C. S. Lewis: Miracles. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 [1947].

 

If I see something I take to be miraculous, my seeing doesn’t prove that it’s a miracle. “Seeing is not believing,” Lewis writes, inasmuch as “our senses are not infallible.” “What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience”—’philosophy’ here meaning ‘assumptions.’ Lewis uses the word ‘philosophy’ because he wants to interrogate not ordinary beliefs or ‘common sense’ but the kinds of philosophy, especially modern philosophies of naturalism, that preclude the miraculous a priori.

A miracle is “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” Philosophic naturalism maintains that Being is nothing but nature, while supernaturalism maintains that Being is not limited to nature. By the natural, Lewis means “what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord, the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited.” He also implies, but does not exactly state, that natural causation is ‘deterministic,’ that nature cannot include free will, that naturalism holds human beings to have no “power of doing more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.” According to naturalism as Lewis defines it, no “such separate power of originating events” can exist.

This obviously depends on what nature’s nature is. Aristotle, for example, is unquestionably a ‘naturalist,’ but he also upholds the human capacity to reason and to make choices founded upon reasoning. Was Aristotle mistaken, or perhaps prevaricating? Lewis does not ask, and so does not answer. By ‘naturalism’ he evidently means most especially modern naturalism, although he may deny naturalism’s claim to comprehensive validity in all its forms.

Both naturalists and supernaturalists agree that “there must be something that exists in its own right, “some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations.” The controverted point is, what or who this Fact is. Eternal nature or eternal God? This Fact is “the one basic Thing [that] has caused all the other things to be”; “they exist because it exists.” More, “If it ceases to maintain them in existence, they will cease to exist,” and if it is altered, they too will be altered. This is not necessarily true, however. If a First Cause ceases to exist, what it has caused might continue, if the First Cause endowed them with the capacity to endure; a child may survive the deaths of his parents. Only if, say, the energies that generated the things produced by the First Cause also perpetuate those things will they cease to be, or change, if the First Cause disappears.

Lewis further maintains that naturalism “gives us a democratic” picture of reality, supernatural a “monarchical” one. Possibly, although either might also provide an aristocratic view, as in philosophic pluralism or a theology of polytheism. But Lewis is thinking here not so much of metaphysics as of dismissals of metaphysics on political grounds: If naturalists charge that supernaturalism merely reflects assumptions congenial to monarchic regimes, supernaturalists can as easily charge that naturalism tends to appeal to democrats. And neither claim speaks logically to the question of whether the ‘democratic’ or ‘monarchic’ metaphysic itself is true.

 Lewis cautions that the distinction between naturalism and supernatural “is not exactly” the distinction between atheism and theism. “Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process”—the doctrine of pantheism. “Such a God would not stand outside Nature or the total system, would not be existing ‘on his own.'” It would not be a Creator-God. It might be Spinoza’s ‘God’ or Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Conversely, a supernaturalist can admit that the One Cause might not have generated only one nature; it (or He, or She) might have caused other natures not spatially or temporally related to the one we know. Nor does supernaturalism imply that miracles occur; “God (the primary thing) may never in fact interfere with the natural system He has created”—the claim of Deism. Supernaturalism admits the possibility of miracles, whereas naturalism rules them out altogether.

“Our first choice, then, must be between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.” True, although naturalism may amount to more than Lewis, evidently following the definition provided by modern philosophers, is said to be. Lewis remarks that if there is a thing that cannot be explained in general within a naturalist system, then the system itself must be flawed. “If any one thing exists which is of such a kind that we see in advance the impossibility of even giving it that kind of explanation,” as distinguished from making an adjustment to the system itself, then that kind of explanation cannot be comprehensive of Being.

Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Lewis begins his explanation of explanations by observing that everything we know beyond our immediate sensation we infer from those sensations. “Since I am presented with colors, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behavior appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic.” The “therefore” thought I have is an inference, an act of reasoning or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The inference I draw from my sensations, that there is a world out there, does not contradict itself. I proceed accordingly, albeit with caution, testing my evident knowledge of what’s out there against my sensations, or more accurately against my interpretations of my sensations. A given interpretation may prove illogical, and therefore false. But “unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true,” inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge.

More, “no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight”; any theory that denied this “would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.” Lewis then makes his crucial claim: that naturalism “involve[s] the same difficulty” because it “discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.” To show this, he distinguishes two types of logic; cause-effect logic and ground-consequent logic. His example of cause-effect logic is, ‘X is ill because he ate Y.’ His example of ground-consequent logic is, ‘X must be ill because he is behaving out of character.’ Ground-consequent logic appeals to evidence of X’s condition; cause-effect logic identifies the cause of that condition. 

The question of causation’s relation to logic is unavoidable for Lewis because he wants to show that some causes can be miracles, supernatural.

His next point is that one cannot get to cause-effect logic without first ascertaining the accuracy of our ground-consequent logic. Before saying what caused X’s illness one must first establish that X is ill. Otherwise, my cause-effect syllogism will be based on a false premise. Once I have established a reasonable ground-consequent observation, one free of contradiction, I can then perform a different logical exercise, namely, discovering the cause of the effect I have established. “To be caused is not to be proved.” That is, my thought may be caused by any number of things: “wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness.” These are caused but “they are ungrounded”; I wishfully (perhaps in this case maliciously), prejudicially, or crazily suppose that you are ill. Naturalism supposes that “causes fully account for a belief” (emphasis added), that “the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not.” 

The problem with this ironclad naturalistic determinism, Lewis argues, is that while acts of thinking are events, “they are a very special sort of events.” Most events “are not ‘about’ anything and cannot be true or false.” To say that an event alleged to have happened never did happen is to say the allegation is false. ‘Fake news’ is a false account of an event. Acts of inference are indeed “subjective events, items in somebody’s psychological history,” but they are also “insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves.” It is one thing to say, “B followed A in my thoughts,” quite another to say “B follows from A.” We cannot infer the latter, logical inference from the former subjective event “without discrediting all human knowledge, including the knowledge-claim that our subjective sensations do not open us to knowledge of anything beyond ourselves. To say, instead, that our inferences from our sensations do open us to knowledge about things beyond ourselves is to say that the content of our knowledge is to some important degree determined by those things, that world. If knowledge of the world were determined in no way by the world itself, “it would cease to be knowledge.”

“Any thing which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning.” What Lewis calls naturalism does exactly that, offering “what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior” as entirely determined by non-rational causes, “leav[ing] no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.” No matter how our sensations were improved, they would never be “anything more than responses,” never insights or even perceptions. ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ but only “when you have discovered what smoke is” can you make a genuine logical inference, basing your causal claim on your knowledge of what smoke is, and what fire is—have a true thought about cause and effect. When Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, infers equal natural right from the equal humanity of all human beings, that all men are created equal, he isn’t basing the latter claim on the fact that he’s never seen a person ‘morph’ into an owl. He is “see[ing] that it ‘must’ be so,” as a matter of logic. The ground of his logical consequence is an observation about the nature of human beings; it can be falsified only if someone could show that human beings do not exist. It must be said that this leaves open the meaning of “created” in the sentence.

Modern naturalism entails evolutionism. It offers “an account, in Cause and Effect terms, of how people came to think the way they do.” This doesn’t answer “the quite different question of how they could possibly be justified in so thinking.” How can human beings, the effect of a series of causes, attain the power of logical insight? If you can’t prove that there are no proofs, then neither can you prove that there are proofs. “Reason is our starting point”; treated as “a mere phenomenon,” it makes every ‘phenomenology,’ including naturalism, evaporate.

