Daily Reflection 5.28.21

[readoldthings]

Today, something completely different.

An article by the Catholic Traditionalist blogger Steve Skojec has been floating around the internet for the last couple of days. This morning I finally sat down and read it. Skojec has spent his life in the Catholic Church, but now he's leaving. And he's furious:
 

I’m angry because I feel as though we’ve all been abandoned and left to the wolves, and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch as people turn to this increasingly uncritical tribalism to feel safe, or conspiracy theories to “explain” things, or even in some cases an explicit desire for the end of the world so that the madness will finally cease.

 

I’m angry because my entire identity, my entire life, has been inextricably intertwined with Catholicism, and as all of this collides and comes apart, I feel as though that identity is being flayed from me, one strip of flesh at a time.

 

I’m angry — but perhaps even more sad — because I have begged God to help me find my way through all this mess, to do the right thing, and to hold on to my faith, but I get no perceptible answer, and I don’t know where to go from here.

 

I’m angry because people think I shouldn’t tell any of this to you, because apparently we’re supposed to keep everything bad that happens in our faith a secret — abuse, corruption, crises of faith, and serious questions about certain teachings that seem false based on real evidence. “You’ll lead souls astray,” they tell you, as though the problems you’re reacting to were of your own making. As though adults are infants with no agency of their own. As though the real scandals aren’t the problem, it’s the people scandalized by them who are.

Skojec's work resonates with me. I am also a Cradle Catholic, and I have a very fraught relationship with the church I was raised in. I love the traditional rituals, the imagery and iconography, the saints and angels, and the Blessed Mother. I hate the institutional church. Hate is not too strong a word. I hate the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for reasons that are as personal to me as Steve Skojec's are to him. I can say that I ddi not suffer as badly at their hands as he did, but I did suffer enough. I'll talk about that another time though.

Reflecting on Skojec's article prompted the following thoughts, which I ended up writing in the time I normally have set aside for blogging. I was going to post it as a comment on JMG's blog, but it's much too long and a bit too personal, so I'm going to share it here instead. 

There is something wrong with Western civilization. This observation is at the heart of a lot of radical Left-wing politics, where it quickly goes toxic. I'm sure we've all heard about the Black Lives Matter movements attacks on Western rationality, which go to the absurd length of condemning "getting the right answer" in math classes. This is nonsense, of course, and in the BLM and other Leftist movements it's also blended with a toxic heaping of anti-white bigotry. But that doesn't mean that it's altogether wrong. Rationalism is, indeed, a feature of Western civilization, and it is a problem. 

 

If you look at 19th century translations of Plato, you keep coming across the word "reason" and, even more commonly, "intellect." Both of these words, for us, indicate discursive, rational reasoning. In the Jowett translation of the Republic, Reason is one of the three parts of the soul, along with Thymos and Appetite. But all of this is wrong, because the word being translated as "reason" DOESN'T mean discursive reasoning-- or at least, doesn't just mean that. Proclus tells us that the rational soul has three powers: "Of the rational soul in its entirety one part is intellect (nous,), another is discursive reason (dianoia), and another is opinion (doxa), and of these the first is connected to the gods, the second projects the sciences, while the third provides these to others."

 

You commonly find these ideas discussed by Eastern Orthodox Christians. For example, here is a series of talks by an Orthodox priest in which he specifically describes the anatomy of the soul as consisting of Nous, Thymos, and Appetite (Epythemia). But at some point, apparently, this understanding was lost in the west, and we enthroned Reason (Latin Ratio, root of Rationalism) as the highest power of the soul. And we then deleted even the possiblity of understanding what we had lost, by giving Reason the name of "Intellectus," which had formerly been used as a translation of Nous!

 

And so we find ourselves in a degraded state. Reason (dianoia) is not the highest power of the soul. Nous is, and it is nous, as Proclus tells us, that allows us to access the Divine realm. Leftists who attack Western civilization and Western rationalism thus have half an understanding of the problem. The trouble is that, lacking the older vocabulary, they're unable to distinguish between non-rational capacities which are higher than reason (noetic experience) and those that are lower than reason (emotion and passion). 

 

This is why Conservatism in the Western world has such a limited power. In the Anglosphere, it tends to be nothing more than a reactionary defense of the previous version of Liberalism, the revolution prior to the current revolution. But even so-called Traditionalism in the Western world  ultimately ends in a defense of rationalism. That rationalism the root of the vicious legalism in the Catholic Church, and the root of the problems that Mr. Skojec (among so many others face.) According to the catechism of the Catholic Church, "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the light of human reason."

