TradCatKnight: Reflections of a Catholic Teacher on the Nature of...

TradCatKnight: Reflections of a Catholic Teacher on the Nature of...: Reflections of a Catholic Teacher on the Nature of Modern Thought Professor Paolo Pasqualucci has dedicated himself to the study of...

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Reflections of a Catholic Teacher on the Nature of Modern Thought

Reflections of a Catholic Teacher on the Nature of Modern Thought

Professor Paolo
Pasqualucci has dedicated himself to the study of philosophy of law,
politics, and of metaphysics. Among his most recent publications are Introduzzione à la metafisica dell'Uno
(Rome: Pellicani, 1996,151 pp.) dealing with the metaphysical notion of
the One in relation to the metaphysical notion of God, and Politica e religions, saggio di teologia della storia (Rome:
Pellicani, 2001, 89pp.) which explores the relationship between
politics and religion from the standpoint of the traditional Catholic
theology of history. He has always participated in the theological
congresses of SiSiNoNo. His contributions can be found in the
Acts of the same, published in French by the Society of Saint Pius X and
in English (partially) by Angelus Press.

 

The
following is the first part of the lecture given by Paolo Pasqualucci,
professor emeritus of the University of Perugia, Italy, on January 3,
2004 at SiSiNoNo's fourth theological congress held in Rome. It will be serialized in the next issues of SiSiNoNo.
The text has been revised and expanded by the author. None of this is
easy, but it is fellows like Dr. Pasqualucci that keep doctrine from
impurities and our minds from going soft.

Setting Up The Discussion

The Marriage of St. Thomas to Modern Thought

A
decree of the Sacred Congregation for Studies (July 27, 1914) under the
auspices of Pope St. Pius X, set forth 24 theses drawn from the
metaphysics of St. Thomas as "safe directive norms" for the
philosophical and theological studies of Catholics. Although these norms
were not made binding, the motive for this decree was later elaborated
by Pope Benedict XV in his epistle Quod de Fovenda of March 19, 1917:

The
Roman pontiffs have constantly maintained that St. Thomas should be
considered as "guide and master" in philosophical and theological
studies, while always preserving liberty of discussion about that which
could and was accustomed to be subject to discussion in both
disciplines.

Popes Pius XI
and especially Pius XII reconfirmed this principle. Pope John XXIII,
however, in his celebrated inaugural address at the Second Vatican
Council, maintained that the "principal goal" of the Council was not
"discussion of this or that theme of the fundamental doctrine of the
Church, repeatedly expounded in the teaching of the Fathers and of
ancient and modern theologians." For such a purpose "a council was not
necessary." The "principal goal" of the Council was supposed to consist
above all in

a
leap ahead towards doctrinal penetration and the formation of
consciences, in more perfect correspondence of fidelity to authentic
doctrine, albeit studied and set forth through the forms of
investigation and the literary formulation of contemporary thought. One
thing is the substance of the ancient doctrine of the depositum fidei,
and another the formulation of its covering: and this difference should
be taken account of in a spirit of patience, measuring everything by
the forms and proportions of a magisterium pre-eminently pastoral in
character.

By proposing this basic distinction between "substance" and "covering," between form and content, Pope
John XXIII, while not formally renouncing St. Thomas as a guide,
coupled him with modern thought, which in its various components is
notoriously as distant as can be imagined from Thomistic metaphysics.
This is the great novelty the Pontiff proposed for the Council to
realize as part of its "principal goal."

Was it a
matter, as many today still maintain, of a simple exterior adaptation,
to make the ancient doctrine more understandable to moderns and
contemporaries? But if it were a simple question of "exposition" and
thus a pastoral matter, was not the convoking of an ecumenical council a
disproportionate means to do this? Wouldn't it have been enough for the
Holy Office to give instructions to the bishops and the pontifical
universities? Furthermore, if it were a simple problem of the exposition
of doctrine and thus a pastoral issue, why did Pope John XXIII affirm
that, beyond the exposition of doctrine, it was also necessary to study
doctrine according to the "methods" (as the official French translation
has it) of modern thought? This distinction between the "substance" and the "covering" of doctrine was something new in the history of the Church. It
did in fact lead to doctrine being studied in a deeper way in the light
of contemporary thought and thus made to conform with its methods,
thanks to a magisterium of "pre¬eminently pastoral" character.

