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.