A theist entangles himself in no such dilemma. If God is the Creator of nature, and God is rational, then reason is older than nature. For a theist, “the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine nature,” free “in the measure required” for arriving at truths, “from the huge nexus of non-rational causation.”  The human act of knowing “must break sufficiently free from that universal chain” of natural causation “in order to be determined by what it knows.” Our very “concept of Nature” depends upon reasoning. We find ‘reasons for,’ causes that have effects, by virtue of reasoning about those causes, initially by ascertaining effects registered by our sensations. “This is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests.”

“Knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense [emphasis added] something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” Fair enough, but what is nature operating in some other sense? Reasoning appears to be a natural capacity of human beings. It may have been caused by forces other natural entities, but the thoughts it generates are caused by itself and experienced as an ineluctable way of understanding entities and events outside of myself. That understanding must be tolerably accurate; if it were not, I would not survive for very long—just as sensory handicaps (blindness, deafness) reduce my chances of survival. Although Lewis maintains that nature is powerless to produce natural thought, that is true only if nature is either entirely irrational or irrational but capable of producing, by some chance combination of its elements, including its energies, of producing a being that can perceive it by reasoning about it. It is of course true to say that divine Creation more readily explains this capacity than evolution or some other natural process does, but that is true of everything. Child: “Mother, why is the sky blue?” Mother: “Because God made it that way.” 

Moreover, while (according to naturalists) nature may be irrational in the sense that reason has not produced it (although of course the Bible says that Logos has done exactly that, but I am following the naturalist premise, here), it cannot be shown to be irrational in itself. That is, if human reason is indeed ‘about’ nature, and it finds that nature and the objects and forces that form its parts or aspects are definable in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction—that black is not white, round is not square—then there must be some connection between human knowledge and the things it knows. If nature were entirely chaotic, then there could be no knowledge of that, and human beings, beings that know by reasoning, could not exist.

Lewis does address something along these lines by considering philosophic claims of an “emergent” God, a “cosmic consciousness” not present at the origin of nature but which somehow develops over time. Hegelian historicism exemplifies this sort of doctrine. Lewis replies that “the cosmic mind will help us only if we put it at the beginning, if we suppose it to be, not the product of the total system, but the basic, self-originating Fact which exists in its own right.” Having already denied immanentist doctrines, Lewis therefore rejects cosmic consciousness as a product of nature rather than its origin. “Reason saves and strengthens the whole system,” even as God not only creates but saves His creation, “whereas the whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason and itself.” It is surely true that an utterly irrational cosmos would not be a cosmos at all but a chaos. But again, is to what extent is ‘the irrational’ thoroughly irrational? [1]

For example, anger is irrational in one sense. If sufficiently powerful in a human soul, it will result in the rage of Achilles, destroying others and finally careening to its own demise—Achilles being only half-superhuman, with a human mother by nature incapable of dipping him into immortalizing water without gripping his body and preventing the water from touching his heel. But human reason can nonetheless see that anger has a definable nature. Anger is tumultuous; tumult is the opposite of calm; a soul cannot be at the same time in tumult and calm. The human soul obeys the law of noncontradiction even when it is ruled by irrational passion. It is part of a system that, by being rationally discernible, its parts partaking of rational order even if they themselves do not think. One might claim that human reason is illusory, that it imagines order where there is none, but that cannot be the case, for the reasons Lewis has already given. As Lewis writes, “Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible,” apparently obeying “the laws of rational thought,” in particular the law of non-contradiction. 

In this, and following from all his preceding arguments, Lewis finds evidence for God, a reasoning being Who, unlike His merely human creations, can and has created nature. “I do not maintain that God’s creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God’s existence, but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable.” And the Biblical story of creation, even if told in the manner of a folk tale (as St. Jerome said), makes a lot more sense than the “delightful absurdities” of competing ‘creation narratives’ in other religions. No argument, there!

Turning to moral arguments, Lewis admits that “you can if you wish regard all human ideals as illusions and all human loves as biological by-products” without “running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense.” Lewis does doubt that many people really believe that that is so. “I believe that the primary moral principles on which others depend are rationally conceived.” But naturalists (in theory if not in practice) take moral judgments to be “statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else.” Practice—there’s the rub. No one can get by without making choices about what is better or worse to do. No one is entirely impulsive. If my apparently reasonable choices are driven by passions, they can, will, and must be judged by myself and by others, however ‘non-judgmental’ I or they claim to be. (And the adjuration thou-shalt-not-judge itself implies a moral judgment about good and bad.) And again, generally, “Reason is something more than cerebral biochemistry,” and once one understands that to think that it is, is to engage in that is not a “merely natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists,” one acknowledges the existence of the Supernatural.” “The Supernatural,” therefore, “is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.” This must be so, if “Nature” means only the collection of such physical phenomena as biochemical reactions. Lewis avers, on the contrary, that “Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural; God created her.” And if so, He might well be able to intervene in His Creation, performing acts that are miraculous, that is, not in conformity with the usual run of the Laws of Nature He established.

Can nature be known “to be of such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible”? Lewis lists three definitions of natural law: natural laws “are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them”; natural laws are “applications of the law of averages”; natural laws are similar to “the truths of mathematics”—logically necessary. Neither the first nor the second definition precludes the possibility of miracles. (For example, as some rabbis teach, God does indeed play dice with the universe, but the dice are ‘loaded’.) The third definition would seem to convict the believer in miracles of self-contradiction. But this charge assumes that no interferences can occur between cause A and effect B. If so (and it is obviously so in the physical world), the only question “is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors.” The Bible clearly teaches that it does: God comes like a thief in the night, Lewis quotes. “If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not break any laws. The laws at once take over,” as pregnancy and childbirth follow. “The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern” and by so doing indicating “the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level,” a reality that as it were frames nature but also intervenes in it.

This raises the question of why, if God does indeed intervene in the ordinary course of events, He does not do so more often, alleviating the sometimes-horrendous suffering of His creatures. Or indeed, why has He permitted nature to feature suffering in the first place? Lewis replies that “Nature is a creature, a created thing,” a being “partly good and partly evil,” as indeed are such fascinating creatures as ourselves. “It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than that the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband.” Nature isn’t God. “She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her.” Like humanity, someday she will be redeemed, but in God’s own time, not ours.

Lewis next invites us not only to meet nature but to meet the Bible, and on its own terms. He recapitulates three “guiding principles”: thought is distinct from “the imagination which accompanies it”; a thought “may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones”; to speak about things that cannot be perceived sensually “must inevitably talk as if they could be” so perceived. By this latter claim he means that even abstract language has sensual content, as when one speaks of the ‘growth’ of institutions. Turning to the Bible, one finds many images, “crude mental pictures which so horrify the skeptic,” as when Christ is described as the “Son” of the “Father.” Those who seek to rid religion of such anthropomorphic images, however, “merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds”—talking, for example of “spiritual force,” thereby invoking images of “winds and tides and electricity and gravitation,” or, rejecting the idea of a personal God, tells us of one all-pervading Being, thereby “exchang[ing] the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.” And so, in considering the Trinity, Lewis reminds his readers that the “Son” is also called the Logos, meaning reason and word, eternally with God and indeed being God. “He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion of cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion.” That, Lewis says, is it means to call Christ the “Son” of the Father God. “The reason why the modern literalist is puzzled is that he is trying to get out of the old writers something which is not there,” namely, the strict separation of literal and metaphorical meanings. “The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science.” One might intervene, quite unmiraculously, to question Lewis’s selection of the term “even” in that sentence, but the point is nonetheless well taken. The Bible describes the “uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be” by means of “the doctrine of the Trinity,” showing that “this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce,” bring about “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.”