It
is well known that the Latin version of this directive by Pope John
XXIII is more concise and seems more moderate than the official French
and Italian versions....But we must recall that
John XXIII did not rectify the vernacular translations, but allowed them
to circulate freely and used them himself on at least one official
occasion in quoting himself. On this point he maintained an attitude
that seemed intended to legitimize the vernacular translations as
representing the authentic meaning of the more concise Latin text.


Some Essential Features of Modern Thought

Let
us briefly outline some essential characteristics of modern thought. We
shall focus on the negation of the distinctions between substance and accident, of being and appearance.
Doing this, modern thinkers obscure the nature of intention as a
conscious state of the subject's being, which is realized in a free and
rational will, distinct from its acts which it nonetheless shapes.
Additionally, modern thinkers attempt to overcome the principle of causality.
We will conclude with a discussion on the negation of the category of
essence, another fundamental premise of modern thought, focused mainly
on the speculation of Martin Heidegger.

We hope that this exposition will show the intrinsic incompatibility
of "modern thought" with Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, and the
intrinsic weakness of the "negations" and "overcomings" on which modern
thought is based. The modern school of thought deliberately places human
thought, will, or instincts at the center of everything, denying any
legitimacy to the very idea of the supernatural.

Discussing The Errors Of Modern Thought

An Overview of the Traditional Concepts

Let us begin with the concepts of substance and accident as summarized by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The
first concept, that of "substance," aims to express that which
constitutes the very essence of a thing or entity: that on account of
which something is what it is. Even in everyday speech we are accustomed
to speak of "the substance (or essence)" of a thing in indicating the
essential aspect of a thing, event, or situation, its inner or
constitutive nature, fundamental structure or essence. The word substance is often used as a synonym for essence.
The second concept, that of "accident," denotes by contrast that which
appears to be an external quality or characteristic of a thing, whether
permanent or transitory.

The substance is under (sub-stare) that which appears and contributes to the very being of something in its essence while the accident (accidens,
that which happens and strikes the senses) appears from the outside, in
perceptible or phenomenal reality. In a concrete entity, understood as a
whole, substance and accident are found in an inseparable connection between what is external and what is internal and profound. The notion of accident implies transiency and change not affecting the substance.
Man, for example, generally shows a loss of his outer characteristics
with the passing of time, but can we deduce from this fact some
modification in his very human nature? Certainly not. Nor can we say
that this quality is lost with the eventual decline of his faculties
because of sickness and old age. From a moral point of view, and a
general spiritual perspective, man remains always himself, whatever
exterior alteration may take place in all his qualities, exterior and
interior.

An entity therefore both exists and appears:
it appears as it is, but also as it is not. There is a logically
necessary distinction between being and appearance, parallel
conceptually to that between substance and accident. The substance is in
the accidents, in the sense that it is manifest in them; however, it is
not identical with its accidents, is not exhausted by them and
cannot be identified with them. Substance persists through the changing
vicissitudes of becoming. It involves their essence.


Applying These Traditional Concepts to "Transubstantiation"

What
would result if we were to look at a dogma of the Catholic Faith
without the help of the notions of substance and accident,
philosophically of Aristotelian origin, re-elaborated in Scholastic
thought, and in particular that of St. Thomas? Without this
philosophical apparatus it is not possible to understand the singular
wonder of transubstantiation in the most rational and thus the best
possible way, in conformity with a sane intellect.

The
consecrated bread and wine maintain their species or normal appearance,
with all their natural qualities or accidents: colors, odors, density,
weight, taste. But their substance is changed in a supernatural way. By
virtue of the words of consecration, they have become "the body, the
soul, and the divinity" of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Normally, the
substance of something is manifest in the accidents or qualities of the
thing itself. Nevertheless there can be a difference, because everything
that is in itself exterior and subject to change does not always
manifest its substance. This happens in a supernatural way in the
Eucharist, where the consecrated Host is sacred not on account of
what it appears to be, but because of what it has intrinsically become
after consecration (transubstantiation) even while retaining all its
accidents intact.

This difference can also be found in the realm
of secondary causes. In the case of man, appearance (being external and
therefore accidental) often does not correspond entirely or even in part
to being, that is to the interior substance in the heart and the
mind of a man. As far as spirit and the ethical life are concerned (the
only life that counts as such for the purposes of our salvation) unity
and difference constantly show themselves to our intellect, which must
collect them, discerning in an adequate manner in itself and in others
the relation between reality and appearance, that is to say, the
difference between exteriority and interiority, between the transient
and the permanent.


