican and Galilean science has to be understood in terms of the immediate historical context in which it arose, and not by reference to a fabulous past that Copernicus could have suddenly rediscovered and revivified by his own unaided genius. Competent assessment of the history of an idea requires a thorough assessment of the immediate social context of its advent. It is an example of incompetent and amateurish historiography to place the genesis of a modern idea by finding its explicatory context in ancient history.

In short, what the Whig historians always fail to account for is that the ideas and advances of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton were made possible by the Christian universities in which these men matriculated, and which the Church created and zealously nurtured and defended, and which were, in fact, truly Christian institutions far longer than they have been secular institutions.

IV. The Christian Presuppositions for Science

We must, then, root the history of the origin of modern science in its immediate context. What was it about the Catholic universities of Europe in the centuries leading up to Copernicus and Galileo that made it possible for them to develop the essential thrust of inquiry that gave us modern science? Hart shows that the key lies in seeing  the recognition by 14th century scholastic cosmologists in Oxford and Paris, such as Buridan and Oresme, that the motion of bodies can be understood without reference to an a priori theory of causality, as in Aristotle’s physics.

The pre-Copernican scholastic theologians had begun to extricate themselves from the a priori conceptual schemes of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had been for so long the accepted cosmologies of late Antique and early Medieval science, in both Christian and Muslim lands. They had begun to develop, more specifically, an understanding of impetus that was “kinematic” rather than “dynamic.” This is to say that they had begun to study the laws of motion in themselves without consideration of an external force or “dynamis” as the ultimate causal agency of motion. This new, “immanentizing,” non-Aristotelian concept of motion was the stepping stone to the modern concept of inertial motion. It enabled the 14th century scholastic cosmologist to postulate, even, the existence of terrestrial rotation: whereas Aristotle and Ptolemy both understood the world to be stationary. Even more, it opened up these scholastic cosmologists to consideration of falling bodies and to their centers of gravity. This new type of study of motion was the Christian scholastic beginning of modern science, and Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were the heirs of its spirit of inquiry and not its initiators sprung from a remote past or from nowhere.

Hart points out that the success of 16th and 17th century science amounted to the final defeat of Hellenistic science and not its ultimate triumph. Hart realizes, with all good historians of science, that the story of science as told by a Carl Sagan or an Arthur C. Clarke is pure nonsense. As early as the 6th century A.D., the Christian John Philoponous had already critiqued the Aristotelian and Stoic pantheistic doctrines of the cosmos as a cosmic machine or as a wondrous divine organism. Philoponous argued, contra the Greek natural philosophers, that the stars were not immutable and that terrestrial and celestial objects did not possess distinct natures. This made possible a valuation of the empirical study of the celestial regions. No longer could it be assumed, as almost all educated Greeks had done, that the nature of the stars and their motions could be deduced by a priori deduction. The celestial realm, Philoponous realized, is every bit as “creaturely” as the terrestrial realm. It was not a divine realm, as for Aristotle, and was susceptible therefore to the same contingency as the terrestrial realm. Its motion, therefore, had to be studied by empirical observation.

What made Philoponous able to make this breakthrough from out of the Greek natural philosophy? It was his implicit acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the transcendent God who created the world ”ex nihilo” — out of nothing. The celestial realm and the terrestrial realm of matter were able, as a logical consequence of this doctrine, to be seen as of the same basic substance(s), amenable to the same scientific laws, requiring empirical study in order to make sense of their contingent ordering.

Though Aristotelian science would still hold sway in the medieval universities for a long time, the breakthrough to modern science was enabled by recognizing, as these Catholic schoolmen in Oxford and Paris had done, that the world is not a divine being and that God is transcendent to it. It is ordered, to be sure. The scholastic theologians all recognized that God had made all things, as the Wisdom of Solomon tells us, according to measure, number, and weight. Many ancient cultures did not see things this way. For much of the Orient, for instance, the world was understood to be a pure illusion. Indeed, the Christian scholastics went even further in their estimation of the order of creation. They understood that the very orderer of the universe had united himself to matter in the most intimate manner conceivable in the Incarnation of Christ. The “logos” or rationality of matter was given thereby a special consecration that Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Neoplatonist, and Oriental cosmologists could not even have dreamt of and probably would have thought unseemly and undignified.