 

With Reason enthroned, the Church is able to get away with a number of abuses that can be defended with airtight logic arising from false premises. Premise: Barring Confession, Sin deserves punishment. Premise: The soul, after death, is outside of time, and therefore unable to change. Conclusion: Therefore, a sinner who dies unrepentant will be punished eternally in Hell, and will deserve it. (Yes, this is a real argument; George Weigel has said exactly this in almost exactly these words in First Things.) That this is monstrous does not matter; it is reasonable. What is still more pertinent is that similarly reasonable arguments are made in favor of priestly celibacy, clerical authority, and papal infallibility. All of which can be shown by the light of human experience to be absolutely destructive.

 

But there's another side to this too, beyond the anatomy of the individual soul. Another thing which is above the human capacity to udnerstand through discursive reasoning is the natural world itself. And nature, when applied to human beings, means history and society. The idea that we can use our individual reason to understand how human society works and then come up with a better way to do things is the most destructive fruit of rationalism. We see this most clearly in the Communist Revolutions of the 20th century, in which intellectuals (there's that word again) came up with brilliant schemes to fix society and ended up producing one bloodbath after the next.

 

The Communist Revolutions were produced by atheist rationalists, for whom the human reason is the highest thing and there is no God. But prior to atheist rationalists, there are Protestant rationalists. For Protestant rationalists human reason is the second highest thing after God, and so human beings are-- despite somehow also being totally depraved-- the second highest things in the universe. And prior to Protestant rationalism, there is Catholic rationalism. For Catholic rationalists, human beings aren't the highest things in the universe, or the second highest. There is still a heavenly hierarchy between us and God. But that hierarchy has been increasingly downplayed and ignored for a thousand years, starting-- I think-- with the preference of Aristotle to Plato in the Middle Ages. Now a faithful Catholic is permitted only to call upon 3 angels by name; is required to believe in the sufficiency of human reason to know God "with certainty"; and is required (this is official teaching, according to ultra-Traditionalist Father Chad Ripperger) to ignore any spiritual experience they have. 

 

I don't know what to conclude, other than a sense that we somehow need to throw out the last 1,000 years and start over again. The scraps of the Western tradition that preserved the older Platonism-- at minimum the Occult tradition, which simply is Platonism; the Druid Revival; the works of Eriugena and Bonaventure; many of our poets and nearly all of our great ones-- can stay and form the basis of a new worldview. But everything else has to go. 

Comments

[tamanous2020]

Thanks for the great analysis. I knew that catholicism had elevated the intellect over the more gnostic aspects of the rational soul, but seeing you break out that was edifying. As a cradle catholic as well, there are so many beautiful elements to the history and practices of the historical church that is undermined by a truly corrupt hierarchy and abhorrent theology (so much that I was driven to atheism for a time in reaction). Truly tragic and I hope that writer is able to heal and come to terms with it all.

It really harkens to Spenglers emphasis that Faust is the epitome of western civilization. The catholic church theology was just the seed by which all modern secular and atheism derived from.

And as another note, seeing how one culture takes a word and transforms it to something else really does give a window into the soul of that culture (much like the word annata in therevada buddhism did not originally mean "no soul" but more of "this is not the soul").

Tamanous

[readoldthings]

Thank you.

there are so many beautiful elements to the history and practices of the historical church that is undermined by a truly corrupt hierarchy and abhorrent theology

Yes, this is exactly my view. The question that I'm always returning to is what to do about it. So far I've come up with three possible answers:

1. Create a new church which fills the need for devotion, beauty, magic and ritual, but which rejects Christian theology in favor of devotion to pagan deities. I've done a lot of work on this with the New Druid Church project, which is ongoing, though the work gets bogged down sometimes.

2. Participate or carve out a new niche in the Independent Sacramental Movement, to help create a place for Christians who want the sacramental life without the horrors of the Roman hierarchy, or any other hierarchy. I've dipped my toes in here, too-- a friend of mine is an Independent bishop who has offered me ordination, and I've also been in contact with the Holy Celtic Church International for some time.

