Maverick Philosopher

An Ecclesiological Contretemps: Edward Feser versus Rod Dreher

Start here with Dreher.  Feser's response to Dreher. Dreher's reply (scroll down). Feser again.

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Addendum 5/31. Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, comments (minor edits added by BV):

With regard to the exchange between Edward Feser and Rod Dreher on the latter’s rationale for leaving Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which I too have been closely following, I have an observation that may be worthy of your notice.

While I believe that Feser exposes the non-rational and hence inadequate motivation for Dreher’s apostasy (and Skojec’s crise de foi), he advances an argument regarding the present theological and ecclesial crisis of the Catholic Church that is not at all cogent or convincing. This is evident [from the] the essential equivalence he draws between it and earlier disputes and conflicts in the Church’s distant history. He writes:

Skojec is scandalized by the fact that the confusion and heterodoxy fostered by Pope Francis’s many doctrinally problematic statements have not yet been remedied despite his having been in office for eight years.  This is quite ridiculous.  Eight years is nothing in terms of Church history.  The utter chaos introduced into the governance of the Church by Pope Stephen VI’s lunatic Cadaver Synod lasted for decades.  So did the chaos of the Great Western Schism.  Pope Honorius’s errors were not condemned until forty years after his death.  Further examples could easily be given.  Few people remember these events now, because things eventually worked themselves out so completely that they now look like blips.  If the world is still here centuries from now, Pope Francis’s chaotic reign will look the same way to Catholics of the future. 

Leaving aside the question of whether relevant “further examples [that] could easily be given,” is it in fact the case that the nature of the contemporary crisis in the Church is essentially of a kind with the three cited medieval crises? In other words, is something going on at the present moment, under the present pope, and more broadly in the decades that stretch back well into the last century that indicates some fundamental rupture with traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice? Are we indeed simply witnessing events that, like those of the past, will “look like blips” in time, or are we, undergoing a unique crisis that, in the words of historian Roberto Pertricci, “segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano’” [‘marks the sunset of that imposing historical reality that can be defined as Roman Catholicism’]?

The histories of the three medieval crises mentioned by Feser are highly [complicated?]and resistant to rapid summary. Suffice it to say, that two of these, the Cadaver Synod of 897 [and] Great Western Schism (1378-1417) were the offshoots of political and dynastic conflicts among orthodox members of the Catholic household of Europe. Neither involved questions of dogma or doctrine, and if the latter was troubling for papal power and prestige, encouraging the conciliarism of the 15^th century and the graver Protestant challenge of the 16^th, its more long-term [effects?] were not. The case of Pope Honorius I (625-38) involves a letter written in 635 by this early medieval pontiff to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who successfully solicited Honorius’ support for the conciliatory position that he, following the Emperor Heraclitus, had adopted toward monothelitism to promote unity among his flock. Honorius was condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81) not for heresy but for allowing its propagation. Here, although the dispute was doctrinal in nature, touching on the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s two natures and two wills, we are dealing with an isolated, although fundamental doctrinal misjudgment, expressed in a letter that is otherwise orthodox, of a pope who was highly regarded during his reign and who manifested no other signs of heterodoxy.

I think that even this highly unsatisfactory summary of these distant events in the life of the Church is sufficient to set them apart from the events of our own time and particularly those under the present pope. There is no need to catalogue the questionable if not heretical statements and judgments of Bergoglio, all designed to encourage confusion and heterodoxy in the Church; his scandalous actions paying homage to pagan idols; his  protection and advancement of sexual predators and sodomites; his purges of orthodox prelates and laymen from important Vatican positions and commissions; his undermining of Church unity to the extent that the German Church is in actual, if not declared schism; his collaboration in the destruction of the loyal Catholic Church in China; his incessant attacks on orthodox Catholics; and his substitution of left wing politics for the Gospel. But more beyond the actions of this pope we have to take note of the systemic rot throughout so much of the Church that has made him and those of his ilk possible; everything from the protection of sexual predators, to the abandonment of Catholic teaching in the Church’s schools and universities, to the passivity of most bishops when confronted with heresy in the Church or public scandal (communion for those who advocate and advance abortion, for instance), and so on.  