So, given its status as creature, the Christian scholastics began to understand that the universe has to be studied empirically and not by a priori deduction. Its being cannot be deduced in the way of, for instance, Anselm’s a priori argument for the essence and existence of God. On the other hand, given the dignity of its inherent logos, the universe is open to being known in its immanent laws. Both of these presuppositions about the nature of the universe, its contingency and its rationality, had to be held together in order for the scientific spirit of inquiry to develop. Both presuppositions are the logical outcome of the Christian doctrine of creation, held by all of the scholastic theologians who eventually, like Philoponous before them, were able to extricate themselves from the vestiges of Aristotelian pantheism and pave the way for the advent of modern science.

V. Overcoming the Myth of the Galileo Affair

Hart, then, has a nice and brief discussion of the shift in understanding of the universe that was enabled by the Christian doctrine of creation. It is not on the same level of Jaki’s thorough demonstrations, but it can serve as a good primer.

Yet Hart is even more concerned in his chapter on the history of science to lay to rest ridiculous myths about the presumed warfare between science and religion that fascinate contemporary culture. Such is the case with the Galileo affair. He gives a good presentation of basic points of the story that are too often missed: that Galileo was not subjected by the Church to torture or imprisonment in a dungeon for his science; that the conflict involved in the incident was not in essence between the Church and modern science but between Aristotelian science and modern science; that Urban VIII was not defending the faith, which we have good reason to think that he may not even have held, but the traditional science of Aristotle (in spite of the fact that the best scholastic theologians had already overcome its defects); that the Galileo incident was but one minor incident in a cultural context in which the Church’s universities were producing Jesuit and Franciscan scientists who were as truly scientific as any major modern scientists who have succeeded them; and most importantly, that Copernicus’s heliocentrism was a hypothesis at the time of Galileo and not an established empircal fact.

Regarding this last point, Hart shows that Galileo put forward an incomptent case in support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism. Indeed, he makes the plausible suggestion, given the poor case that Galileo had made to the Roman censors, that it was the Church who was in fact defending reason and Galileo who was acting on faith. Hart shows that Galileo was defending a theory that he had not proven and that violates our most basic common sense: we do not, after all, experience the earth to revolve around the sun. The extraordinary claim of heliocentrism, then, to parrot the unfortunate Carl Sagan, should have required extraordinary evidence, which Galileo, for all of his genius in fields other than astronomy, was not able to give.

None of this is to say that Hart rejects heliocentrism. It should be needless to point this out, but in this day and age one has to take extraordinary steps to state the obvious. But it is to say that it is hightime that the myth of the Galileo affair is put to rest in popular culture.

There are other important points that Hart makes in his chapter on science that are worth attending to, which is only a small part, and perhaps the most inessential, of his book. I don’t have time to go into these other points here. It should be reiterated that Hart does not wish to rest his whole case against the New Atheism on the issue of science, which has been in many ways but an ambiguous good in the modern age. Indeed, Hart has some deep sympathies with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the utilitarian objectivism and nihilism that gives rise to science-worship.

Nevertheless, the chapter in question is a good primer and worth reading as a whole. Upon doing so, one may want to turn to Jaki’s many volumes to fill in the details.

I. The New French Theology

As far as current trends in theology go, perhaps the most interesting work being done is in France. A hope-inspiring current of thought has emerged in the past two decades, existing in the line of the great French theologians like Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, and Louis Bouyer. I refer to a loosely connected current of thought embodied in such illustrious contemporary figures as Jean Luc Marion, Remi Brague, Yves Lacoste, and Robert Armogathe. These figures are all well-known, even in America, albeit mostly in the area of philosophy. But they have brought French humanism to the doorstep of theology by recovering the Catholic theological dimension of modern French philosophy in its Cartesian and Pascalian directions. That is no mean achievement, given the rabid secularism of the French Academy, with its propensity to repudiate, in Manichean fashion, the very Church that gave birth to the European universities. Interestingly, most of these new French Catholic thinkers emerged as Christian humanists in response to the cultural revolution in western universities in the late 1960s.

Indeed, in response to the Communist-led student revolutions of those years, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the French Church in the twentieth century, Msgr. Maxime Charles, formed a non-credit school of theology for the most promising young French Catholic students of the day – at the Shrine for the Sacred Heart at Montmarte overlooking Paris.  These included Marion, Brague, and Armogathe, as well as the now-prominent professor of literature in France, Jean Duchesne.