Returning to the political dispute among theologians concerning monarchy and democracy, “with Hegel” pantheism, a democratic notion of God, “became almost the agreed philosophy of highly educated people.” Pantheism in some form “is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” Only “Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both) have proved…capable of resisting it.” The Monarch who brings Himself to our attention in the Bible says, in contradiction to pantheism, not only that He is but that He is the LORD (the capital letters used in the written version of His Word being quite appropriate to His status). Democratic man thinks what the college freshman said out loud: “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” Here is where revelation puts its limit on reasoning. If you restrict your reasoning to nature, you will find yourself tending toward pantheism, even in your most exalted moments, as when a Disney cartoon character croons his invitation to wish upon a star, rather than praying to God. Pantheists have hated the traditional imagery of the living God not “because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king or even as warrior,” whereas “the Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing,” being “there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.” But “if the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God,” He “might do things,” work miracles in order to realize His own thoughts, not ours. God’s mind is not the human mind; it may plan miracles that register “the highest consistency,” but not the one to which we are accustomed, or to which we desire to conform. This notwithstanding, Christian theology “offers you a working arrangement which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”

Lewis next presents “the three central miracles of the Christian faith”—the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Resurrection—in light of what he calls human beings’ “innate sense of the fitness of things,” exemplified by our expectation of order rather than chaos in the world around us.

With his claim that reasoning is distinct from nature, he can assert that “our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation.” The Biblical God being “not a nature-God but the God of Nature,” and given the charity, the agapic love, of the Biblical God, surely that God’s power can effect His own incarnation in a human body, and surely His love for his once good, now fallen, creation, makes the Incarnation quite reasonable, however initially stunning to our sensibilities. Just as “a brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought” (although one might well say that an unreasoning human brain is indeed ‘less’ a brain, failing to perform to its best nature), so a man is no less a man for being used by the divine Logos. In this sense, Jesus in His incarnate form was fully God, fully Man, engaged in the rational purpose of bringing human beings at least part of the way back to their intended rational nature. “The whole Miracle” of the Incarnation, “far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary.”

The miracle of the Immaculate Conception equally points to the character of God’s interventions. Unlike the stories told by Ovid and the brothers Grimm, where metamorphosis is catastrophic to the nature of the person metamorphosed, the God of nature changes existing, defective nature for the better. He alters to perfect, “com[ing] to Nature in no anti-Natural spirit.” Lewis contrasts Jesus’ multiplication of one loaf of bread into many loaves, for the purpose of feeding the many who have gathered to his refusal of Satan’s challenge to turn a stone into a loaf of bread. In the Incarnation, God “was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew,” the perfect Man. “The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature,” a “foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future,” when Jesus will return to create a new Heaven and a new Earth.

“The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts”—that is, the supreme act for Christians to know. It showed the many witnesses to it the possibility of life after death and provided them with “a picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general.” It is the opposite of a magical act, which “arises from the spirit’s longing to get that power” without paying the ‘wage of sin,’ which is death. Left to itself, nature as it exists now is indeed entropic; only a miracle can reverse its course. The Resurrection confirms the possibility of the Christian promise, that one can be ‘born again.’ The spirituality of Christianity does not simply mean ‘not-bodily,’ immaterial, since “immaterial things may, like material things, be good or bad or indifferent.” Rather, spirituality means “the life which arises in such rational beings [i.e., human beings] when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ.” In “this sense alone…the ‘spiritual’ is always good.”

These final chapters show Lewis at his strongest, probably the most able defender of Christian faith in the English language since Chesterton. 

 

Note

1. For a ‘professional’ philosopher’s commentary on Lewis’s argument, see Elizabeth Anscombe: “C. S. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles,” lecture delivered at Oxford University, 1985.

Pius X: Lamentabili Sane (“Condemning the Errors of the Modernists”). July 3, 1907.

Pius X: Pacendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”). September 8, 1907. 

Pius X: “The Oath Against Modernism.”

 

Pius X is best remembered today as a critic of “modernism,” as set forth in the writings of the French Catholic priest Alfred Loisy, author of The Gospel and the Church, published in 1903. A student of Ernest Renan, the Hegelian scholar whose widely distributed Life of Jesus denied the divinity of Christ and the occurrence of miracles, Loisy maintained that the Church was founded by His disciples in the years after Jesus’ death. (Mistakenly supposing that His Kingdom would be established very soon, Jesus Himself had no reason to found the Church, Loisy claimed.) In a 1907 document, Lamentabili Sane, compiled by the Church’s Holy Office and endorsed by Pius, this claim was listed as the thirty-third of sixty-five modern heresies listed—thirty-three being Jesus’ age when crucified. [1] Other heresies included the ‘scientific’ criticism of Scripture, which claims that “Catholic teaching cannot really be reconciled with the true origins of the Christian religion”; denial of God’s authorship of Scripture; denial of the unerring character of Scripture; the claim that the Book of Revelation is only “a mystical contemplation of the Gospel,” not a real prophecy; the definition of revelation as consciousness; the assertion that because revelation is only human consciousness it is incomplete, ongoing, the Bible being an important way station in its unfolding but no more than that; the charge that Church dogmas have been designed by human beings with no divine assistance; the claim that faithful assent to Church teaching is a probabilistic human judgment, uninfluenced by the Holy Spirit; denial of Christ’s divinity, messiahship, Sonship; denial of the Resurrection, of the expiatory character of Christ’s death, and of the validity of the sacraments, including baptism. Loisy accordingly took a more or less contemptuous view of the Catholic Church, considering it hostile not only to modern natural science but also to advances in theological science. In the words of the Holy Office, modernism holds that the Church “obstinately clings to immutable doctrines which cannot be reconciled with modern progress,” and that such progress “demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted,” since “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.” These are indeed claims consistent with Hegelian historicism, and therefore a century old at the time Loisy published them. The novelty of them, and Pius’ indignation, likely derived from Loisy’s status as a Catholic priest. He would be excommunicated, a year later.

Pius himself wrote a detailed critique of modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, published a few months after the Lamentabili. “These latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ”—enemies who “put themselves reformers of the Church” and are the more dangerous because they know the Church more intimately than the outsiders do.” They lay the axe to the root of Church, faith itself, by “play[ing] the double role of rationalist and Catholic.” One of their techniques consists of a sort of intellectual guerrilla warfare, “present[ing] their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement” while hiding under several guises: philosopher, believer, theologian, historian, critic, apologist, reformer.

As philosophers, Modernists affirm the doctrine of agnosticism, holding that human reason applies rightly only to the phenomena, with “neither the right nor the power to overstep these limits.” Reason cannot reach God, affirm his existence, “even by means of visible things”—i.e., the argument from design, cited by the Apostle Paul. Thus, they rule out Thomism, “which they denounce as a system which is ridiculous and long since defunct.” This might have led them to a Protestant-like reliance on faith alone, but their agnosticism is only a way station to atheism, at least in the fields of science and history. There, “God and all that is divine are utterly excluded.” They replace God with “what they call vital immanence”—Hegel with a Bergsonian twist. Religion, Modernists maintain, can be understood scientifically and historically within the life of man, originating not in the Holy Spirit but in “a certain need or impulsion,” in “a movement of the heart,” a ‘religious sense’ located in man’s subconscious mind. God is a sort of life-force, permeated the human mind; ‘revelation’ is only the consciousness of the initially subconscious religious sense. “The religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion.” This being the case, all religions are “both natural and supernatural,” and there is no principled way to distinguish them or to prefer one to another. Catholicism “is quite on a level with the rest.”