3. Western Rite Orthodoxy.

Each one of these has its problems, to whit:

1. The pagan deities I know best are those of the Druid revival. We get along famously, but they are not at all the same type of beings that the saints and angels of the church are. Not that they're bad or evil-- they aren't. But they are powers of Nature, and Nature emphatically does not have the same type of concerns that human beings do. Thus I've found that the Druid gods are very happy to bless my yard and garden, keep my home free from difficult spirits and so on, but when it comes to human relationships... it's really not their department.

2. Much of the independent movement is rooted in the Liberal Catholic tradition. (If you aren't familiar, that's a church founded by Theosophists in the early 20th century; nothing to do with liberal politics.) There is a lot to admire in that tradition, but I personally find their liturgy... well, the polite way to say it is "not appealing."

3. This is a viable option, but there's a lot to give up if you go that way. In a big, more or less mainstream Catholic church, a baptized and confirmed cradle Catholic can fly under the radar-- no one knows that you're doing the LBRP in your bedroom at night, and the priest isn't going to deny you the sacraments. Western Rite Orthodox churches are small, consist mostly of converts, and everyone knows each other-- if you go this route, there's no hiding your interest in occultism or whatever else. And like I said to Methylethyl below, there's also the matter of having to give up basically everything from Aquinas forward.

JMG likes to say that it's more important to make a choice than which choice you make. And he's 100% right-- I could hem and haw like this forever. But the fact is that, for me personally, I find it a very hard choice to make, to the point that I've been pursuing options 1 and 2 actively for several years now, while keeping 3 in the back of my mind.

[jruss]

I’ve noticed this with the Druidic gods, the not caring about man deal.

Part of why I gave up on Druidry for the Greco-Roman-Egyptian gods. Along with those of India, China and Japan.

Worshiping the powers of the world I live in, not somewhere else.

[readoldthings]

That's not a bad plan. In my experience it isn't that the Druid gods are gods of somewhere else, but rather that most of them simply aren't prepared to act as what the Hermetic, Platonic and Abrahamic traditions all call "shepherds of men."

Catholicism

[onesage]

I, too, was raised Catholic (although not from the cradle - my father remarried and converted when I was very young). I got this rushed CCD for converts wherein I got baptized, first confession and communion, and confirmed all in one year when I was 10. Our classes were literally nothing - I learned zero, it was just glorified day care. I was functionally atheist as well, but so woefully uninformed!

It’s a great disservice we do our children with the poor education nowadays, but my own children don’t have any interest in learning for the most part. I have one who is a history buff and we feed that interest mightily, but my two oldest? They care not a whit for the deeper levels of life. I remind myself that neither did I, as a teenager, but I have matured.

There’s a lot of beauty in the Catholic Church, but a lot of ugliness as well. I tried, I really did - got as far as getting all kids baptized and the oldest his first communion, but it just died on the vine because nobody cared - least of all the parish! We were nothing more than cash cows to be milked. It was infuriating!

My husband is a cradle Catholic who left in disgust after the abuse came to light. He tried to get back into it for my sake, but the money grubbing from the pulpit drove him away again. It’s like Girl Scouts nowadays are just a front for a cookie selling conglomerate with free (underage, cute) sales staff. There is no substance, no learning except “how to run your business”. I just can’t even, as the kids say. ;)

Re: Catholicism

[readoldthings]

On the kids, I get that. I have a 10 year who would spend all day in front of the TV watching the Simpsons if I let him. I try to slip in such education as I can. I've been able to get him to understand Plato to a certain extent, though if I push it directly in any way he tunes out.

On the Church... yeah, I don't even know. Yesterday we were driving down an old country rode to a farm to pick strawberries, and out of nowhere this absolutely hideous building appeared, radiating that kind of Modern-Brutalist ugliness in every direction. I said to my wife "That's either a school or a prison." Turns out it was a Catholic Church, with attached school. I took a look inside the church via Google Images. Picture a high school auditorium with a Buddy Christ above the podium flanked by two garish Modernist paintings; no sacred images, no saints, no candles-- no magic.

And in contemporary Catholicism, your options are that kind of disenchanted ugliness, or else a Traditionalist movement that preserves the beauty of the old forms but keeps it locked inside the sort of abusive cult mentality that Steve Skojec talked about in the article that prompted this post.

So what do you do? I don't know. I baptized my daughter at the National Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes a last Christmas. I said to my wife yesterday that if we decide to introduce the kids to the sacraments, I'll just get ordained in an ISM parish and we'll do it ourselves.