Msgr. Charles brought together an eminently distinguished group of theologians to teach these young students, including de Lubac, Danielou, and Bouyer, all of whom deeply inspired the theology of Vatican II. Interestingly, all of these theologians had in common with Charles a sense of isolation from the mainstream Church in France in the post-conciliar age. They had wanted to engage the culture of the day from the heart of the Church’s doctrinal, scriptural, liturgical, and spiritual tradition. The mainstream French Church, on the other hand, had capitulated to a large extent to the ideology of the student revolutionaries.

In spite of all that, and with the grace of God, Msgr. Charles’s non-credit academy of Christian theology would form this young group of French scholars to go out into the universities and to bring  the message and person of Christ there: albeit through the subtle workings of philosophy, philology, and genealogy. They would not be able to enter directly into theology at all times, but they would be able to encounter the radicals and ex-radicals of the Academy with the subtle voice of the Logos who speaks to the depths of all human hearts.

Though Msgr. Maxime Charles, de Lubac, and these other great theologians whom Charles had recruited, were radically isolated from the French Church-at-large, this was only a temporary condition. For the ideology of the Communist revolutionaries faded, and Charles’s informal academy of Christian education had done its job so well that French Catholic thought was taken back into the heart of the Church by these now-eminent scholars. Cardinal Lustiger, later appointed by John Paul II as the Archbishop of Paris, would encourage the direction in Catholic education that Msgr. Charles had begun with this aspiring group of intellectuals. Indeed, in the equally troubling days of WW II, Lustiger, then a young student, had himself been converted to the Church through the instrumentality of Msgr. Charles’s influence! Lustiger would even reopen the cathedral school in Paris, where nowadays Parisian seminarians receive at least some of their theological formation. This is a remarkable turn of events, a concrete example of Europe perhaps coming back to its Christian roots.

All of this is providential, following the pattern of wisdom that is imprinted in the created order and brought to radical newness in Christ. The Church of Christ is the means for the salvation for humanity; it is only natural that it should prove to be, in unenlightened, dark ages such as our own, the great means of salvation for the humanities as well.

II. The Example of Jean Borella 

I wanted to do this post strictly on Borella, but I think that he is representative of this greater direction in French thought. So, it seemed appropriate to detail the encouraging signs of development in post-conciliar French theology as a whole.

Borella was not himself, so far as I know, formed in the school of theology at Montmarte that Msgr. Charles had started. He is, in fact, of a different generation. But he might be the most interesting thinker among all the names that I have mentioned in this post. He is a French Traditionalist Catholic: a faithful Catholic theologian in the schools of both Henri de Lubac and Rene Guenon, the latter of whom he greatly criticized for his syncretism and for his denial that Catholic theology has a truly mystical dimension. Borella has written several books detailing the spiritual depths of the Catholic faith, defending the tradition of Christian gnosis, seeking to provide a greater understanding of Henri de Lubac’s seminal theology, defending the papacy of John Paul II, detailing the root cause of the Church’s post-conciliar liturgical desacralization, and showing the roots of modernity in Christian heresy.

Perhaps his most interesting book is The Sense of the Supernatural, which was written over ten years ago now, but is still of great importance. Arthur Versluis summarizes the book in this way:

Like The Secret [an earlier book of Borella's], The Sense of the Supernatural is a devotional work on the orthodoxy of gnosis, but it includes a different aspect — historical analysis — and in this it is a groundbreaking and extremely important book. If in The Secret, Borella is concerned with establishing the necessity for an authentic Christian gnosis comparable to but distinct from what one finds in Taoism, Sufism, or other world religious traditions, in The Sense of the Supernatural, Borella’s focus is much more analysis of what he sees as the various modernist heresies that have emerged in the past several centuries. Chief among these is the refusal not only of those in secular society, but what is worse in his eyes, of those who represent Roman Catholicism itself, the refusal to recognize the primacy of faith and of what he calls the “sense of the supernatural.” Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular have become almost totally secularized, and Borella analyzes this secularization in some detail from the perspective of a traditional Roman Catholic clearly scandalized by it and by some of the rather astonishing pronouncements by contemporary or recent Roman Catholic clergy, theologians, and even bishops.