Having rejected God in their scientific and historical work ‘in advance,’ Modernists predictably find nothing about “nothing that is not human” in “the Person of Christ.” Christ is not eternal but ‘historically relative’: in considering Him, “everything should be excluded, deeds and words and all else, that is not in strict keeping with His character, condition, and education, and with the place and time in which He lived.” What Christ taught has been clarified in subsequent generations by the logic of the human intellect, as Christ spoke in terms of mere symbols and parables. Thus, there has been an “intrinsic evolution of dogma,” consistent with the Modernists’ historicism. 

Modernists distinguish philosophers and theologians from believers. As believer, the Modernist claims to know God through their “personal experience,” thereby departing from rationalism “only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-mystics.” He reaches God-as-life-force by way of “a kind of intuition of the heart” which “exceed[s] any scientific conviction.” If I deny this ‘God’s’ existence, it is only because I am “unwilling to put [myself] in the moral state necessary to produce” the religious experience. This again affirms the claim that many religions are true. 

This split between science, the knowable, philosophy, and faith, the unknowable, belief, accrues to the advantage of science, which judges religious belief. Modernism makes science “entirely independent of faith” while “faith is made subject to science.” In this, Modernists reject the teaching of “Our predecessor,” Pius IX, wrote, “In matters of religion it is the duty of philosophy not to command but to serve, not to prescribe what is to be believed, but to embrace what is to be believed with reasonable obedience, not to scrutinize the depths of the mysteries of God, but to venerate them devoutly and humbly.” Pius X instead stands with Pius IX and indeed with the distinguished Counter-Reformer Charles Borromeo, deploring the Modernists, who act “on the principle that science in no way depends upon faith” and therefore “feel no especial horror in treading in the footsteps of Luther!”

The Modernist as philosopher holds that “the principle of faith is immanent”; the Modernist as believer adds, “this principle is God”; the theologian concludes, “God is immanent in man.” In so arguing, he reduces the elements of the Catholic liturgy to the status of mere symbols. But what do these symbols now symbolize, if not a Bergsonian, a Hegelian, or even Spinozist God, the God not of holiness or separation but of pantheism? 

The Modernist theologian denies that the Church and the sacraments were instituted by Christ. After all, according to them “Christ [was] nothing more than a man whose religious consciousness has been, like that of all men, formed by degrees”—developed, evolved over time. “All Christian consciences were, [Modernists] affirm, in a manner virtually included in the conscience of Christ as the plant is included in the seed.” Scriptural writers ‘heard’ God, but “only by immanence and vital permanence,” since “inspiration…is in nowise distinguished from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him by words of writing, except perhaps by its vehemence.” The Bible is “a human work, made by men for men,” but an expression of the immanence Modernists call God. As for the Church, it is simply “the product of the collective consciousness” of believers—not revealed to individuals and surely not founded by Christ. In this, Pius suggests, the Modernists are the ones who are limited by the ‘spirit’ of their time and place. “For we are living in an age when the sense of liberty has reached its highest development,” seen in the civil order by the prevalence of “popular government” and in the ecclesiastical order in the democratic notion of collective consciousness. To the Catholic Modernist mind, the highest authority is the Church as collective consciousness, an attempt to reconcile “the authority of the Church” with “the liberty of the believers.”

Politically, Catholic Modernism seeks separation of Church and State. The traditional Catholic teaching also separated Church and State but with the State subordinate to the Church. For the Modernists, the Church no longer exercises authority over citizens as citizens. This means that “in temporal matters the Church must be subject to the State.” And if the magisterium of the Church “springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideas.” Without this democratization of theological teachings, the evolution of Church dogma will be stymied. To hasten this desired end, ecclesiastical authority “should strip itself of that external pomp which adorns it in the eyes of the public.” Ultimately, democratization “would make the laity the factor of progress in the Church.”

At the central point of his Encyclical, Pius pivots from the Modernists’ ideas to their practice as Church historians, critics, apologists, and reformers. Their “historico-critical conclusions are the natural outcome of their philosophical principles.” So, for example, in considering the life of Christ as historians, the Modernists’ agnosticism assigns the human aspect of Jesus to the realm of historical research while relegating His divine aspect to the realm of faith. The same goes for “the Church of history and the Church of faith. To be sure, faith itself has a history, but it cannot be explained historically by having recourse to supernatural explanations. “The historian must set aside all that surpasses man in his natural condition”—his natural condition being limited to his psychology and “the time and period of his existence.” Historians also limit themselves, perhaps unwittingly, to the presuppositions of their own time and place, a time and place characterized by ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism: “They will not allow that Christ ever uttered those things which do not seem to be within the capacity of the multitudes that listened to Him,” or, even more boldly, those things that they take to have been beyond his character, condition of life, and education. “Their method is to put themselves into the position and person of Christ, and then to attribute to Him what they would have done under the circumstances.”

“As history takes its conclusions from philosophy,” from the ideational framework of the historians, “so too criticism takes its conclusions from history.” According to the Modernists, there is “the history of the faith” or “internal history”—the story the Church tells its members about itself—and there is “the real history” of the Church; there is the Church history of Christ and the “real history” of Christ, the first reflecting the “of faith, who never really existed,” a Christ “who never lived outside the pious meditations of the believer,” the second reflecting “a real Christ. Add the doctrines of immanence and evolution to the equation and one gets the “scientific criticism” of the Bible. Scientific criticism gives us an originally incoherent Bible, whose books were not written by “the authors whose names they bear,” whose passages have been cobbled together from diverse materials by men who lived long after the events described. Such coherence as the Bible now comes from its compilers and editors, who contributed to its “vital evolution springing from and corresponding with the evolution of faith.” 

All of this puts apologetics on a new footing. No longer do those who defend Catholicism defend Church teachings as authoritative, simply. They rather admit “errors and contradictions” in them, adding “that this is not only excusable but—curiously enough—that it is even right and proper,” given not only the evolutionary character of faith but the logographic necessity under which Church authorities have operated, their teachings limited by the capacities of the persons they addressed. Errors of science and of history have been defended because the majority of Catholics couldn’t handle the truth, as it were. Focused primarily on “religion and morals,” the authors and editors of Scripture deployed history and science for heuristic purposes, only. As Nietzsche had claimed during the same epoch Modernism arose, “life has its own truths and its own logic—quite different from rational truth and rational logic, belonging as they do to a different order, viz., truth of adaptation and of proportion both with what they call the medium in which it lives and with the end for which it lives.” What is “true and legitimate [is] whatever is explained by life”—an expression of their vitalism.

Pius X intervenes in his description of Modernist arguments to observe that “this is equivalent to attributing to God Himself the lie of utility or officious lie,” the “noble lie” of Plato’s Socrates. Biblical prophecies are no more than “artifices of preaching, which are justified by life.” Such noble lies include Jesus’ apparent claim that his Kingdom was coming very soon. “They tell us that we must not be surprised at this since even He Himself was subject to the laws of life!” In justifying the supposedly “flagrant contradictions” of Church teachings, Modernists justify them on the grounds of the necessities of life. “But when they justify even contradictions, what is it that they will refuse to justify?” Will their lies enhance life, or only aggrandize their own lives? And even if their lies enhance life, does this not amount to worshipping Creation in the place of the Creator? 

