L'Insegnamento di San Tommaso
e le Difficoltà di Capire la Cattiveria del Pluralismo
A. Pluralism—Especially Americanist Pluralism—Causes Mental Illness
In 1978 I was working as the Eastern Director of the Philadelphia-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a national conservative organization. One of our European speakers told me that he had had a brief spell in the 1930s as a professor at the most important of the American Jesuit universities: Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. He explained to me that he had been fired when a student asked him what he thought about American Democracy and he responded by saying: “I cannot answer that question; I am a political philosopher, not a pyschiatrist”.
A few years later, it was precisely a psychiatrist who wished to discuss with me my by then notorious written attacks on Americanism and the Pluralism that plays an essential role in its ideological vision. He reiterated the Austrian’s assertion, insisting that Americanist Pluralism infallibly engendered a dreadful mental illness, and at deadly, highly infectious, plague-like levels. Given that the critique I had undertaken had swiftly gained me a reputation as a Marxist at best and a madman at worst, this professional man’s attribution of insanity to my opponents and their victims obviously consoled me considerably.
My task here today is three-fold. Most pertinent to my theme is determining whether Thomism can successfully diagnose and treat the dreadful disease in question. After speaking of a basic, historically rooted problem of Catholics in general, and our average modern Thomist “doctor” as well, I must then move on to present the mentally ill, Americanist Pluralist patient that he is expected to treat. Finally, we will explain why the patient suffering from this disease puts a major obstacle in the path of any successful diagnosis—and at the hands of a potentially handicapped physician—-through his utter incapability either of admitting that he is actually sick at all or bring himself to accept a cure. These last two last tasks, although secondary to my main theme, are nevertheless crucial to its full and proper understanding.
B. Catholic Parochialism and Thomism
Although I believe that the work of St. Thomas has proven to offer an absolutely indispensable theological and philosophical tool for the defense of the Catholic Faith, one that must always be cultivated by the Church, I am not convinced that that it can be employed successfully for curing those suffering from the Americanist Pluralist mental illness on its own. It needs the help—in fact, the prior help—of what should be considered an obvious ally, but one with whom it has actually had a troubled relationship since Thomism’s birth as part of the whole development of Scholasticism in the High Middle Ages. Allow me to explore this troubled relationship both historically as well as with reference to my own personal experience in order to underline its negative impact upon the battle against the deadly plague we have identified.
Students of theology speak of it as having two branches: speculative and positive. Speculative theology applies rational, logical principles to the explication of Revelation, a project that quickly realized that it had to cultivate Greek philosophical language and methodology to go about its work. Positive theology focuses on developing a full understanding of the substantive, material—and hence, “positive”—sources and voices of Christian Revelation—Scripture and the Church Fathers, along with the magisterial pronouncements and pastoral experience of the Mystical Body of Christ throughout time. Such a focus helps positive theologians understand both the underpinnings as well as the obstacles hindering or even possibly distorting the work of their speculative colleagues. Such positive theological labor has always involved an appreciation of the rhetorical use of language, literature, and history.
Any number of modern historians, the Thomist Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) among them, have worked hard to put the development of theology in alliance with philosophy, as well as its application to pastoral life, into its historical context without falling into the trap offered by historicism: an error that reduces the revealed teachings of the Faith to the status of a product of purely natural environmental factors and human action alone. Such historical studies have sharpened our awareness of the specific causes that have frequently promoted a dangerous parochialism within the intellectual life of the Catholic world; one leading many of the proponents of speculative and positive theology to excommunicate one another.1
This parochialism can be seen in a variety of forms. One of these was born from the medieval passion for the use of Aristotelian logic and that great ancient philosopher’s newly rediscovered scientific writings. It was also fed by the pressing need of thinkers appreciating these tools to respond to specific problems posed for the Faith by Arab commentators on Aristotle’s work, along with their European supporters in the universities of the High Middle Ages. This passion and need brought with them a notable speculative theological disdain for positive approaches to addressing Christian difficulties.
That disdain was irritating to the profoundly literary-minded Platonists of the earlier School of Chartres, their Renaissance Humanist successors, and the mystical writers of the later medieval period, all of whom were critical of what they deemed to be an exaggeratedly logical Aristotelian treatment of the Faith and its concerns. In many cases, this hardened from a positive philosophical and theological lamentation of a narrowing of Catholic thought—-and its apologetic and pastoral consequences—-to a total rejection of the value of the logical, Aristotelian speculative path.2
By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the exaggerated partisan battling among followers of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure worked mightily to discredit them both. This helped ensure a Nominalist domination of the philosophical world, with its root and branch rejection of the possibility of any rational definition of universal principles coming from both of the two warring Realist camps. Meanwhile, the mobilization of Realists, Nominalists, Humanists, and Mystics by the Papacy as well as by secular rulers in the service of the bitter power struggles of the age brought apologetic and pastoral damage to the cause of everyone now politically-engaged: speculative philosophers and theologians as well as that of their literary, rhetorical, and pastorally-minded positive competitors.
While proponents of speculative and positive theology continued to battle with one another at the Council of Trent, both, together, exercised a beneficial influence there, with new religious forces such as the Society of Jesus working to combine the achievements of Scholasticism and Renaissance Humanism. This productive union continued to have an influence into the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, however, there then proved to be a break in further, desirable Catholic development of positive historical studies until the nineteenth century.3
It was the presentation of the past as concocted by Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers that was to tighten an iron grip on the western mind, putting the orthodox Catholic perpetually on the defensive, incapable of organizing the framework of scholarly debate, fighting merely to be heard, much less harkened. Over time, as the victorious advance of the historical picture painted by Enlightenment word merchants came totally to dominate the intellectual world, many Catholics seem to have drawn the conclusion that all in-depth probing of the Church’s past must be rejected as innately counterproductive or at least easily subject to manipulation by enemies.4
On the other hand, Catholics also failed to give a faith-friendly explanation to history because of a corresponding tendency to abandon and even display open contempt for their traditional speculative theology. Yes, after its revival in the late fifteenth century, systematic thought also continued to thrive for a time in Catholic circles. But by the latter part of the seventeenth century, the cause of systematic, speculative thought was already once again under serious attack. Some of the Catholics engaged in work on positive theology fell prey to a disdain for traditional speculative theology reminiscent of the spirit of the latter Middle Ages and Renaissance. A great man like Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) indicates that he dutifully took his notes on the old, approved, scholastic thinkers while at university, but then tossed them instantly into the rubbish bin as useless once beginning intellectual labor in the “real world”. He therefore became one of the last to find history to be much more suitable to his apologetic efforts.5
Yet without a systematic, speculative, Catholic theology to guide it, positive theology yields nothing but raw data that still has to be molded by an organizing principle to make it fruitful. What happened when lesser minds and weaker spirits than possessed by the Bishop of Meaux tried to operate without such guidance? Who and what became the guides for learning about the corrective and transforming message of the Word and what was pastorally necessary for its translation from the realm of theory to that of practice? The answer should be clear. Under these circumstances, it was the organizing principle that came from the Zeitgeist that ruled the roost. And this, by the end of the seventeenth century, was happy to second the temptation to abandon Catholic speculative theology with all the means at its disposal.