How Traditional Concepts Are Denied in Modern Thought

The
faculties of discernment and judgment are hard to exercise, yet are of
vital importance. Modern thought fails to supply any principle worthy of
the name, prone as it is to simplify reality from the perspective of
the subject. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:

Modern
thought made great progress in reducing existence to a series of
phenomena [impressions -Ed.] which manifest it. In this way it sought to
eliminate a certain number of dualisms....Indeed it has above all
disposed of the dualism that opposed that which is inside an entity to
that which is outside. No longer is there anything exterior to an
entity, if by this is understood a superficial skin that would conceal
the true nature of an object from our vision. This true nature was
supposed to be the secret reality of things. It could be intuited or
supposed but never reached because it was "interior" to the object taken
into consideration. The phenomena that manifest the entity are neither
exterior nor interior; they are all of equal value, they all refer to
other phenomena and no one of them holds a privileged position....An
electric current, for example... is nothing but the ensemble of actions
that manifest it. No one of these actions is sufficient to reveal it. At
the same time it does not cause us to see anything behind itself;
it refers to itself and a whole series [of actions]. The result of
this, as it appears, is that the dualism between being and appearance no
longer has a place in philosophy. That which appears directs us to a
whole series of phenomena and not to a hidden reality capable of drawing
to itself all the being of the entity.... Thus the being of an
entity is precisely its appearance....For the same reason, the dualism
of actuality and potentiality disappears. Everything is actual. There is
no potential behind an act, nor is there a capacity, nor a virtue [of
producing the action]....Therefore we can indeed refute the dualism of
appearance and essence. The appearance does not hide the essence, but
reveals it: it is the essence [emphasis in the original].

Sartre here presents principles that he would apply both to nature and to man. These
principles epitomize the characteristic tendency of modern thought
towards a constant, progressive reduction to a single entity which is
not God but man. If man-whether as an individual or as a collective subject-were to take himself as the source of the meaning of existence, of the whole, he would tend to repress not
only every idea of essence but also every idea of transcendence, of
First Cause, of the supernatural! He would then find himself enclosed in
a reality that appears to be constituted by a simple series of appearances,
by phenomena that could not be reduced to a deeper reality, would not
depend on a first cause, and would not be marked by a final cause. It
would thus be appearance, that is, the situation, that would make
us what we are. Ethics could no longer be based on absolute
principles-because such principles express an immutable essence that
transcends phenomena-but would rather be a situational ethics and thus the mere reflex of a finite reality that constitutes and justifies itself by the demands of action.

In
such a vision man, as a subject endowed with intellect and will,
dissolves in the elusive becoming of appearances and is overwhelmed by
the anxious perception of nothingness on which existentialist thought of
the 20th century has always insisted. If in fact "appearance is the
essence," and if therefore "everything is in actuality," if there is no
potentiality behind and therefore prior to an act and no
"capacity" or virtue is realized in it, this amounts to saying that
nothing underlies it. Behind the appearance there is no essence, and if
there is no essence there is nothing behind it or, if one prefers,
nothingness lies behind it. Thus, we come from nothing and we go to
nothing. The inevitable conclusion constitutes a metaphysical absurdity
even more than a moral one: if nothingness is both before and after us,
how did something-life itself-arise?


A Criticism of the Materialistic Foundations of Contemporary Nihilism

To
respond to this traditional objection, materialists have from ancient
times responded that matter should be understood as eternal and
uncreated. This amounts to an act of faith in matter. Matter is endowed
with divine attributes; matter is implicitly supposed to contain an
intelligence that gives order to the world.

Lucretius (c. 98-54 BC) wrote that things cannot be born from nothing by a divine act (De Rerum Natura
I, 150) because otherwise reality would be dominated by chaos and "we
would see everything born from everything, and nothing would have its
own seed, men would be born from the sea, scaled fish on land, birds
would jump from the sky (ibid. I, 158-63). Nature shows that
every thing is born in a definite and ordered way, through the operation
of a generative power that acts from its own seed (ibid. I, 168;
173-74) and develops not arbitrarily but in accordance with a
determinate, specific and finite form. To understand this one must
recognize that "a finite part of matter was given to all things, a
limiting part was given to every existent thing for the purpose of
generation out of which it is clear what can arise" (ibid. I,
203-4). The poet's lyrical formulation begs an obvious question: "Who
has given a finite matter and thus a determinate form to each and every
thing?" Was it the gods?-No, the Olympian gods, infinitely distanced
from the world, cannot be understood in this manner; the gods of
Epicurus are neither creators nor judges, but mere ciphers, so to speak.
Was it then matter that gave itself an order on its own, without the
intervention of a demiurge or artificer?...