In Pius’ estimation, even as a form of apologetics, this will not do. Modernist defenders of the Church must attempt “to persuade the non-believer that down in the very depths of his nature and his life lie hidden the need and the desire for some religion, and this is not a religion of any kind, but the specific religion known as Catholicism,” which must be held up as “the perfect development of life,” as somehow immanent in life itself. “They would show to the non-believer, as hidden in his being, the very germs which Christ Himself had in His consciousness, and which He transmitted to mankind.” But like all such claims, this one subverts the actual teaching of Scripture, which adjures human beings to worship God as their Creator, not as integral to Creation, and to understand God as Holy, separate from all He has created and all He has inspired. Jesus may live within me, but He is not part of me. 

The Modernist as Church reformer exhibits a passion for comprehensive innovation. He demands that Church government “be reformed in all its all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments.” These “must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity.” While the Church should remain outside political organizations, it “must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit.” Pius calls this “Americanism,” and it includes not only democratization but the claim “that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice.” This insistence fits with egalitarianism, as the active virtues are the virtues of ‘the many,’ theoretical or contemplative virtues primarily for ‘the few.’ 

Adroitly aiming Hegelian language against the neo-Hegelian Modernists, Pius calls Modernism “the synthesis of all heresies.” The new theorists, the new ‘few,’ redirect the human intellect in accordance with their core doctrine, agnosticism. “By it every avenue to God on the side of the intellect is barred to man.” Since “the sense of the soul is the response to the action of the thing which the intellect or the outward senses set before it,” agnosticism cuts off the distinctively human characteristic, reason, from the Creator of human beings. This is highly unlikely to lead to an enhancement of faith; “take away the intelligence, and man, already inclined to follow the senses, becomes their slave”—as already seen in the writings of Hobbes, who calls reason the scout of the passions. But “all these fantasies of the religious sense will never be able to destroy common sense,” which “tells us that emotion and everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to the discovery of truth”—human appetites being foolish and inconsistent counselors, as Socrates had remarked. As defined by Modernists, religious experience in its variety adds nothing “beyond a certain intensity and a proportionate deepening of the conviction of the reality of the object.” “But these two will never make the sense of the soul into anything but sense.”

Common sense begins the road to prudence or practical reason. Pius appeals to the religious experience of the bishops: “Venerable Brethren, how necessary in such a matter” as religious experience “is prudence, and the learning,” the theoretical framework, by which prudence is guided.” You deal with human souls all the time, “especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates,” those most urgently in need of rational guidance. You have also read “the works of ascetical theology,” which possess “a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing.” Modernist democrats are not as democratic as they suppose, inasmuch as “the vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God.” Absent this rational path, what can remain to men “but atheism and the absence of all religion,” the denial of God as a Person and the affirmation (at most) of pantheism? The Modernist doctrine of immanence does not “leave God distinct from Man”—the definition of pantheism.

While Modernists may “have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church,” “in reality they only offend both.” Why are they doing this? Here, Pius permits himself an argumentum ad hominem. They are in the grips of a curiosity, a philosophic eros, “imprudently regulated,” seeking to know what the human soul is not “meant to know,” namely the course of Divine Providence, which they have reduced to supposedly knowable ‘laws of History.’ Even worse than their unregulated curiosity is their pride; “they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves.” And they are ignorant, having effected “the union between faith and false philosophy,” a faith in self-generated ‘progress’ of human affairs. They do, however, see some things all too clearly. “They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy”—Thomism, which adjusts the relation between the reasonings of Aristotle and the revelations of Scripture—the “authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church.” “On these they wage unrelenting war,” a long march through the institutions, “seiz[ing] upon professorships in the seminaries and universities, and gradually mak[ing] of them chairs of pestilence,” preaching their doctrines from the pulpits (“although possibly in utterances which are veiled”) and advocating them at conferences. They ‘network’ at social gatherings and publish in books, newspapers, and reviews”; “sometimes one and the same writer adopts a variety of pseudonym to trap the incautious reader into believing in a multitude of Modernist writers.” They are especially influential among the “many young men, once full of promise and capable of rendering great services to the Church,” whom they have now led astray.

Pius accordingly ordains that “scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences” and that all Catholic priests should “promote the study of theology,” understood Thomistically. In the universities, study of the natural sciences shall be undertaken without neglecting the sacred sciences,” which are indeed sciences, that is, forms of knowledge rationally arrived at. Catholic presses shall not publish Modernist books; let publishers outside the faith do so, if they will. Establish a “Council of Vigilance” in every diocese, capable of recognizing and exposing Modernist heresies. 

Pius was not slow to write an “Oath Against Modernism,” requiring that Catholic clergy and teachers in Catholic colleges and universities affirm that God “can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world,” as stated by the Apostle Paul in Romans I:19. The Oath further stipulated acknowledgment of miracles as proof of divine revelation, proofs valid for all time, “even of this time”; of the authority of the Catholic Church, “the guardian and teacher of the revealed truth”; of the falsity of any claim that Church teachings “evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously” or that any Church teaching was formulated by unassisted human reason; of the understanding of faith as “a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source, not “a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; and of the rejection of pantheism and of the historical relativism modern pantheism tends to support. The Oath endured until rescinded by Paul VI’s Holy Office, which replaced it with the “Profession of Faith.” The Profession eliminates the condemnation of Modernism and the affirmation of Thomism, stipulating only profession of belief in monotheism, the divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church and its teachings in their current form. That is, the Profession drops the condemnation of pantheism and appears to give some leeway to the historicist or evolutionary conception of Catholic teachings. Understandably, defenders of the Oath, and of the Thomistic Catholicism it supports, have dissented.

 

Note

1. The Holy Office is the informal term for what was then called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, so named by Pius X in 1908. The Office was founded in 1542 as part of the Counter-Reformation and was originally called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Its officers at that time conducted heresy trials. The liberalizing Pope Paul VI renamed the Office yet again in 1965, calling it the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; twenty years later, the word “Sacred” was dropped. 

 

 

Pius X: The Complete Collected Encyclicals of Pius X. Privately published, 2023.

 

Born in 1835 in the Kingdom of Lombardy, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto attended the Seminary of Padua, where he studied the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and canon law before being ordained as a priest in 1858. He rose in rank within the Church, serving as spiritual director and later professor at the seminary in the Diocese of Treviso, then as Bishop of Mantua, beginning in 1884. Nine years later, Pope Leo XIII appointed him to the Sacred College of Cardinals, and he succeeded Leo in the papacy in 1903. Notable as a critic of “modernism” in the Church, he died in August 1914, on the eve of the war that has sometimes been described as the debacle of European modernity. The Church canonized him in 1952. 

In his first message as pope, Pius professed himself “disturbed” at having succeeded such an eminent pastor as Leo but “terrified beyond all else by the disastrous state of human society today.” “For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction?” Against this, citing Ephesians i.10,”We have no other program in the Supreme Pontificate but that of ‘restoring all things in Christ'” amidst a society in which “every effort and every artifice is used to destroy utterly the memory and the knowledge of God,” for Whom “all respect” has been “extinguished among the majority of men.” In modernity, “man has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God,” making “of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored.” The result has been a Hobbesian world, in which “the greater part of mankind [are] fighting among themselves so savagely as to make it seem as though strife were universal.” While many cry for peace, “to want peace without God is an absurdity, seeing that where God is absent thence too justice flies, and when justice is taken away it is vain to cherish the hope of peace.” He therefore calls upon his Church brethren to “lead mankind back to the dominion of Christ” as a spiritual necessity, “a natural duty,” and in “our common interest” as human beings.