C. The Liberal Pluralist Plague
Plague Pluralism has multiple roots in the efforts of a variety of badly divided Protestant societies to deal with the instability engendered by their heretical religious outlook and their fear that either Catholics or atheists could take advantage of this weakness. However, the truly effective modern stimulus to the outbreak of the Plague was that provided in England by the so-called Glorious Revolution, its victorious “Whig” faction, and their chief intellectual spokesman, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke embedded Pluralism in the broader political vision that we call Liberalism. And Liberalism, aided by the preaching of a battery of so-called “physico-theologians” who were enamoured of the experimental and technologically successful Baconian-Newtonian recipe for dealing with the natural world, created a seemingly irresistible steamroller of a vision for forging a path to a happier future for divided and suffering mankind. Unfortunately, the peaceful and glorious Baconian New Atlantis to which that superhighway supposedly leads is actually a Kingdom of Utopian Nihilism. It is driven by an anti-Christian magical spirit whose guiding principle is the triumph of meaningless, willful power; a Kingdom, once again, destined to drive both its rulers as well as its victims stark-raving mad.6
To make this path to madness yet more insane, the Glorious Revolution, the Whigs, John Locke, and the physico-theologians specialized in shaping Liberalism to look as though it were really actually traditionally minded—-“godly” and conservative in the best sense imaginable. What they argued was that their recipe for a peaceful and progressively ever more prosperous social order would offer protection for belief in God, along with that of the “real” spirit of the nation’s past, and this in two complementary ways.
Pluralism was a crucial ingredient in this recipe since protection of truly godly worship in the midst of Protestant denominational proliferation was to proceed by guaranteeing to all confessions a religious tolerance. This would entail backing away from public insistence upon adhesion to the supposedly ideologically-charged demands of dogmatic Christianity—especially Catholic Christianity—-on the one hand and the danger of a dogmatic Atheism that could profit from religious confusion on the other. Let a plurality of denominational Christian flowers, all tolerant of one another, bloom! Physico-theologians told believers that there was no need for them to worry that the consequence would be religious mayhem, because Baconian, Newtonian observation and experimentation with nature yielded infallible natural laws obviously proving the universe’s dependence upon the hand of the Creator God. Moreover, the fruits of such work would strengthen the practice of a Christian morality that was now unchangeably embedded as “common sense” in the minds of men, offering believers the practical technological means, finally, to fulfill Christ’s law of charity by healing the sick and feeding the hungry on a mass scale in the process.
Meanwhile, Liberalism was said to ensure an open recognition and enhancement of a “traditional” English three-fold division of historical powers responsible for the governance of the land that would make it much more difficult for the tyrannical misuse of the authority of the State. Executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government would check and balance one another for the benefit of the common good of all. This would add to the healthy Pluralism preventing narrow sectarian vengeance guaranteed by religious tolerance the further assistance needed to rein in the trampling of the historic personal rights of individual Englishmen attempted by recent would-be absolutist rulers. These tyrants were depicted as innovaters, violating the proud historical traditions of the nation.
But the real effect of Whig Liberal Pluralism is the slow destruction of all that is traditional in the history of Christian England, beginning with any serious faith-driven impact on the definition of “the common good”. Religious tolerance frees so many warring denominations that even if the Liberal order of things did not outrightly prohibit the dominance of one of them, they must all so “check and balance” one another that the impact of each could only be felt in their specific, parochial “clubhouses”; not in the public sphere.
Additionally, the natural confirmation of the Creator God supposedly uncovered by the harmony of natural laws does not logically point to the revealed Christian Trinity, but much more easily to a rational Deist clockmaker, and one whose continuing hand in guiding the universe atheists could claim would eventually be explained away through further scientific observation and experimentation. Pour comble de malheur, Bacon’s anti-Christian spirit—seen in his admission that the magicians had it right in their understanding that the true purpose of knowledge is simply to gain power—-gives its blessing to whatever can be done through observation and experimentation with the natural world. This must inevitably permit a great deal more than a Christian morality said to be embedded in an unchangeable natural “common sense” had ever allowed in the past. But as a change in moral judgment takes place, it is effectively masqueraded by the Whig prohibition of looking back to past dogmatic judgements to demonstrate that betrayal. Such an enterprise is strictly prohibited lest it reintroduce regrettably “divisive” religious warfare into the body politic.
Simultaneously, the traditional authority even of the already more limited divided powers of the Liberal State is insidiously subverted still further by the Lockean Whig vision. It is clear that this separation of powers was devised in order to allow a victorious, property-obsessed private oligarchy to go about its materialist “business as usual” without the interference of an emasculated government. Denied religious dogma as a guide, that elite has only the “law of nature” to instruct it regarding the common good. But this, in fact, amounts to very little as a guide, leaving the changing will of the oligarchy as its own teacher.
Dr. Juan Fernando Segovia demonstrates magisterially how the words of Locke regarding “natural law” and “the common good” end up meaning something quite different in reality than was traditionally the case. Aside from the Baconian power distortion of nature’s purpose—which applies here as well—-Locke’s Nominalism disallows any universal philosophical principles from making an impact upon their definition, his rational“natural order” being completely individualistic and totally dependent upon sensual stimuli for its understanding of life. Human Reason is thereby immeasurably cheapened. Locke’s “natural law” and “the common good” that emerges therefrom thus become what is noted above: whatever the sensual desires of the individuals composing the dominant oligarchy determine that they should be, limited only by a conventional agreement baptized as a “godly common sense”. Any remaining Christian and Socratic roots are continually eaten away at by the growing power over nature that its Baconian technological exploitation permits, even though traditional Christendom would have condemned such erosion as sinful. But, once again, the changed meaning of Christianity, like that of natural law, is taken as the true one, since the alteration cannot be investigated and denounced publicly.7
As the stronger members of the oligarchy—in the first instance, the industrialists and financiers of England and any other nations adopting the Liberal Pluralist model—turn on their former, weaker “allies” to achieve their greater advantage in a general war or all against all, the march towards the triumph of the most powerful will moves inexorably forward. Their only real competitors for power are the outright ideological madmen whose individualism and vision of a utopian “New Atlantis” future takes a different but equally materialist direction than that of the philistine and dreamless capitalists. A willingness to use more violent means to achieve their goals than their opponents would ever conceive of employing against their enemies has proven to give the ideologues a different kind of strength that keeps the outcome of the war of all against all that is unleashed a regularly changing and undecided one.