What is going on now, right before our eyes will never become some historical “blip.” The magisterium, both ordinary and extraordinary, may still stand, but how long will this be the case if it is increasingly ignored, subverted, and questioned? If the words of the Pater Noster, which are clear in both Greek and Latin, can be altered at will to make them more theologically acceptable to the bien pensant, what is beyond the reach of “reform”? Thus, those who remain loyal to the Church should have no illusions about the uniquely destructive nature of this crisis. It is being advanced by dangerous “progressive” forces, increasingly aligned with the global Left, that have taken control of the leading institutions of the Church and whose objective is the eradication of the very core of traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice.

Sacramental Efficacy Despite the Corruption of the Church?

Here:

Therefore, the serious believer is thrown back upon his or her own inner resources. Thankfully, the Sacraments are still efficacious despite the corruption of the Church . . . .

Suppose I go to what used to be called Confession, but is now foolishly called Reconciliation. The priest, I have reason to believe, is a  practicing homosexual, a sodomite, a child molester, and doesn't believe a word of traditional doctrine. The Roman Catholic Church is his mafia, his hustle, except that he lacks the honesty of the mafioso who in private will admit that  he is a criminal out for self and pelf.  We all know that there are plenty of priests like this. 

Forgive me, father, if I can no longer bring myself to accept the doctrine of sacramental efficacy given the deep moral corruption of you and your church. I grant the abstract logical possibility that the efficacy of sacraments is untouched by the corruption of their ministers.  But how, in your presence, could  I achieve the heart-felt compunction necessary for true confession knowing that you are a moral fraud? Would the achievement of that state of compunction not be more likely in the  depths of my privacy in claustro?

On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:

A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer.  It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude.  What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution.  It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.

Where would we be without institutions?  We need them, but only up to a point.  We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful.  But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.

We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human.  But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path.  Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree.  To achieve true individuality  is one of the main tasks of human life.  Spiritual individuation is indeed a task, not a given. In pursuit of this task institutions are often more hindrance than help.

For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community.  But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.

For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation -- extra ecclesiam salus non est -- is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.

But now, having given voice to the opinion to which I strongly incline, I ought to consider, if only briefly, the other side of the question.

What if there is a church with a divine charter, one founded by God himself in the person of Christ? If there is such a church, then my charges of intolerable dogmatism and idolatry collapse. Such a church would not be just a help to salvation but a means  necessary thereto. Such a church, with respect to soteriological essentials, would teach with true, because divine, authority.

But is there such a divinely instituted and guided church? To believe this one would first have to accept the Incarnation.  And therein lies the stumbling block.

If the Incarnation is actual, then it is possible whether or not we can explain or understand how it is possible. Esse ad posse valet illatio.  Necessarily, what is, is really possible, whether or not conceivable by us. It is not for our paltry minds to dictate what is actual and what is possible. On the other hand, if the best and the brightest of our admittedly wretched kind cannot see how a state of affairs is possible, then that is evidence that it is not possible.  If, after protracted and sincere effort motivated by a love of truth, the Incarnation keeps coming before the mind as contradictory, and the attempts at defusing the apparent contradiction as so much fancy footwork, then here we have (admittedly non-demonstrative) evidence that the Incarnation really is impossible. 

And then there is the ethical matter of intellectual integrity. (Beliefs and not only actions are subject to ethical evaluation.) One can easily feel that there is something morally shabby about believing what is favorable to one when what one is believing is hard to square with elementary canons of logic.

This then is the predicament of someone with one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem.  The autonomy of reason demands insight lest it affirm beyond what it is justified in affirming. At the same time, reason in us realizes its infirmity and helplessness in the face of the great questions that bear upon our ultimate fate and felicity; reason in us is therefore inclined in its misery to embrace the heteronomy of faith.

How are we to resolve this problem?  Are to accept a revelation that our finite intellects cannot validate? Or are we to stand fast on the autonomy of finite reason and refuse to accept what we cannot, by our own lights, validate? (By 'validate' I do not mean 'show to be true' but only 'show to be rationally acceptable.')