Lucretius does in fact think of matter as an entity that produces and orders itself on its own
without need of a mind and a power to create it. This conception, with
diverse nuances, is at the foundation of all materialistic philosophies
through succeeding generations. It is the well-known argument of the
shoe that makes itself, without need of a cobbler. Common sense argues
that it is absurd.

Yes, it is absurd. But there is no error that
does not have its share of truth, its appearance of truth and its
subtleties with their own power of fascination. Thus one should attempt
to refute it with rational and measured arguments. Against Lucretius and
his disciples the following arguments are to be made:


Understanding "Nothing"

Lucretius
writes that, if things had appeared out of nothing, chaos would reign,
because everything would come to be spontaneously without any order.
Here he contradicts the traditional principle, which he himself repeats
several times, that nothing can in any way be created from nothing (nil posse creari de nilo, op. cit., I, 156-57). In fact, only nothingness can come from nothing and thus nothing can be produced by nothing, not even chaos (i.e., birds falling from the sky, fish born on earth, etc.). Nothingness produces nothing. It abides forever in its absolute non-being.
Non-being is always something that has no potential being. Nothing is
born in nothingness, nor does anything develop in nothingness, whether
order or chaos.

Nevertheless, our criticism cannot stop here. The
philosophy of Lucretius obliges him to suppress a concept that is in
itself valid-that of creation out of nothing, as revealed by
revelation-by representing it in a mistaken way. That's important to look at.

The
target of Lucretius's polemic is the pagan religion that he knew. In
the introductory verses of his poem he exalts Epicurus for trampling on
religion with his materialistic philosophy. He cites the (legendary)
sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis as an example of the evils caused by
religion. The concluding verse of this episode contains an invective
that has been cited over centuries by all the enemies of religion, that
is, "Religion had the power to induce the practice of such evils,"
though the word "'religio" in this context is better translated "superstition."

Lucretius
lived in the age of Cicero, when Roman society was in grave crisis
because of the ongoing civil wars. This crisis arose from social,
political, and economic causes. Religion in itself can hardly be cited
as a cause of the crisis, understood in the strict sense. But
Lucretius's visionary and poetically seductive materialism seems to
express a more profound crisis than that derived from the lost political
ideals of the Roman republic. It manifests the spiritual crisis of an
entire civilization which could no longer find a place to stand. In such
a situation the world-view of Epicurus was seductive. It proclaimed a
philosophy of renunciation, of the hidden life, of egoistic retreat into
oneself, compensated at the same time by exaltation of the self as an
atom that, believing itself projected into the eternity of matter,
imputed to itself a lasting cosmic dimension.

The idea of
creation from nothing cannot be found in the religious mythology nor in
the mystery religions of paganism, nor in Greek philosophy. The Platonic
demiurge does not create matter from nothing, but forms its elements
from an abiding substrate dominated by chaos:

Because the god
wanted all things to be good and that, insofar as possible, nothing be
bad, he then took every visible thing that was not at rest but was
driven about without order or rule and reduced it from disorder to
order, judging this a superior condition.

In fact, creation from nothing
is a Biblical concept, testified by divine revelation. Human thought
did not arrive at it on its own. But we cannot suppose that Lucretius
meant to polemicize against the Book of Genesis. The Septuagint, the
celebrated Greek translation of the Old Testament, was composed from 250
BC to about 130 BC and was not part of the intellectual furniture of
Greek and Roman intellectuals in the first century BC, even if some
general and indirect knowledge of its teachings cannot be excluded a priori.

Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo

Be that as it may, the concept of creation out of nothing as criticized in Lucretius's De Rerum Natura
is not the same as that revealed in the Bible. I must make this
clarification to oppose the mistaken belief that Lucretian criticism is
applicable to the Biblical doctrine. The creation of the world as
described in Genesis does not suppose the existence of matter prior to
the Creator, and thus does not imply the capacity of matter to give
order to itself independently of a Creator. Creation took place
according to the mind of God who thought and made all things issue forth
from nothing. This happened in a sudden manner, according to the
well-known fiat known from the Bible. This creation is not the work of
nothing but of God, who makes all things (including man) originate from a
state of nothingness with respect to themselves, not with respect to God.
This means that the nothingness from which things arise is that of
their prior lack of existence, not that of an absolute
Nothing-Non-being-which cannot exist if God exists. But God exists "from
eternity" and will always exist. Lucretius, who did not believe in a
reality outside the senses, clearly understood by "creation out of
nothing" either the creative act of an absolute Nothing, of nothingness
as a whole, which, if its existence be admitted, itself makes the
concept of creation impossible; or else, and more likely, he understands
it as the act of the Platonic demiurge, which makes the world out of an
original substrate which would constitute "nothingness" as a
primordial disorder. In either case his criticism of the idea of a
creation out of nothing cannot be applied to the true conception of
"creation out of nothing" as reported in the Sacred Scriptures.