Let us remember, before moving forward, that what one modern writer has labelled a “formula of exclusion” worked to direct men and women away from the “ungodly”, “divisive”, and “socially tasteless” threats posed by dogmatic teachings and philosophical rationalism that could unmask the entire fraud being perpetrated upon them, keeping any disturbing critique trapped within the impotent private denominational “clubhouses”.8 Bit by bit, the victims of this fraud come to believe that their exclusion from public impact is actually their best means of protecting a Christian vision that will eventually be dismantled by free individuals within their clubhouses as well as in the public sphere. Any maintenance of a committment simultaneously both to the lies of an ever changing Liberal Pluralism as well as to the embattled and contradictory eternal truths of Christianity condemns these victims to the development of what St. Cyril of Alexandria (376-444), referring to the jointly Christian and pagan influences over the lives of the members of his own late ancient flock, often called a dypsychia: a soul divided into two parts: in other words, to a mental illness.
D. The Americanist Pluralist Plague
All of this false “traditionalism”, productive of dypsychia, was inherited by the American colonies and translated into the modus operandi of the Constitution of the United States. The subversive governing spirit of that seemingly “conservative” document is well explained by James Madison (1751-1836), its chief author, in the extremely influential Federalist Papers that he, along with several other “Founding Fathers”, wrote in order to promote the acceptance by the various states of the federal Constitution. Here, one sees that the founding oligarchy viewed the machinery of that document—-guided by its powerful naturalist, individualist, but unmentioned substructure—-as a means of so dividing potentially threatening private corporate religious and secular communal authorities so “multiplying factions” preventing their effective action as to allow the existing elite to remain in power in the public sphere. 9 This indeed proved to be a valid assumption with respect to maintaining the dominance of some kind of naturalist oligarchy, but not the exact composition and direction of that earth-bound elite: whether a purely rapacious material power or an insanely ideological one.
Liberal Pluralism in the United States faced greater problems than its British counterpart. The Constitution spoke not of religious tolerance but of religious freedom. It did so with respect to many more denominations than in the birthplace of Liberalism, including some militant Protestant ones and that of the fearfully dogmatic Catholics as well. Small in number to begin with, immigration drastically increased a “divisive” Papist population that Locke himself had considered to be incapable of being “integrated” into the Liberal Pluralist system. Waves of Jews arrived to intensify the work of integration.10
Moreover, almost all of the migrants coming especially after 1848 had little or no ethnic, historical experience in common with the Anglo-Saxons. As time went on, migrants also included atheistic socialists and anarchists, looked upon with special horror by a capitalist industrial oligarchy rendered much more powerful due to the defeat of the southern plantation aristocracy in the Civil War. Finally, industrialisation and the expansion of the frontier throughout the course of the whole of the nineteenth century made pulling up roots to go to the city or the West a constant option to Americans, upsetting the peaceful stability of the population and intensifying the practical divise effects of a totally free—-and potentially radical—-individualism.
Such an increase of possible stimuli to instability made the hunt for some stronger social glue to “integrate” an ever more “divisive” American nation much more pressing in the United States than in Britain. Benjamin Franklin had already suggested the need for a “civil religion” to serve as a unifying tool in the less divided America of the foundation years—-something which had also been seen as being essential in “pluralist” ancient societies ranging from that of the New Empire in Egypt to the Hellenistic kingdoms succeeding Alexander the Great, and the Roman ecumene as well. Abraham Lincoln developed and intensified Franklin’s argument. A variety of worried oligarchs and ideological defenders of Pluralist Liberalism in America then combined together to build on Franklin and Lincoln’s ideas to complete the creation of the civil religion that historians call “Americanism” to fill the gap.11
My argument is that the much more urgent needs of Americanist Pluralism creates a much more militant socio-political system claiming to fulfill the set of utterly impossible contradictory goals it inherited from English Liberalism. Revealng its Nominalist, Protestant, Lockean, and Baconian-Newtonian roots, this system argues, on the one hand, that it offers an unbounded freedom for the vast diversity of all peoples imaginable living in one and the same land: hence, its thorough-goingPluralism. On the other, it harkens back to that English Civil War engendered passion for restoration of an order that precisely such unbridled religious and secular individualism inevitably troubles. This passion was translated by the propertied American oligarchy and its “word merchants” into a committment to a stable union on the basis of the sole glue that Protestantism’s insistence upon the “total depravity” of all human persons after Original Sin had already prepared them to believe practically feasible. That glue was an unredeemed “business as usual” pursuit by every group and by every individual of the same drab, naturalist, materialist ends. A “tumultous monotony” is therefore the final product of the supposedly unbounded freedom given to an immense range of diverse peoples, their corporate expressions, and their individual members.
What Americanists came up with to ensure a belief in the contradictory dogmas underlying and producing this “tumultuous monotony” is a comprehensive Faith that must never be examined rationally—a fideistic Faith. This faith employs the English Liberal Pluralist “formula of exclusion” to block religious dogmatists and rationalist ideologues from questioning what it teaches. But it goes much further than that. It is a Faith whose jealous God transmits His message through demigods; through the prophetic “will of the Founding Fathers” and the foundation documents they produced. That prophetic will and those sacred documents were said to endow the United States with a “divine mission”: but, ironically, one that is both openly proclaimed and vigorously denied at the same time!
America’s “divine mission” built upon the intense messianism of the Puritain settlers in New England, the gradual secularization of whose Protestant convictions was a prelude for what came next. Their vision of the salvific role of the New World was diverted away from that of constructing a Christian “city on a hill”—-based upon securing a belief in nature’s total depravity—-that would shine a religious light upon the benighted Old World. America’s redemptive role was now that of offering a “city on a hill” whose model pointed the way to a paradisical future of individual liberty and peaceful, prosperous stability for all of the diverse groups of otherwise oppressed peoples the world over; a beacon light which, in Lincoln’s words, provided all of mankind its “last and best hope”. Outside of its reedeeming embrace, there could be nothing but the weeping and gnashing of teeth: tyranny, poverty, and unending, impotent, divisive conflict.