The path to Christ “is the Church.” Once the Church has refuted the pretension of human self-deification, it must continue on “to restore to their ancient place of honor the most holy laws and counsels of the gospel; to proclaim aloud the truths taught by the Church, and her teachings on the sanctity of marriage, on the education and discipline of youth, on the possession and use of property, the duties that men owe to those who rule the State; and lastly to restore equilibrium between the different classes of society according to Christian precept and custom.” Central to these tasks will be the reform and reinvigoration of Catholic education: “How many there are who mock Christ and abhor the Church and the Gospel more through ignorance than through badness of mind.” “Progress of knowledge” need not extinguish faith; it is ignorance that does so. “The more ignorance prevails the greater is the havoc wrought by incredulity.” In the parishes, however, the most effective way to teach is by example, as “luminous examples given by the great army of soldiers of Christ will be of much greater avail in moving and drawing men than words and sublime dissertations.” [1]

His first specific step to realize this reformation was a letter on Church music, crucial to satisfying the need to establish “the decorum of the House of God in which the august mysteries of religion are celebrated” with “sacred chant and music.” There has been “a general tendency to deviate from the right rule,” which is “to clothe with suitable melody the liturgical text proposed for the understanding of the faithful…in order that through it the faithful may be more easily moved to devotion and better disposed for the reception of the fruits of grace belonging to the celebration of the most holy mysteries.” Although “every nation is permitted to admit into its ecclesiastical compositions those special forms which may be said to constitute its native music,” those forms “must be subordinated in such a manner to the general characteristics of sacred music,” the supreme model of which is the Gregorian Chant. The congregants should themselves participate in the Chant, so that they “may again take a more active part in the ecclesiastical offices, as was the case in ancient times.” The human voice should predominate over organ music.  Modern music “in the theatrical style” (“which was in the greatest vogue, especially in Italy, during the last century”) should be avoided in worship services, for “its very nature is diametrically opposed to Gregorian Chant and classic polyphony, and therefore to the most important law of all good sacred music.” But even the best music should be kept in strict subordination to the liturgy; “it must be considered a very grave abuse when the liturgy in ecclesiastical function is made to appear secondary to and in a manner at the service of the music, for the music is merely a part of the liturgy and its humble handmaid.” As Plato’s Socrates knew, music tunes souls, readying them for reason or for unreason and in a Christian church it should be such as prepares them for receiving the Holy Spirit by word, the Gospel, and in action, by the sacraments.

If Logos means God’s Word, and His Word is reasonable, then the Church should follow the Fourth Council of the Lateran, which in 1215 made sacramental confession and Holy Communion mandatory only after a child “had attained the age of reason.” By the age of reason, the Church Fathers did not mean the age where formal instruction in logic might be undertaken but simply the time when the child “knows the difference between the Eucharistic Bread and ordinary, material bread, and can therefore approach the altar with proper devotion.” For this “full use of reason is not required, for a certain beginning of the use of reason, that is, some use of reason suffices.” Thought governed by the principle on non-contradiction enables the mind to make distinctions between one thing and another, a capacity that small children have attained.

Beyond this elementary instruction, further knowledge of God begins with this natural capacity of the intellect. But if the intellect lacks “its companion light,” the light of the Gospel, it remains unable to see its way “to the paths of justice.” “Christian teaching reveals God and His infinite perfection with far greater clarity than is possible by the human faculties alone.” Mere “knowledge of religion” can coincide with “a perverse will and unbridled conduct.” Christian education therefore requires not only faith, “which is of the mind,” but hope, “which is of the will,” and love, “which is of the heart.” Christian education addresses “the whole man” as “the son of the heavenly Father, in Whose image he is formed, and with Whom he is destined to live in eternal happiness,” as is revealed “only by the doctrine of Jesus Christ.” Outward actions, such as baptism and giving alms, are thus less important than teaching. This is why the Council of Trent decreed that the “first and most important work” of pastors is to educate the faithful, carefully distinguishing the “milk” of catechetical instruction from the solid “bread” of the Gospel. The catechist will “take up one or other of the truths of faith or Christian morality and then explain it in all its parts,” comparing God’s command to “what is our actual conduct,” using “examples appropriately taken from the Holy Scriptures, Church history and the lives of the saints” applying them to his hearers’ own lives, showing them “how they are to regulate their own conduct” and “exhort[ing] all present to dread and avoid vice and to practice virtue.” Without this fundamental instruction—aimed, like the liturgy, including music, at preparing the soul for attention to the things of God—the more advanced instruction in the Gospel will prove little more than puffery.

Citing the intention to restore “all things in Christ” enunciated in his first Encyclical letter, Pius reaffirms the substance of the Gospel doctrine on the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine which had been reaffirmed fifty years earlier by Pope Pius IX. “For can anyone fail to see that there is no surer or more direct road than by Mary for uniting all mankind in Christ and obtaining through Him the perfect adoption of sons, that we may be holy and immaculate in the sight of God.” That is, it is in a sense no less miraculous that decidedly unholy human beings may be ‘born again,’ becoming sons and daughters not only of their own parents but of God, than it was for God to be born of a woman. Both the ‘reconception’ Christians experience and the Conception of God in Mary are ‘immaculate’ or untainted by sin. Upon Mary, “as upon a foundation, the noblest after Christ, rises the edifice of the faith of all centuries.” Since faith is a thing of the mind, and education guides the mind, Mary is indispensable to Christian education.  “With her alone of all others Jesus was for thirty years united”; as a result, “Who could better than His Mother have an open knowledge of the admirable mysteries of the birth and childhood of Christ, and above all of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is the beginning and the foundation of faith?” In “sharing as she did the thoughts and the secret wishes of Christ she may be said to have lived the very life of her Son,” and “nobody can ever be more competent as a guide and teacher of the knowledge of Christ.” Devotion to Mary also remedies the defects of the will and the heart, since in seeking “to gain the heart of Mary,” in courting her favor, one must “correct his vicious habits and to subdue the passions which incite him to evil.” Mary educates the whole man, and does so by her nature, having been exempted from “all stain of original sin” by God. This must be so, because the Son of God took not only his human nature from her but something of her own nature. By affirming the truth of the Immaculate Conception precisely as a miracle, Christians reject rationalism and materialism. Mary “has exterminated all heresies in the world” not by preaching but by her life, crushing the head of the serpent and his ‘worldly wisdom’ with “Christian wisdom,” the purpose of Christian education in full.

Such heresies have entered the Church itself. “An air of independence which is fatal for souls is widely diffused in the world, and has found its way even within the sanctuary, show[ing] itself not only in relation to authority but also in regard to doctrine.” He tells an assemblage of bishops that “some of our young clerics, animated by that spirit of unbridled criticism which holds sway at the present day, have come to lose all respect for the learning which comes from our great teachers, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the interpreters of revealed doctrine”—foremost among them, Thomas Aquinas, with whose Summa the mind of Pius himself had been fortified. “If ever you have in your seminary one of those new-style savants, get rid of him without delay…. You will always regret having ordained even one such person; never will you regret having excluded him.” Since “a poisonous atmosphere corrupts men’s minds to a great extent today,” bishops should proceed deliberately with ordination. “Your priests will be as you have trained them,” and you are the ones who must train them, rather than releasing them into the secular universities without “very good reasons” for doing so and after “necessary precautions have been taken.” Seminarians are not to “take part in external activities,” to read newspapers and periodicals except “those with solid principles and which the Bishop deems suitable for their study.” Bishops should appoint a spiritual director for each seminary, a man with the innocence of doves and the prudence of serpents, ready “to train the young men in solid piety, the primary foundation of the spiritual life.”