Understanding "Matter"

If
no one gave matter the capacity to distribute itself according to a
form, to grow in a regulated and finite way, something that implies a
plan, an end, it is then necessary to admit that matter possesses on its own that capacity which can be seen in a thought or a mind at work. But this implies that matter as such thinks,
that it is capable of conceiving itself according to all the forms
which it can possibly take. Matter would thus contain not only creative
power but also thought itself, the mind that directs it. But mind and
thought can only be conceived as something spiritual. Matter would thus
contain a reality (thought) whose characteristics are not those of
matter, which is characterized first of all by extension. Mind
lacks extension and thus, by virtue of this fact alone, its operations
cannot be reduced to that of matter. They lack that essential condition
of finite and sensible beings, that spatially determined limit that
characterizes matter. The "mind," intelligence, thought, spiritual ways
of being that have their roots in our soul, this complex and entirely
spiritual reality seems in effect unlimited in comparison with matter. As Anaxagoras said:

All
other things have a part in every thing, but intelligence is unlimited,
independent, and not mixed with anything, but stands alone in itself.

If
matter were to think, would it not have to be capable of explaining
itself? Instead, it always appears as endowed with form and forms itself
[i.e., as weather elements swirl and become a hurricane -Ed.] according
to a direction and an end, without ever being able itself to give any
explanation of its being and action, of why it is what it is. But this
insuperable incapacity of matter seems nevertheless at the same time
connected to its ordering itself according to the idea of an end. Such a
connection, explains St. Thomas Aquinas, legitimizes or even
necessitates the hypothesis of the existence of a Mind that creates and
directs matter. As he says in his Summa Theologica:

We
see in fact that determinate realities lacking reason, constituted by
natural things, operate with a view to an end. This appears from the
fact that they always or very often operate in the same manner to
achieve the best end; whence it appears that they reach their goal not
by chance but deliberately. But things that do not possess knowledge
[because they lack reason-Ed.] do not tend towards an end if they are
not directed by someone capable of knowing and understanding, but
therefore, there must be a rational being by whose operation all natural
things are ordered towards an end: and this entity we call God.

"Nature" Doesn't Run on Auto-Pilot

The argument of Lucretius for the eternal conservation of all nature by nature's own operation is totally unacceptable.

Thus
it happens that nature dissolves all things into their own elements and
does not disperse them into nothingness: if a body were subject to
total dissolution, anything could suddenly disappear before our eyes and
cease to exist: no force would be necessary to realize the separation
of its parts and dissolve its connections. (op. cit., I, 215-20)

The
fact that the world has not disappeared up to now does not result from
the fact that every thing has been absorbed into the constituent parts
of its nature. A natural entity dissolved by death never returns. If it
did, one would be obliged to admit the absurd concept that the dead body
of one's father is contained in the seed of each one of us and so on
infinitely through the generations. The fact that the world persists up
to now results from the fact that it is maintained in its being by new
births that continually replace the dead. This self-reproduction
involves a compensation of life and death that appears thought out and
willed by Someone in function of the equilibrium of the whole.

For
Christian philosophy the principle of causality [i.e., that every
effect has a cause -Ed.]: 1) has an ontological value, that is to say,
is really present in [the being of] things; and 2) is so evident that it
is easily resolved into the first principles of our mind [i.e., that a
thing is what it is and not what it is not, that one thing cannot be
itself and another at the same time -Ed.]. In fact, given an entity that
has the character of an effect [i.e., by participation, contingency
-Ed.], the intellect sees in it the implicit need for a cause. All our
theodicy rests on the principle of causality (Parente-Piolanti-Garafalo,
Dizionario de Teologia Dogmatica).

["Theodicy,"
by the way, is the philosophical apologetic that confirms the justice
of God and whereby right reason demonstrates the principles of the
Faith, the existence of a personal God, and the necessity and
discernibility of revelation -Ed.]. Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Gregis
said about Lucretian concepts:

Their system, overflowing
with so many and such enormous errors, has emerged from the marriage of
false philosophy with the Faith.