The unlimited hope promised by this unquestioning, fideistic Faith is painted into the cupola of the Capitol Building in the nation’s capital, where Washington presides in the place of Christ or the Virgin in a modified Baroque/Classical splendor. It is taught in schools, driven home in the incessant propaganda offered by national holidays and the ceremonies and speeches connected with them, in political party documents, in pilgrimages to shrines where eternal flames burn before the Founding Documents and likenesses of the Founding Demigods. Its sense of unlimited hope and pious, messianic mission is perhaps best illustrated by the poem of Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), a Jewish activitist, part of which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.12
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she {the Statue} with silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
But despite all this, the unquestioning, fideistic Faith in the divine mission of America to provide unlimited individual freedom and secure peace, unity, and prosperity also simultaneously demands adherence to the belief that it is not a Faith at all; that it is simply a practical, pragmatic, historically generated “method” for ensuring liberty and stability. And its practical, pragmatic, historically generated “method” is the last and best hope even for every already existing “Faith” to protect itself against radical atheist assault and prosper! Americanism coopts the role of St. Michael the Archangel as traditional religon’s chief “defender in battle” against the wickedness and snares of all devils imaginable.
In short, the propagandists of Americanist Liberal Pluralism employ on behalf of their unquestioning fideistic Faith the tools that were first utilized by their Sophist forbears against the Socratics in Ancient Greece. Sophists, like these modern word merchants, sought to prohibit any rational Socratic correction and transformation of a marred natural order. They, too diverted men and women away from any serious thought critiquing their approach by claiming that they possessed the one, sole means of defending True Philosophy: the philosophy that did nothing other than secure the victory of an unquestioning, practical, pragmatic “business as usual” mentality. They, too, used a “formula of exclusion” to depict their thoughtful opponents as dangers both to Truth and to the peace of the Established Order, forcing them into impotent “clubhouses” to continue their useless mind games privately if they wished to survive.
Socratic thinkers, such as Plato, brilliantly analyzed the tactics utilized by these ancient forbears of the Americanist Liberal Pluralist message to prevent the mind, the heart, and the soul from soaring upwards to the light, both rational and ultimately divine. Plato understood the power of the Sophist “knack” for rhetorically feeding the unchecked “bread and circus” desires of the unredeemed populace at large to serve their cause. He also grasped the immense difficulty faced by real philosophers in their hunt to find and then lead men to “the Father of Lights”. This was a project that only the revelation and grace coming from the Incarnation could bring to fruition, making of Christianity—Catholic Christianity—an infinitely greater danger to the machinations of the word merchants of all ages than their original Socratic enemies could have ever dreamed of being.13
E. The Zeitgeist, American Pluralism, & the Captivity of Catholics
One of the glories of the historians who emerged from the nineteenth century Romantic Movement was their demonstration of the complex mixture of intellectual, practical, and rhetorical factors creating the immensely powerful spirit of a particular environment in any given time period—a Zeitgeist—the liberation from whose claws is very, very difficult indeed. I would argue that the Zeitgeist produced through Americanist Liberal Pluralism is the most difficult to escape of all. It closes and confirms nature in its fallen state, building its political and social system on the basis of a willful sinfulness that must never be examined lest its errors be unveiled. It has thus created a world whose supposed “natural laws” are actually savage “calls of the wild”.
Through their assistance, the already powerful mystery of iniquity works its curious charms much more effectively than in a society where its insidious effects are battled. These laws and the institutions they inform train men to view the truly religious, truly rational, and the solidly good to be pointless and insipid, while ignorance, lies, and downright filth are welcomed as something wise, beautiful, and almost irresistibly attractive. A serious invitation to investigate the foundations of the naturalist vision is, in contrast, dismissed as being nothing other than insane propaganda of precisely the sort that the Americanist Liberal Pluralist Zeitgeist itself both successfully peddles and forces its customers to purchase.
Bewitched and obedient populations therefore automatically reject the responsibility for evils that can easily be attributed to it. Indeed, the more patent and blameworthy the disasters that it foments and perpetrates have actually become, the greater their vehemence in rejecting its involvement in their genesis. Whole nations thereby open themselves happily to new and still more dubious explanations for why human woes are caused, never attributing them to the true villains standing behind them but, rather, to the real friends of mankind—with the Word, His message, His Church, Catholics, and all those rational and corporate forces allied with them in opposing the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” at the top of the list. The Americanist Liberal Pluralist vision thus profitably continues to offer “cures” which merely deepen the illness it has spread ever more widely across the globe.
Attempting to incite anyone to escape the influence of any Zeitgeist, along with the institutions and mentality it shapes, is an immensely complicated affair. It is easy to arouse people to outrage over the failure of their fellow men who did not reject the Zeitgeist of another, past era that they themselves do not have to live in and confront on a daily basis. In contrast, it is extraordinarily more tedious to get them to step back and maintain a critical distance from their own time and place. Each and every Zeitgeist, good and bad, commandeers the whole of the ballroom in which the pilgrim dance of life unfolds and the new steps necessary to performing it well are learned.
But the Americanist Liberal Pluralist inspired Zeitgeist of this last stage of modern naturalism buries men and women in a life guided by unnatural structures of dependence that have been proven to provide the most effective form of anti-Word obedience training in the history of the world. This Zeitgeist transforms the dance of life into that especially bizarre and exhausting danse macabre that everyone must join in executing throughout the course of each and every day. And the debilitating work of that danse macabre prevents its participants from opening their eyes to seeing, learning, and doing anything that might pull them away from its inhuman and self-destructive twirl.
The influence of the Liberal Pluralism of the more “godly” English (and then Americanist Liberal Pluralist) Enlightenment led Catholic thinkers of all sorts from the eighteeenth century onwards to fit the results of their positive or speculative conclusions into the system created by their naturalist enemies and present them as the obvious Diktat of “common sense” under the title of “natural theology”. Work upon a distinct Catholic vision of history based on its factual data or of a speculative system based upon rational explication of the revealed message was then rendered superfluous and downright unthinkable. Positive and speculative theologians of the Word Incarnate might continue their “clubhouse” labors if they wished, but it was the “natural theologians”—in practice, the Liberals, scientists, physico-theologians, and other propagandists of the Moderate Enlightenment and their Americanist heirs—who would explain to them how their work could be used and what it actually signified. Whatever this might be said to mean, it definitely could never indicate anything supporting a vision of life that called for correcting nature and transforming man and society in Christ.