So reformed, so re-centered on Christ, the Church can then resume what Pius regards as its rightful task not only as “the guardian and protector of Christian society” but as the “solid foundation for civil legislation. In the past, proper relations between Church and State require “the public recognition of the authority of the Church in those matters which touched upon conscience in any manner” and “the subordination of all the laws of the State to the Divine laws of the Gospel,” ensuring that “the harmony of the two powers in securing the temporal welfare of the people in such a way that their eternal welfare did not suffer.” In modern life, religious toleration prevails, offering “indiscriminately to all the right to influence public opinion.” Very well then, Catholics “can certainly use this to their advantage.” To do so, they must “prove themselves as capable as others (in fact, more capable than others) by cooperating in the material and civil welfare of the people,” to “acquire that authority and prestige which will make them capable of defending and promoting a higher good, namely, that of the soul.” In regimes of liberal democracy, the Church can no longer wield political power directly but it can reestablish itself among in the minds and hearts of the sovereign people without formal Church establishment. 

Since the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had formalized its relations with civil governments by signing concordats—effectively, treaties whereby a given state would agree to a set of licit practices within it by a ‘foreign power,’ the Church. The Church never committed itself to treating with any one regime type. So long as the Church could freely perform its duties to God and to men, it was ecumenical with respect to rulers and ruling institutions. What Pius deplores in modern times is ‘laicization’ of civil society, particularly as seen in the French Law of Separation the Churches and State, enacted in 1905. Although the Concordat of 1801 had re-established the Catholic Church in France after its disestablishment and the dispossession of Church properties under the First Republic, secularization had resumed, gradually, in the 1880s within the education system. In 1904, the Third Republic had severed diplomatic with the Holy See. The new law completed the task, permitting divorce, replacing nuns with laywomen as hospital nurses, ending exemption from military conscription for priests, transferring Church property to the national and municipal governments, banning public prayers at the beginning of parliamentary sessions, and eliminating religious references from oaths taken in courtrooms as well as any religious symbols in the courtrooms. Pius deems this violation of the Concordat to be “as disastrous for society as it is for religion,” an act of “injustice to God,” inasmuch as “the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own,” incurring an obligation to “a public and social worship to honor Him,” not merely a guarantee of Christian worship conceived as “a private cult.” The purpose of the God-ordained political community isn’t “the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only”—a “proximate” aim—but of “man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course.” Under the Law, however, the Church in France survives “under the domination of the civil power,” having taken over education and other important functions of Christian charity and having revoked the government subsidies Napoleon had instituted as compensation for the despoiling of Church properties during the Revolution. The framers of the Law admit that they intend to “de-Catholicize” France, even to the extent of severing religious institutions from the Church hierarchy by making them “judicially answerable to the civil authority.” Pius adjures French Catholics to defend the Church by “model[ing] all your actions and your entire lives” so that they “may do honor to the faith you profess” and then unite with “your priests, your bishops, and above all with this Apostolic see,” going forth fearlessly and prayerfully to resist these statist depredations, “employ[ing] all means which the law recognizes as within the rights of all citizens to arrange for and organize religious worship.” In so doing, French Catholics must anticipate that their adversaries will falsely claim that “the form of the Republic in France is hateful to Us,” that the Pope intends “to overthrow it.” They will pretend that the Church seeks “to arouse religious war in France,” but on the contrary, “the whole world now knows that if peace of conscience is broken in France, that is not the work of the Church but of her enemies.” [2]

Some of Pius’s suspicions were directed at would-be ‘helpers’ of the Church. In 1894, a French lay Catholic named Marc Sangnier founded Le Sillon (“The Path”). Responding to Leo XIII’s call for increased civil-social engagement by Church members, Sangnier hoped generally to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic-republican regime in general and with the French labor movement in particular. Membership grew to 500,000—predominantly laypersons and the younger clergy. The Sillon arrayed itself against the resolutely monarchist enemy of the Third Republic, Charles Maurras’s Action Française. [3]

Initially hopeful, by 1910 Pius became skeptical of the Sillon. Admittedly, “the Sillon did raise among the workers the standard of Jesus Christ, the symbol of salvation for peoples and nations,” inculcating “a respect for religion upon the least willing groups, accustoming the ignorant and the impious to hearing the Word of God,” “proudly proclaiming their faith in the face of a hostile audience,” often consisting of urban workers more accustomed to hearing secular-republican and Marxist doctrines from union organizers. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Sillon “were not adequately equipped with historical knowledge, sound philosophy, and solid theology to tackle without danger the difficult social problems in which their work and their inclinations were involving them.” They incautiously allowed “the penetration of liberal and Protestant concepts” into their talks, adapting Catholicism as much to laïcité as they adapted laïcité to Catholicism. In so doing, “the Sillonists are deceiving themselves when they believe that they are working in a field that lies outside the limits of Church authority and of its doctrinal and directive power,” a misconception Pius was not slow to correct.

In calling for Catholic civic engagement, Leo XIII rejected radical egalitarianism or social leveling, affirming rather that Christian Democracy “must preserve the diversity of classes which is assuredly the attribute of a soundly constituted state.” Neither popular sovereignty nor social egalitarianism met with Leo’s approval, yet these are the doctrines the Sillon promotes. Pius firmly replies: “In these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker—the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be set up unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy nations; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants.” 

Pius regards the Sillon’s regard for human dignity as praiseworthy, but its conception of human dignity is mistaken, taken from philosophers “of whom the Church does not at all feel proud,” the ‘philosophers of freedom’ who define liberty as autonomy. [4] From the principle of autonomy they derive the principles of economic, political, and intellectual emancipation from bosses, from all regimes other than democracy, and from the Church hierarchy, respectively. “The leveling down of differences from this threefold point of view will bring about equality among men, and such equality is viewed as true human justice.” Without the traditional hierarchies ordained by God, the bonds of society will consist of “love or one’s occupation and for the welfare of the community.” Thus, fraternity will give shape and cohesion to the society of equality and liberty. None of this comports with Leo’s intention, which had been consistent with “the sentiments of Catholics who hold that the right of government derives from God as its natural and necessary principle.” Sillonists have committed “the error of philosophism,” embracing doctrines propounded by the philosophes who endowed the Jacobins with what little intellectual heft they had. In a word, the Sillon resembles a salon. By making authority “a shadow, a myth,” Sillonists establish a principle whereby there can be “no more law properly so-called, no more obedience” to rulers secular or religious. “Even the priest, on entering [The Sillon], lowers the eminent dignity of his priesthood and, by a strange reversal of roles, becomes a student, placing himself on a level with his young friends, and is no more than a comrade.” The philosophy of freedom inclines toward anarchism. But in fact, as Leo himself had declared, the people are entitled “to choose for themselves the form of government which best corresponds with their character or with the institutions and customs handed down by their forefathers.” Following Aquinas, who follows Aristotle, the Church has long considered kingship, aristocracy, and mixed regimes as licit forms of government, since “justice is compatible with any of them.” “Democracy does not enjoy a special privilege.” In embracing it, and rejecting all other regimes, the Sillon “subjects its religion to a political party,” when the Church “has always left to the nations the care of giving themselves the form of government which they think most suited to their needs.”