But what makes The Sense of the Supernatural so valuable is the perspective it offers on what I would call the paradox of modernity. The paradox of modernity is this: how is it on the one hand that modernity is indissolubly based in the notion of “progress,” and that indeed there are numerous advancements, technological, medical, and otherwise that may be adduced to support the notion of progress, and yet it is self-evident that this “progress” is destructive not only of humanity and culture, not only of nature, but also of religious tradition? If from a purely materialistic perspective, we may be said to live in an era of unparalleled “progress,” the same cannot be said of our eroding and disappearing religious traditions and traditional cultures. The paradox of modernity, simply put, is that all our “progress” appears to have as corollary effects cultural and religious regress or decadence, and the destruction of the natural world. The Sense of the Supernatural offers an analysis of modernity from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective informed by a vast erudition, secular and theological. This vantage point is in fact to a considerable extent outside modernity itself, and thus offers insights that one will not find elsewhere.

Of course, Borella’s Guénonian logic, combined with his total devotion to Roman Catholicism, leads him to condemn not only modernist secularism, but also the Protestantism that inevitably led to modernism. According to Guénonian logic, Protestantism was nothing more than a manifestation of the downward movement toward the complete loss of the sense of the supernatural, toward the individualism, secularism, and decadence of modernity, caught as it is in unredeemed historicism and materialism. Of course, this rather condemnatory view of Protestantism does totally ignore the entire Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Böhme in the early seventeenth century, and that continued throughout the subsequent history of modernity in such stellar figures as Franz von Baader in the nineteenth century, and Leopold Ziegler and Nicholas Berdyaev in the twentieth centuries. And indeed, the truth is that Baader (himself a Catholic and also a theosopher in the line of Böhme) has much in common with Borella’s own insights. In overlooking the theosophic tradition in its entirety, and in its total condemnation of Protestantism as a whole, Borella’s work loses some of its luster. It would be richer were it to include the Böhmean current of theosophy and its insights. This said, Borella is faithful to his Guénonian premises here; for Guénon too, coming from a Catholic perspective, totally ignored the theosophic tradition.

One other major contribution of Borella’s The Sense of the Supernatural, beyond its analysis of modernity, is to introduce us to the work of Louis Lanneau, an eighteenth-century French missionary to South Asia who encountered Buddhism and who wrote a long manuscript on the Christian process of “deification” that was only relatively recently republished in French in full. One can see why for Borella the work of Lanneau would be immediately recognizable as important as a predecessor: it emphasizes the centrality in Christianity of a process of spiritual awakening through which one must go, as opposed to a merely historical understanding of Christianity according to which, since Christ died at a certain point in history, one need to nothing more than give lip service to one’s belief in that death and its significance. For Lanneau, as for Borella, Christianity is nothing if not a process of spiritual awakening that leads to gnosis, or direct spiritual knowledge of the divine and individual deification.

Borella is indeed representative of a fully Christianized, one should say more specifically, “Catholicized,” Guenonianism. This is a very important achievement. He has brought the great Henri de Lubac into confrontation with Guenon in a decisive manner and has turned the latter, through the instrumentality of de Lubac, in the direction of Christ. This is an important achievement because Guenon may be as influential a figure in the history of twentieth century thought as even the most prominent and famous philosophers that everyone studies in grad school.

For those who do not know, Guenon was the progenitor of the Traditionalist school of religious philosophy. This was a syncretizing movement of metaphysical theology that favored Islamic mystical monotheism over traditional Christian Trinitarian thought. People who are known to have been influenced greatly by Guenon are Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton, Fritjof Schuon, Aldous Huxley, Philip Sherrard, Titus Burkhardt, E.F. Schumacher, Wolfgang Smith, Seyyed Hosein Nasr, Huston Smith, and Ananda Coomaraswamy (whose son, Rama, became a traditionalist Catholic priest).

This loosely connected school of thought is of world historical importance perhaps rivalling that of even the great and famous postmodern philosophers. Though its thinkers tended to exist on the margins of the universities (generally speaking, the WASPy Ivy Leagues were not a fitting match for these people) and largely go unstudied in official channels, they have greatly influenced attitudes in the West to world religion and have even played a role in the resurgence of Islam and radical Hinduism. As the religious essence of human existence becomes more and more a prominent, undeniable fact of culture, and as secularism fades gradually into insignificance, it might become evident that Guenon exceeds in importance even Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucalt.

But, like Derrida and Foucalt, Guenon’s thinking is marked by a darkness, nay, even a nihilism: for he rejects the triune God in favor of an Absolute in whom no alterity, no true deification of man, is allowable. He sees a perennial tradition of religious mysticism at the core of all religions, and this core is very much for him that of the Neo-platonic One- beyond-being, existence outside of which can be no more than an inexplicable egress.