Perhaps most instructive in this regard was the seemingly irresistible attraction of John Locke. French Jesuits and influential Roman academic circles began to revere the teacher of religious tolerance and doctrinal destruction as an oracle—not because they grasped the fullness of his argument and agreed with it but because he was presented to them as the man most suitable for destroying Descartes, Cartesian mathematical ideology, and the Spinozan atheism and mechanical fatalism deemed by many to be their inevitable by-product; in short, because he was presented as a God fearing, modern empiricist in the line of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas; and this in the company of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton. Unfortunately, the more that the approach of the Liberal Pluralist Enlightenment was accepted and imitated, the more that Catholics lost a sense of the supernatural character of their Faith and what it is they most needed to do to fend off intensified attacks on its doctrinal integrity and mission. And yet given the ultimate illogic of the Lockean Liberal position, it was readily subject to a radicalization that could only end by serving the plans of atheists and libertines, disguised or open, as well.14
Thankfully, the nineteenth century saw a Catholic revival of enormous proportions, one that strengthened a reinvigoration both of speculative as well as positive theology, as well as a revitalization of all of the liturgical, devotional, and mystical tools of pastoral activity abandoned to follow the humdrum guidelines of Poor Richard’s Almanach. Activist movements were founded that appeared to be charged with a zeal for constructing the Social Kingship of Christ in all of its fullness.
Nevertheless, as the Catholic sun seemed to rise high in the sky, the traditional “noon day devils” also emerged once again. Partisan battling between speculative and positive schools of thought, with different conceptions of what pastoral activity required, intensified anew. Disciples and teachers of sometimes much more nuanced masters, as active in the front lines of education and guidance of the faithful as they were ill-prepared for the task, demanded a parochial exclusivity for their “team”. Political influences dictating choices limiting the impact of a theoretical committment to Christ as King for “practical”, “prudential” reasons protecting narrow clerical interests also reentered the picture. These political influences once again aimed the dominant forces in the Church—-the Papacy included—-down the direction of fighting the radical atheism of Marxist Socialism through a “practical” embrace of the Moderate Enlightenment; of Liberal Pluralism; of Americanist Liberal Pluralism; of the “Godly Party of Freedom and Order”. Acceptance of papal policies in this regard was intensified by the committment to an exaggerated Ultramontanism that blessed every “practical”, prudential” papal decision whatsoever as an infallible magisterial pronouncement.
Americanist Liberal Pluralism’s hold over the Zeitgeist was magnified exponentially, in different ways, through its fomenting of a terrified reaction to the advance of atheist Communism in the wake of the Second World War and its vigorous colonization of a prostrate Europe. Sad to say, the effectiveness of this propaganda, from cradle to grave, has proven to guarantee that the full power of Sophist mockery of those obsessed with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the foolish hobgoblin of little minds”15—intellectual consistency—-has caused even such an historically powerful force as the Roman Catholic Church to praise the consequent destruction of its corporate authority and existence as the Mystical Body of Christ as “her last, best means” of protecting herself; to accept her emasculation with joy and confess her past dogmatic sins with humble repentance. Its power was increased still further by the collapse of the “competition” with the fall of the Soviet Bloc and a still more arrogant assertion of the “exceptionalism” of “the American Way”, backed by a military force claiming freedom from any moral code in fighting “terrorism” due to the tyrannical demands of the fideistic Faith whose existence it simultaneously denies.16
F. Thomism and the Escape From the Plague
Let us note that no one seeking liberation from this Zeitgeist needs to worry about the availability of the materials needed to regain knowledge of the full meaning of the Incarnation and its message of building the Social Kingship of Christ. All of the information required for a solid Catholic Enlightenment is readily accessible in much of the globe, out in the open air for any interested party to consult at will. Every text that could demonstrate, intellectually, what is essential to Catholicism, what is transitory, and what has elbowed its way into the Christian enterprise simply to obtain an easier ride to its own peculiar destination lies at hand. Examination of what they have to say indicates how failure to be rigorous in relating pragmatic action to eternal truth has regularly led the faithful to indulge narrow, time-bound, and often self-destructive concerns that are ultimately not in harmony with the Faith at all; concerns that have resulted in hasty and dangerous alliances with predatory “friends” and retreat from their ill-considered embrace only to run headlong into still another disastrous tryst with different but equally mismatched lovers.
It is of course true that digesting all this readily available knowledge is a task that requires a systematic, disciplined, and patient labor. But, unfortunately, the first problem that the a Catholic freedom fighter faces is not that of persisting at the intellectual labor involved in systematically learning and digesting the full message of the Word. The problem of liberation is primarily that of breaking the hold of non-rational influences convincing a man that it is foolish to begin to undertake the work of Catholic enlightenment in the first place. The chief barricade that a man seeking liberation faces today is that everything in his environment works to stifle his efforts to open the book of the wisdom of the Word, take it to heart, put it into effective practice, and thereby also uncover the errors and the diabolical trickery of their willful Americanist Liberal Pluralist oppressors.
What this means is that the freedom fighter’s battle is not primarily a struggle against any substantive ideas that lie behind the contemporary Pluralist Empire of the World. Rationally speaking, the defenders of that order are paper tigers. Rather, theirs is a conflict with a psychological system that provides men, from cradle to grave, with a form of “obedience training” that short circuits questioning about the cave that they live in and its intellectual foundations; a system, once again, that ensures contracting a mental illness.
It is crucial to emphasize this point to avoid the illusion that the better armed with rational arguments the liberators might be, the greater their chance of besting the influence of the representatives of the Zeitgeist. There is absolutely no question but that such rational arguments are necessary and of immense value in and of themselves. Nevertheless, strategically at least, they are not as important for the initial awakening of most captive men to the importance of opening their minds, hearts, and souls to the message of the captive Word. What ails the bulk of mankind has to be dealt with first by removing the psychological obstacles to confronting the search for the truth. And this is a much more holistic activity than that involved in ratiocination.
No Catholic freedom fighter should be surprised by this greater environmental significance. If he himself has been awakened to the full message of the Incarnation, he already must know that dependent, created beings in a dependent, created nature—rational beings though they may be—require all the assistance that God has given them in order to understand the meaning of their existence and to dance the dance of life well. He must realize that it is through the exceedingly variegated and powerful “teachings” of literally absolutely everything in their daily environment that men build their will and courage; the will and the courage that they need not only to open their eyes to examine and digest the message of the Word that lies readily available before them but also to believe what their minds tell them that they must take seriously so as to follow their Faith and their Reason through to their logical practical conclusions.