Re: Catholicism

[onesage]

Ha! That’s Saint Stephen’s and Prince of Peace and Nativity around here, I know exactly what you mean - all the churches are devoid of magic except one down in the heart of downtown called Sacred Heart. It’s old and beautiful, and I’ve felt divinity inside, but not during mass... the priests staffing the place are honestly just going through the motions. It’s really sad, because there’s such potential there. I wanted Catholicism to work for me as it would have been such an easy and elegant solution! Alas, I’ve found Druidry, where I’ll actually need to do some work on myself (yuck, lol). I also try to sneak teaching in to my kids when they least expect it... like that cookbook from Seinfeld’s wife where she added puréed veg to all kinds of kid foods to slip them a nutritious mickey. Never worked on mine, just taught them to smell their food before taking a bite, ha!

[methylethyl]

Catholics like to say that in 1054, with the Great Schism, the Christian East left its reason behind and went floating off on ungrounded mysticism. The way the Orthodox tell it, The Roman Catholics left their Nous behind in the headlong pursuit of Reason. Sometimes phrased as: "Augustine and Aquinas ruined everything".

There is a telling difference between the ways that East and West define "theologian."

In the West, a theologian is someone who has studied, and is an expert on, theology.

In the East, a theologian is someone who gotten to know God on a fairly personal level.

That's a grave oversimplification, of course. In the East, "Theologian" is an honorific reserved to a handful of saints: St. John the Theologian, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Symeon the New Theologian... We loosely use it to mean people who study and elucidate theology (as in the west), but prefer St Evagrios' definition of a theologian as "someone who prays truly".

[readoldthings]

Indeed. I've heard it put that in the Great Divorce, the West got the brains, the East got the beauty. I don't believe that, though-- I really think that on this issue, the East is right, and the West is wrong, full stop.

When I consider it from a Catholic perspective, the thing that irritates me about the East is that they demand that the West abandon everything from 1054 to the present, which means everything from St. Francis to Fulton Sheen. I wonder if a version of the Western Rite existed which allowed converted Catholics to preserve their devotions and their post-schismatic saints it might do very well. Maybe not, but I expect that if Catholics were allowed to leave their corrupt hierarchy behind while holding on to beloved saints like Francis, Joan of Arc, Louis de Montfort, Therese of Lisieux and Bernadette of Lourdes they might abandon Rome in a hurry. I'd like to think so, anyway.

[methylethyl]

Oddly enough, there *are* some Western-Rite Orthodox.

In discussions of ending the schism from the Orthodox side, I have never seen anybody assert that everything after 1054 must be abandoned. Not once. The main bones of contention seem to be papal supremacy, papal infallibility, and the filioque.

Of course, Reader Bojan thinks the main impediment is Catholics' love for lace:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HNr43ObrFk

He may be onto something...

[readoldthings]

We're talking about two different things now, though.

Ending the schism is something I don't give much thought to, because I don't ever expect it to happen.

But with regard to Western Rite Orthodoxy, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that devotion post-schism saints is prohibited?

[methylethyl]

Ah, yeah, ending the schism seems unlikely.

I think the line on post-schism saints is... "we don't know about those, so for now we can't include them officially." It ends up being sort of a gray area in practice. I'm told there's a monastery in NY that used to be Catholic, but defected to Orthodoxy (New Skete?), and have reliable reports that St. Francis still features prominently in their iconography. I know a few Orthodox who surreptitiously include St. Francis as well (he's just very popular?). I know for sure that I have been to Orthodox liturgies where the new Coptic martyrs were recognized, and asked for their prayers. Is this strictly canonical? I don't know. But it is true that Orthodox commonly venerate holy men and women *in anticipation* of their general recognition as saints.

It's a weird area, and might be worth asking an actual Orthodox priest about.

[readoldthings]

That's interesting. I'm going to ask an Orthodox priest of my acquaintance about it.

[methylethyl]

I'd love to know his answer!

[readoldthings]

So far I've heard back from a friend of mine who's a cantor at a church in Texas. He said "it's an area where the Orthodox practice of 'veneration from the ground up' plays to an advantage" because post-schism saints won't show up on church calendars, but they might be part of private devotion or local churches. He mentioned an Hispanic Western rite church in his area that held akathist hymns on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

[methylethyl]

OK, glad to hear I'm not spouting complete nonsense!