My answer, interim and tentative, is this.  The ultimate resolution involves the will, not the intellect. One decides to accept the Incarnation or one decides not to accept it.  That is to say: the final step must be taken by the will, freely; which is not to say that the intellect is not involved up to the final step. The decision is free, but not 'arbitrary' in the sense of thoughtless or perfunctory.  No proof is possible, which should not be surprising since we are in the precincts of faith not knowledge.  One who accepts as true only what he can know or come to know has simply rejected faith as a mode of access to truth.

"But if the doctrine is apparently contradictory and an offense to discursive reason, then one's decision in favor of the Incarnation is irrational." 

I think this objection can be met. What is apparently contradictory may or may not be really contradictory, and it is not unreasonable to think that there are truths, non-contradictory in themselves, that must appear contradictory to us in our present state.  This is a form of mysterianism, but it is a reasoned mysterianism.  Human reason can come to understand that human reason cannot validate all that it accepts as true.

Miniscule and Majuscule; catholic and Catholic

I am too catholic to be much of a Catholic. 

But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base.  Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent.  Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Related articles

The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

The Devirilization of Priest and Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass

Leftist First, Catholic Second

Popes and Dopes

I was planning on writing something along these lines, but James Taranto has done the job and done it well.

Atheist Malcolm Pollack gets it right too and refers us to a fine piece by Pat Buchanan.

And then there is this by Michael Brendan Dougherty on the ascendancy of Jorge Bergoglio:

But the other way to look at the dawn of this papacy is that it is one more in the pile of recent Catholic novelties and mediocrities. He is the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit to be pope, and the first to take the name Francis. And so he falls in line with the larger era of the church in the past 50 years which has been defined by ill-considered experimentation: a “pastoral” ecumenical council at Vatican II, a new synthetic vernacular liturgy, the hasty revision of the rules for almost all religious orders within the church, the dramatic gestures and “saint factory” of Pope John Paul II’s papacy, along with the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI. In this vision, Benedict’s papacy, which focused on “continuity,” seems like the exception to an epoch of stunning and unsettling change, which—as we know—usually heralds collapse.

"Ill-considered experimentation" is right.  I would go further and call it profoundly stupid.  People who are drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent.  Conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary.  For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of keeping things as they are, a  defeasible presumption in favor of traditional formulations and usages, beliefs and practices.  Now the world outside the Church is rife with  change, not all of it bad, of course, but much of it unsettling.  The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal.

So  you drive people away from the Church by instituting 'reforms' that accommodate the Church to the crap culture outside it.  This is a large topic and a fit one for a large-scale rant, but it is time to punch the clock.  I will just mention three stupidities: getting rid of the Latin mass; abolishing the no-meat-on-Friday rule, and the asinine PC re-labelling of confession as 'reconciliation.'  Pee-Cee crapola and just the tip of the iceberg.

Even if Catholicism is pure buncombe with no transcendent warrant, if it wants to survive immanently speaking, then it must not allow itself to be watered down into some form of  namby-pamby secular humanist bullshit.

Have I succeeded in expressing my disapprobation of recent developments?

The dopes inside the Church are worse than those outside it.

Related articles

Benedict XVI: "A Conservative Not in Favor of Reforms"

The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:

A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer.  It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude.  What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution.  It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.

Where would we be without institutions?  We need them, but only up to a point.  We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful.  But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.

We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human.  But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path.  Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree.  To achieve true individuality  is one of the main tasks of human life.  In pursuit of this task institutions are more hindrance than help.

For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community.  But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.

For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation -- extra ecclesiam salus non est -- is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.

For my take on idolatry see the Idolatry category.

The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

This from D. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my  mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis:  Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.  I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' -- which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable -- I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative.  ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was."  Why are these the only two alternatives?  The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.  One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East.  After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church.  That is at least a possibility.  If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be.  It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant  truth. 

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an obviously  worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice.

My point is a purely logical one.  I am not taking sides in any theological controversy.