Any believer who has fastened the Americanist Liberal Pluralist blindfold over his eyes will automatically reject the slightest criticism of its precepts as the work of the devil. For what could possibly go wrong in this system, the best system, the only just system, and therefore the Most Catholic System? What could possibly go wrong when the post-conciliar Church herself has blessed its God-given methodology for defending the peace and freedom of mature, sophisticated, rational modern peoples? Why even bother to ask whether one might find criticisms and warnings against Pluralism in past Christian teaching when one knows, by definition, that Pluralism is the sole healthy and practical force to rely on today? It is because Pluralist Fideism has been so effective in stopping up the ears of its cult followers that each new assault, each new “sack of Rome” which ought to have been the final eye-opening disaster, seems to have done little to awaken Catholics to the major cause of their impotent and even non-existent defense of their own heritage.
If a Catholic freedom fighter wishes to employ all of the various tools western man has developed over the course of the ages for discussing the theoretical validity of Pluralism’s definition of peace, freedom, and the ultimate meaning of individual and social life, all of these tools, one by one—-including theology, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology—-will be dismissed as both impractical and intrinsically dangerous. A desire to use them will be said to illustrate nothing other than a lack of “obvious common sense” on the part of the foolish, impractical, “loser” critic. Do such tools help one to maintain public order? Do they assist in making a killing on the stockmarket? On the contrary, all they do is bring up disruptive fantasies encouraging divisiveness and disturbing profit-making in the process. And like a father prohibited from objecting to his daughter’s betrothal to a scoundrel until he could produce someone perfectly suitable to make her a counter-proposal, the critic will be pressed to offer solutions to absolutely every single problem of contemporary society before the slightest theoretical questioning of Pluralism as such would be permitted.
If, on the other hand, a freedom fighter seeks to demonstrate the long-term practical dangers of the Pluralist mystique, and especially its degeneration into a reign of “might makes right” disguised as the victory of freedom, its totally unquestionable “godliness” will once again be called up by incredulous believers to smother the dialogue. The critic will be accused of lacking faith in the obvious Catholic nature, language, and mandate of the system…as revealed through the infallible will of its God-loving Founders and their latest batch of effective word merchants. Here, the Catholic liberator will be condemned for his cynical rejection of the God-given “last and best hope” for securing individual freedom and social peace---whose nature, once again, he cannot discuss---and his consequent lack of charity for suffering humanity.
Should he take up the challenge and return to the realm of theory, demonstrating that it is an acceptance of Pluralism as an irrational, fideistic Faith that prevents a practical sociological analysis of the purely materialist conception of life and the victory of a willful oligarchy it ensures, he will be dragged back down to the “true grit” pragmatic level once again. With complete disregard for the change in tactic and argument, he will be assaulted for his childish naiveté; his hopeless idealism in the midst of a depraved, jungle universe whose history is that of a war of all against all. Surely only a Catholic “loser” envious of the success of his betters would think that life was susceptible to guidance by his utopian spiritual babble! Gorgias and Isocrates would not have been able to express themselves better.
But what if our freedom fighter persists in his position and emphasizes the fact that he has been the subject of an absurdly irrational attack, accused simultaneously of being a faithless cynic on the one hand and both impractically naïve and viciously envious on the other? First, he will be mollified, told that everyone appreciates the fight for the indefensible cause that he has made, and warned that he must now be a nice boy and go out and make some money. If this last “good-willed” strategy does not do the job of silencing the troublemaker, why, then, he will be condemned as the kind of “public nuisance” promoting unpleasant, logical consequences of first principles whom Marsilius’ Defender of the Peace would have been forced to silence, whom David Hume would have sent to play billiards or take a warm shower to render traquil, and whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, as we have already seen, would have chastised for cultivating the “foolish hobgoblins” of a “petty mind”.
Contemporary word merchants benefitting from the system will be summoned to find as many “appropriate words” as possible to brutalize him as an Enemy of the People. Truth will not matter in their campaign against him. He will perhaps be dismissed as an obvious lunatic. More effectively still, given that Pluralism fought the good war against the Fascists, he will also be denounced as a Nazi; as an anti-Semite; as a paladin of genocide. Terrorism having finally begun to supplant Nazism as Pluralism’s current manifestation of pure evil, the critic will also most likely be painted as a spiritual ally of “Islamo-Fascism”. With this application of the “Formula of Exclusion”, his expulsion from polite society will be complete.
Few Catholic freedom fighters will have the stamina to reach this final stage of unsuccessful dialogue. Should a hardy remnant maintain the passion to fight the good fight still longer, it, too, will eventually be forced to abandon the struggle due to the demands of the materialist environment created by the system in which, after all, it still has to function. That environment mandates work and ever more work in order merely to survive. Even the strongest opponent, over time, will simply be too exhausted to contemplate indulging the luxury of criticizing Pluralism in the few hours of repose left to him by its “free” economic order at the end of the day.
Hence, Americanist Pluralism, the Defender of the Peace, mankind’s “last, best hope”, retains its undeserved image and can continue to wreak its all too predictable havoc again and again and again, in country after hapless country, throughout the Empire of the World. Its danse macabre continues to move men relentlessly along, killing their will and their courage to consult even the most clear and open text revealing the message of Christ placed directly under their eyes. Every step in its danse macabre pushes them away from reading the book of Faith and Reason.
The directors of this debilitating game complete their work of diversion from the Word Incarnate by battering into the Catholic mind the conviction that the music of the danse macabre, which relentlessly transmits the message of “nature as is”, actually provides the best tune for the true dance of life to sway to in its pilgrim march to God. This is the Catholic music, they insist. This is the Catholic message. You have been privileged to live in the most glorious Catholic Moment in history. Under these circumstances, the slightest glance away from the back wall of the ballroom for further light from outside its precincts becomes a sin against human Reason and the Holy Ghost at one and the same time. All this is accomplished with an effectiveness that surpasses anything that the supporters of the Sacred Empire or the Most Christian Kings ever even distantly approximated. So the participants in the danse macabre twirl on and on, and its impresarios pursue their willful goals as their victims exhaust their bodies and deaden their minds, hearts, and souls.
Allow me to offer but a single example. I know of one good bishop—and there are many more like him—who delivers excellent public talks on Catholic catechesis. The Catholic Magisterium is honored in every one of his words. Still, he prides himself on being a practical, pastoral, post-conciliar leader. Therefore, his diocese is filled with practical programs of the kind suggested by the Americanist Liberal Pluralist Magisterium.
