The Church in the Stormy Seas of Heresy and Apostasy

08-04-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

And, I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion….The Biglietto-Speech St John Henry Newman

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy….

If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society. Note: The heresy of indifferentism is a theological and philosophical perspective that suggests that all religious beliefs are equally valid and no one faith is superior to another. This view contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching that Christ founded one true faith. Newman then made the prophetic observation below that day in 1879:

Hitherto the civil Power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that: "Christianity was the law of the land". Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten. Hitherto, it has been considered that religion alone, with its supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to secure submission of the masses of our population to law and order; now the Philosophers and Politicians are bent on satisfying this problem without the aid of Christianity. Instead of the Church's authority and teaching, they would substitute first of all a universal and a thoroughly secular education, calculated to bring home to every individual that to be orderly, industrious, and sober, is his personal interest.

Then, for great working principles to take the place of religion, for the use of the masses thus carefully educated, it provides—the broad fundamental ethical truths, of justice, benevolence, veracity, and the like; proved experience; and those natural laws which exist and act spontaneously in society, and in social matters, whether physical or psychological; for instance, in government, trade, finance, sanitary experiments, and the intercourse of nations. As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course he must pay for, and which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance. The general character of this great apostasia is one and the same everywhere; but in detail, and in character, it varies in different countries Note: Apostasia (the sin of apostasy) “is the total repudiation of the Christian faith.” Heresy is the obstinate postbaptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, Catechism of the Catholic Faith #2089 The response to Revelation is faith, which is an act of will, informed by God’s grace that involves believing in God, Who can neither deceive or be deceived. Jesus is the fullness of God's Revelation. Divine and Catholic faith is a type of knowledge that comes from divine authority and gives the recipient absolute certainty. It's based on Divine Revelation, God speaking to human beings revealing truths that are above the human mind to know. Following St. Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas there are three levels of Faith: 1) belief that God exists. Even the devils have this kind of faith James 2:19 “ You believe there is one God; you do well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” 2) belief in what He says because God can neither deceive nor be deceived! 3) belief unto God since the goal of Faith is to reach God especially to go to Him in times of trouble and the Cross, but finally to see Him face to face in Heaven where faith is no longer needed. In his Anglican years, Newman contributed to “Tracts for Our Times,” a series of essays. One of them, Tract 73, is entitled “On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Religion” and contrasted the “rationalistic spirit” with the “catholic spirit.”

“To rationalize in matters of Revelation,” Newman explained, “is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonized with our existing stock of knowledge.” Newman’s critique of this rationalistic spirit criticized it as prideful and inhumane. What worries Newman about rationalism, in other words, is not just that it undermines religious truth, but also that it diminishes the personhood of the human knower and his human sources. It treats the human mind like a piece of technology.

One of the first things Newman says about rationalism is that it espouses an unrealistic view of human knowledge. Rationalism holds that we cannot claim to know something truly if we cannot fully account for it. This isn’t how humans know things. Newman argues there are other ways people come to know something: People know the world through “half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood … ” He continues “There is a multitude of cases in which we allowably and rightly accept statements as true, partly on reason, and partly on testimony. We supplement the information of others by our own knowledge, by our own judgment of probabilities.” In other words, we shouldn’t expect human persons to fully explain their views. This is unrealistic. It is not how most human beings gain knowledge. We rely regularly on information given to us by authorities and those we trust.

Reason is historical. It is situated in relation to a community of people who share knowledge. As always, Newman has before him the common person, not the academic scholar. The common person cannot be expected to fully defend in a scientific way all of his or her beliefs. But does that mean that the vast majority of the human race is irrational? Newman wasn’t so misanthropic. The second problem that Newman has with rationalism is similar. He worries that rationalism is reductive. It diminishes human experience to what is manageable and quantifiable. It works from a system or scheme that simply dismisses anything that does not fit. It’s archetype of knowing is scientific investigation and therefore only comfortable with the predictable and repeatable. Consequently, rationalism works with laws, not persons: “Laws are stable; but persons are strange, uncertain, inexplicable.” The rationalist is impatient with the feebleness of human history and the mysteries of the human heart. He prefers to work with impersonal objects or laws. What this means is that rationalism discounts historical testimony and personal experience because they aren’t easily testable. This can only lead rationalists to be skeptical of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

This leads us to the third problem with rationalism. If rationalism is impatient with the vicissitudes of human history, it is even more so with divine mystery. Newman was careful to say a rationalist was not a pure naturalist, that is, someone who denied the existence of God or divine revelation. However, a rationalist does require that God’s revelation conform to what we know of the natural world. Thus, what is described in God’s Revelation must always be conventional: “it is Rationalism to accept the Revelation, and then to explain it away; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man; to refuse to let it speak for itself; to claim to be told the why and the how of God’s dealings with us, as therein described, and to assign to Him a motive and a scope of our own; to stumble at the partial knowledge which He may give us of them; to put aside what is obscure, as if it had not been said at all; to accept one half of what has been told us, and not the other half.” (“Tract 73,” 1)

Perhaps an example of this rationalism would aid our understanding. A common liberal or rationalistic interpretation of the episode of Jesus feeding the five thousand “explains away” the miracle by saying that what in fact happened was that the crowd was moved to share their food by the young boy’s generosity. This interpretation is clearly uncomfortable with the supernatural and thus re-interprets the miraculous multiplication as a moral transformation of the hearts of the crowd. It is typical of those who interpret the Scriptures this way to also look down upon ancient authors as primitive, pre-scientific, superstitious, or just plain deceptive. And thus discomfort with the supernatural is paired with disdain for human testimony. While it would be too much to explore Newman’s alternative, his critique of rationalism is quite useful. Rationalism remains very much alive today. There are many in the Church who prefer to downplay the supernatural aspects of the Faith and treat it as simply motivation for social justice or earthly progress. Rationalism is not only in the Church. It is in our society as well. Impatient with human responsibility and moral growth, people prefer to substitute in their place bureaucratic systems or technological contrivances. Rationalism seeks to computerize everything. This is the view that replaces humans with robots and designs academic curriculums around quantifiable learning. Newman’s critique of rationalism reminds us that such a view of reason is ultimately inhumane and impious. It rests on disdain for what is human and disbelief in what is divine. It can only lead to a denial of mystery and so a loss of love. https://media.ascensionpress.com/2019/10/18/st-john-henry-newman-and-his-critique-of-modern-ideas/