Borella’s work is so important because, taking full cognizance of the mystical dimension that truly must nurture all religions, he brings the Guenonian tradition into a fully Trinitarian and Christological fulfillment. He helps to show that in Christ and in his Church alone can there be found a deification that truly answers to the yearning of human eros, the condition of unrequited longing that is at the root of all religion. Christian mysticism, in the orthodox form that Borella extols, follows the pattern of Chalcedonian Christology, in which it is understood that God’s perfect union with man in Christ and the eschatological Church is “without confusion or change.” Christian deification, unlike that of merely monotheistic mysticisms, is in fact a transfiguring recreation and not a decreation.

The other French thinkers whom I have mentioned, Marion, and so on, tend to take their starting point for dialogue and confrontation in the postmodern critique that enlivens the universities. But Borella’s thought, following the Guenonians, is rooted from the start in the religous center of human existence and in man’s quest for divinization. As a purely ideological humanism slowly disappears from the face of the earth with the disappearance of socialism, the religious dimension of man’s being will perhaps, as I’ve said, become an obvious cultural fact. The importance of Borella’s work will perhaps then also come to the fore, as he shows that the only truly efficacious religion is founded on the Mystical Body of the Eucharist of Christ.

His most recent posts, this one on the New Republic’s Greg Easterbrook, in particular, are bringing to light the truly despicable anti-humanism that is now, with the advent of leftist supremacy in the White House and in congress, coming out into full display. And where are the David Frums, Rod Drehers, and paleo-conservative pundits in general in taking note of this flourishing anti-humanism of the left? They are nowhere to be found. Here’s a tidbit from Wesley Smith’s most recent post, where he makes a connection between the biotech revolution and scientific anti-humanism (part of the ethos that supports eugenics):

The biotech agenda has never been about stem cell research. That is only a stage. The ultimate agenda is Brave New World, e.g. genetic engineering, reproductive cloning, post humanism, and anything goes.  This has been hidden for political reasons, but with the hated Bush’s stem cell funding restrictions now defunct, we are beginning to see some truth in advertising.Greg Easterbrook of the New Republic fame spills some beans over at Wired.  From his column “Embrace Human Cloning:”

Others argue that cloning is “unnatural.” But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn’t new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there’s nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

This does not necessarily make human cloning desirable; there are complicated issues to consider. Initial mammalian cloning experiments, with sheep and other species, have produced many sickly offspring that die quickly. Could it ever be ethical to conduct research that produces sick babies in the hope of figuring out how to make healthy clones? And clones might be treated as inferiors, rendering them unhappy.

Still, human cloning should not be out of the question. In vitro fertilization was once seen as depraved God-playing and is now embraced, even by many of the devoutly religious. Cloning could be a blessing for the infertile, who otherwise could not experience biological parenthood. And, of course, it would be a blessing for the clone itself. Suppose a clone is later asked, “Are you glad you exist even though you are physically quite similar to someone else, or do you wish you had never existed?” We all know what the answer would be.

The column is mainly a bunch of assertions without real moral engagement.  Note, for example, that Easterbrook is unable or unwilling to say categorically that it would wrong to experiment on sick babies to perfect human cloning.  And that isn’t all it would take to make human reproductive cloning “safe.”  There would have to be many thousands of cloned embryos manufactured (raising the egg biological colonialism issue), eventually gestated into fetuses, and terminated to see how the genes are expressing and as part of the attempt to discover reliable quality control techniques.  Even successful reproductive cloning would also be  human experimentation of the rankest kind since any cloned child successfully brought to birth would be subjected to continued scientific prodding and poking to see how his/her biological systems functioned.

The ethos on display in this ”Wired” article that Smith dissects — that is, turning human persons into subjects fit only for scientific experimentation – was precisely that of the Nazi regime in Germany, in its first stages, and this is why so many on the American right are now prone to level charges of Nazism at the democrats: who uniformly support the biotech revolution. This is a legitimate connection, one that Edwin Black made quite convincingly in linking early twentieth century American eugenics and scientific experimentation to the ethos of Hitler, in his important book The War Against the Weak. Indeed, it was early twentieth century American progressivism that normalized eugenics and the reduction of the person to an experimental subject for scientific prodding. One hundred years later, little has changed.