But exactly the same type of irrational enthusiasts and willful bureaucrats who dominate unorthodox dioceses administer those of his supposedly orthodox one. Both programs and administrators are focused upon the latest sexual obsessions, the most up-to-date commercial gimmicks, or the best in anti-authoritarian democratic changes. The bishop does not think of stopping their antics, since he, too, has been shaped by Pluralism. He fears that actions against them would render him naïve, impractical, undemocratic and divisive. To prove that he has no sympathy for such evil tendencies, he goes out of his way actually to encourage their projects. The faithful then learn from such programs and such stewards exactly what it is that the bishop’s orthodox statements really mean in daily life: absolutely nothing. And should the faithful try to build their Catholicism upon the innumerable recommendations of diocesan bureaus and spokesmen, they will never have time to investigate Catholic Tradition as a whole, to see whether or not these “practical” projects are actually as good as they are told.
If this contradiction is pointed out to the bishop, he often reacts vigorously: but in a way that aids the Pluralist cause and hurts Catholic Tradition still further. He calls attention to his personal orthodoxy, which no one doubts, but which is simply not sufficient to deal with the problems of the diocese. He acts as though his charism as bishop guarantees the legitimacy of pastoral methods that cannot really lay claim to infallibility. If one insists upon the distinction of doctrine and prudential action and continues the critique, making reference to a variety of arguments from Catholic theology, philosophy, history, psychology and sociology to demonstrate what is happening around him, a fideist Pluralist bell goes off in his head. He dismisses his critics on Pluralist grounds, for closed-minded, divisive attitudes; for lack of "faith" in the methods dictated by the council and its “spirit.” He points to the Pope, who points to the Council. Their statements reiterating Catholic doctrine are called forth to assure the critics to have no fear. One might then try to indicate, yet again, that it is not the words of the council, the pope, and the bishop himself that are under question, at least when these merely repeat orthodox teaching, but the practical, contradictory methodology accompanying and destroying them.
Still, once this point has been reached, further discussion is hopeless. Nothing is permitted to bring into question the degree to which such methodology is de fide and valid. No rational evidence of what has transpired, in practice, by following it, is allowed in court. The bishop insists upon defending the Truth and simultaneously encouraging its enemies to subvert it. The new age of liberty and reason within the Church requires Catholics to abandon the free use of their Faith and their reason to complain of the destruction of the diocese. At best, the bishop laments the manner in which some people reject “true” Pluralism and deny the Catholic Church’s right to have her full message heard. But when he does so it is he who is deceived. Many of the very servants he defends are active in smothering that full message and working, consciously or unconsciously, to make sure that Catholics do the only thing that "true" Pluralism really permits them to do: emasculate and destroy themselves. Dypsychia is what triumphs.
We are now in a position once again to return to the main question with which we are concerned here today: can the speculative theology of Thomism serve as the liberating tool bringing the plague of Americanist Pluralism, with its Nominalist, Protestant, Whig, Liberal, Lockean, Baconian-Newtonian, physico-theological, individualist and magical utopianism to an end? And once again, the answer to that question is “not on its own, and not to begin with”.
There is only one path to removing the blindfold of the Zeitgeist welded onto the eyes of men by Americanist Liberal Pluralism: the adoption, as good catechists and evangelists, of every intellectual and pastoral tool at our disposal. Rational thought cannot bring the crucial awakening that is needed. Citing the Summa alone cannot do the trick. As I said here last year, this is why I decided that I needed to write a novel to explain how American Catholics seeking to escape the mental illness assured by the danse macabre of their twisted environment and the word-merchant musicians incessantly blaring out the message of its spirit. I expressed all my astonishment over the staying power of this diseased Zeitgeist in the work that I called Periphery: A Novel of Rage and Reason.17
Now it is absolutely true that a number of neo-Thomists whose work I have studied did yeoman service in attacking what was not yet called Pluralism in their assaults on Liberalism and even the first stages of Americanism in the nineteenth century. And it is also absolutely true that the nineteenth century editors of La Civiltà Cattolica who were immensely important to that Thomist revival deeply appreciated an intellectual and pastoral “universalism”.18
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the reentry of a partisan, parochial spirit by the time of the Modernist Crisis, badly weakened this intellectual and pastoral “universalism”. Yes, and once again, men like Etienne Gilson did not fall prey to this temptation. But that did not prevent footsoldiers of Neo-Thomism from looking askance at such an effort in general, leading to their assault upon the importance history and all of the tools that history uses, with speculative philosophy and theology and logic coming from their school of thought being treated more and more treated as the exclusive acceptable Catholic instrument. Even the effort to place St. Thomas within his historical context as an actual critic of unquestioning, logical Aristotelianism, or to argue that there were issues that had emerged later that might have to be addressed in a different manner than those of Scholastics attacking Avicenna and Averroes, was made to look as though it were a progressive, historicism; a subterfuge of anti-Catholic Modernism and its fellow-travellers. But without history and history’s examination of the influence of every factor in human life—with literature as a valuable rhetorical and psychologically awakened ally—the immense power of the Zeitgeist over one’s exclusive approach was entirely missed. Exposure to the intellectual and pastoral failure thereby engendered certainly characterized my own experience when I entered the embryonic Traditionalist Movement at the tender age of nineteen in 1970.
In general, almost all of the Catholics who were disturbed by the Council and its consequences whom I encountered at that time were also dismayed by the secular disturbances simultaneously unhinging their contemporary Americanist society. Their outrage and bewilderment over the lack of charity displayed by their former and now incomprehensible shepherds, was compounded by their anger at the loss of the residual assistance, still significant in the 1960s, that had been provided for the Faith from the secular educational establishment. This had turned significantly more radical in its orientation and was therefore no longer trusted by them.
My fellow budding Traditionalists tended to react to the most immediate threats confronting them on both the religious as well as the secular front with one form or another of a crippling “tunnel vision” damaging to a fully conscious and complete defense of Faith and Country. They tended to see salvation as involving a return to a Thomism and a Patriotism towards which they were traditionally disposed and about which they had “good feelings”. A Thomist “tunnel vision” was not sufficient to awaken them to the dangers that had come and would continue to come from the Americanist Liberal Pluralist Zeitgeist now guiding Pope and Council on the one hand and crippling a valid definition of their patriotism on the other.
Thomism had certainly not saved Jacques Maritain from finding hope not just in the teachings of Aquinas but also in the unfounded “optimism” of Gaudium et Spes and Pope Paul VI. The same was true of practically every other “conservative” Thomist whom I met. Such thinkers would point, with full, logical legitimacy to the literal “words” of conciliar documents and the Novus Ordo. Meanwhile, they refused to investigate the historical prelude and environment of the Council years and the personalities responsible for shaping them the way they absolutely needed to in order to see what the Zeitgeist demanded those words be interpreted to mean.
That interpretation, was, ironically but not illogically, either militantly Americanist or militantly much more radical and anti-Americanist in character. This was due to the inevitable opening that Lockean individualism has historically given in Liberal Pluralist societies—which now included the Roman Church in their number—- to the sucessful progress of willful radical positions of all kinds. Such radical positions were reflected in teachings imposed upon the Catholic faithful in the name of the Holy Spirit; teachings that made conservative Thomist-expressed interpretations— totally orthodox as they were—-utterly unacceptable and incomprehensible to the postconciliar Catholic mainstream population, which ignored them entirely.
Consultation of history, psychology, sociology, and literature would all have demonstrated how Americanist pressure had been exercised to create a Liberal Pluralist friendly Council which was also easily manipulated by supporters of a more radical Modernist, Marxist, and Third World focused Personalism to emasculate Church authority and make everything except orthodox Catholicism look as though it were the path to Catholic victory. It would also have revealed to Thomists the true nature of the American foundation behind that Americanist pressure; the fact that, as with its Lockean forbear regarding “natural law” and “common good”, while the words that make that foundation sound “traditional”, the spirit behind them undermines any original Christian sense they inherited from the past.
And yet I myself was repeatedly told by conservative Thomists that consultation of these tools was terribly dangerous; that it could only produce precisely the horrifying Modernist or Marxist or Third World perversions of the Catholicism that all of us were against; that the Catholic-friendly sounding words establishing the American system alone gave us the freedom effectively to oppose such madness. Hence, the prohibition at new Thomist-centered universties—-that I do not deny seek sincerely to confront the post-conciliar collapse of the Faith—-both of historical studies and all criticism of Americanist Liberal Pluralism.
Over and over again, I was informed by these thinkers that the Pope-who-could-not-err would soon set all things right religiously and that the dangers to secular society came only from radical leftists who were held in check by the “exceptional” American system alone. And this, as one pontiff after another, year after year, introduced new innovations that I had not long before been told he would never dream of contemplating; and as “exceptional” America, decade after decade, wreaked new havoc with the “unchangeable” Christian moral code!
Such innovations came to be accepted by them, bit-by-bit, and even with enthusiasm. One extremely important, conservative, Ultramontanist Thomist explained to me that that he would listen to the liturgy standing on his head if the Roman Pontiff told him to do so. Another fellow-travelling ally, absolutely sincere in his opposition to “Cafeteria Catholicism” in general, informed me that one “simply had to ignore just war theory” in support of “godly” American imperialist warfare. Again, dypsychia ruled the roost, with a yearly recitation of the Summa doomed to remain a Catholic clubhouse project whose memorization by every believer would never threaten the Established Zeitgeist.
Just in case anyone may have lost sight of my insistence that I nevertheless consider Thomism indispensable to the Catholic cause, allow me to end on a positive note. I entered the Traditionalist world in 1970 through my exposure to the Roman Forum, the organization that I have directed since 1991. This was founded by Dietrich von Hildebrand in 1968. I became a member of the Roman Forum for one reason alone: because of the militant battle being waged by von Hildebrand and his associates in defense of the Magisterium as a whole and the Traditional Roman Liturgy in particular.
Von Hildebrand and the three other founders of the Roman Forum were anti-Thomist Phenomenologists, “positive theologians”, and somewhat “personalist”in their approach in their own particular and orthodox way. On the one hand, unlike the Thomists I encountered, and to my great joy, they encouraged my historical studies and my critique of Americanist Liberal Pluralism. Moreover, I found their devotional writings an enormous stimulus to seeking construction of the Social Kingship of and individual transformation in Christ.
On the other hand, I never could grasp how von Hildebrand’s Phenomenology could explain the Catholic Faith with the rigor that the speculative theology of St. Thomas Aquinas did. It seemed to me that even his followers at the Roman Forum found themselves resorting to Thomistic formulae to achieve this necessay goal. But such phenomenological weakness also proved and still proves to me my earlier assertion. Every tool, positive and speculative, is needed to escape the Americanist Liberal Pluralist mental disease and build a fully Catholic world. Once positive theology has done its job in fully awakening a man to the nature of the disease, the power of the Zeitgeist causing it, and the complexity of its cure, the speculative theolgian must be called upon to provide the substantive meat more solidly explaining the teaching and sacramental nuts and bolts securing construction of the Social Kingship of Christ. To paraphrase Charles Maurras, “all tools that are human and divine belong to Catholics!”
Viva Cristo Rey! King of all Revelation, all human thought, all human action, and the history thereof!
See, for example, The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Random House, 1955)↩︎
See, for example, Georges de Lagarde, La naissance de l’esprit laique au declin du moyen age (Nauwelaerts, Five Volumes, 1958).↩︎
Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, History of the Church (Crossroad, Ten Volumes, 1981), V, 546-555, VI, 93-106; Hubert Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient (Herder, Four Volumes, 1949-1970).↩︎
John Rao, “Lose the Past, Lose the Present”, https://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20041101.html↩︎
Jedin and Dolan, Op. cit., VI, 95; Henry Philips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 100-188↩︎
For this whole argument, see Richard Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia (Cambridge, 1993); Christopher Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Viking, 1972); Jonathan Israel, J., Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2002); Enlightenment Contested (Oxford, 2009); Democratic Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011); Margaret Jacob, The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (Humanities, 1984).↩︎
Juan Fernando Segovia, La ley natural en la telaraña de la razón : ética, derecho y política en John Locke (Marcial Pons, 2014)↩︎
Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge, 1998).↩︎
See The Federalist Papers, n. 10 (any edition).↩︎
For all the below, See John Rao, “Le mirage américain”, in Église et politique: Changer de paradigme (Artège, 2013), pp. 227-258.↩︎
Paul Boller, George Washington and Religion (Dallas, 1962); Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land (Penguin, 1985); William Wolf, Lincoln’s Religion (Pilgrim, 1959).↩︎
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus.↩︎
See John Rao, Black Legends: The War of Words Against the Word (Remnant Press, 2011), Chapter One, pp. 15-26.↩︎
John Rao, Black Legends, Op. cit., pp. 317-428; Dale van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791(Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 234-248; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested, pp. 751-780.↩︎
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/353571-a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds-adored.↩︎
For a detailed discussion of all of this, with many other sources indicated, see John Rao, Black Legends, pp. 429-630; also, John Rao, “He Who Loses the Past, Loses the Present”, http://jcrao.freeshell.org/NorciaDignitatisHumanae.html.↩︎
John Rao, Periphery, http://jcrao.freeshell.org/Periphery.html.↩︎
John Rao, Black Legends, pp. 429-497.↩︎
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