Nor does the Church endorse the secularist notion of fraternity. “Love of our neighbor flows from our love for God,” and “any other kind of love is sheer illusion sterile and fleeting,” inasmuch as “pagan and secular societies of ages past…show that concern for common interests or affinities of nature weigh very little against the passions and wild desires of the heart.” Catholicism means universalism, but it is far from an indiscriminate universalism. Indeed, “by separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization,” especially since their version of fraternity tolerates false ideas, errors, and vices—interdenominationalism and indeed “promiscuity” of association. Similarly, secularist notions of human dignity only exalt “human pride.” The Sillonists are therefore utopians: “Unless human nature can be changed, which is not within the power of the Sillonists,” their envisioned society will never arrive. Real fraternity will occur only when “all minds” are “united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ,” which only the Catholic Church affords. “Vague idealism and civic virtues” will not do. And “worse is to come,” as “the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish” but an egalitarian ‘Religion of Humanity.’ [5] Sillonists have been “carried away towards another Gospel which they thought was the true Gospel of Our Savior,” but which “put[s] aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency.” But the real Jesus “has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors.” Yes, Jesus loves sinners, but He also teaches them “in order to convert and save them.” “He was as strong as he was gentle,” teaching “that fear [of God] is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.” Such teachings “show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.” Cutting off the offending limb was exactly what Pius then proceeded to do, telling the leaders of the Sillon to turn their leadership over to the French bishops, whom he charged with superintending the civil-social work of the rank-and-file members. 

Pius outlined his own understanding of the Church’s role in a democratic republic and in regard to labor organizations in his Encyclical, Singular Quadam, published in 1912. There is to be no revival of religious warfare. “We desire and intend that the faithful live with their non-Catholic fellow citizens in that peace without which neither the order of human society nor the welfare of the State can endure.” But spiritual warfare is another matter. A Christian “cannot ignore the supernatural good,” but “must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good,” subjecting all his actions “to the judgment and judicial office of the Church.” This goes for labor organizations, which ought to be “established chiefly on the foundation of the Catholic religion and openly follow the directive of the Church.” Associations composed of Catholics and non-Catholics are forbidden to Catholics, given the “serious dangers to the integrity of their faith and the due obedience to the commandments and precepts of the Catholic Church” such organizations entail. “Provided they exercise due caution,” Catholic labor organizations may “collaborate with non-Catholics for the common good” as “cartels”—associations, that is, which imitate the already existing cartels among capitalist firms, cartels involving labor instead of goods. It is entirely possible that Pius may have noted the resemblance of existing cartels to medieval guilds, organizations the Church had dealt with, and among, for centuries.

Beyond Europe, Pius intervened on behalf of South American Indians, consistent with a longstanding Church policy of defending them against European colonizers. [6] Quoting Pope Benedict XIV’s 1741 Encyclical, Immensa Pastorum, Pius recalled the rebuke of nominal Catholic Spaniards who acted “as if they had utterly forgotten all sense of the charity poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost,” reducing the Indians to slavery, selling some into slavery, and “treating them with such inhumanity that they were thus greatly hindered from embracing the Christian faith”—example being more persuasive than precept. Although slavery has since been abolished, in some instances Indians are still scourged and branded, “often for most trivial causes, often for a mere lust of cruelty”; whole villages and districts have seen the people slaughtered, with the extinction of some tribes. Surviving women and children are sold acts in which the rulers “have surpassed the worst examples of pagan iniquity.” Pius calls on European Catholic bishops to sponsor missions in America and to denounce “these base deeds,” which do “dishonor to the Christian name.”

Pius X’s Encyclicals clearly evidence the work of a pastor-statesman, one who undertook the reforming the regime he served in light of new circumstances, implementing a comprehensive policy consisting of recurrence to the regime’s first principles, attention to its ruling persons and institutions (especially its educational institutions, under assault from several quarters), and formulation of what might be described as a foreign policy regarding friends and enemies alike. He upholds the regime’s way of life and the end or purpose of that way of life, both as set down by its Founder. The besetting vice of the statesman might well be pride; this is even more likely in a monarchic regime, wherein the ruler has no equals, and so no one likely to rebuke his errors. To avoid this, to humble himself, Pius looks first to the King of kings and of popes. But to do that isn’t necessarily to see how a non-divine being might rule in the office he has inherited. He therefore looks to the examples set by one of his most distinguished predecessors in the Holy See, St. Gregory the Great, the great missionary and defender of the Church against monarchic interference St. Anselm of Acosta, Archbishop of Canterbury, and also St. Charles Borromeo, reformer of both the Catholic Church in Milan and the city itself and, like Pius, a strong advocate of sound education for the clergy. 

Pius celebrated the thirteenth centenarian of Gregory, “that great and incomparable man,” that “most prudent father of the family of Christ,” in 1904. In praising Gregory for his prudence, Pius follows both the teaching of Christ, who advises His disciples to be as innocent as doves and as prudent as serpents, but also Aristotle, who regards prudence as the preeminent virtue for the ruler. The parallel between the circumstances of the sixth century and the twentieth are clear: “When Gregory assumed the Supreme Pontificate the disorder in public affairs had reached its climax; the ancient civilization had all but disappeared and barbarism was spreading throughout the dominions of the crumbling Roman Empire.” Although the barbarism Gregory faced down was violent—Italy “had been left a prey of the still unsettled Lombards who roamed up and down the whole country laying waste everywhere”—Pius foresees a similar condition of anarchy in then-peaceful contemporary Europe, if the forces of modernity remain unchecked. More than only a defender of the Faith, Gregory sent to missions to England, adding that country to the realm of the Church while stipulating that it was Christ, not his own human wisdom, Who must be credited with that success. His “profound humility” led him never to “put himself forward as one invested with the might and power of the great ones of the earth,” calling himself rather “the Servant of the Servants of God.” Not despite because of this humility, carried on by his successors, the Church remains, even as the powerful men who rose up against her have disappeared and “philosophical systems without number” have been forgotten, confirming Jesus’ prophecy, “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.” For this reason, the Church today can “calmly wait until all the voices be scattered to the winds that now shout around Us proclaiming that the Church has gone beyond her time, that her doctrines are passed away forever, that the day is at hand when she will be condemned either to accept the tenets of a godless science and civilization or to depart from human society.”

In the coming struggle, the “unshakeable firmness” of Gregory in understanding the necessity of “a perfect harmony between the two powers, ecclesiastical and civil,” stands as an example for this pope and for all the clergy. Brought to understand that the Church does no injury to “the common weal” and may not abandon its own rights, vis-à-vis the state, “the world regained true salvation, and put itself on the path of a civilization which was noble and fruitful in blessings in proportion as it was founded on the incontrovertible dictates of reason and moral discipline, and derived its force from truth divinely revealed and from the maxims of the Gospel.” The Church today in one sense finds itself in the opposite condition. Christendom has been built, yet the world “seems as though it were tired of that life which has been and still is the chief and often the sole font of so many blessings—and not merely past but present blessings.” This exhaustion derives from the denial of the “supernatural order” and, “as a consequence, the divine intervention in the order of creation and in the government of the world and in the possibility of miracles.” “Men even go so far as to impugn the arguments for the existence of God.” Contemporary “historical criticism” of Scripture ignores the intention of the Scriptural authors, instead “forcing them to say what [the critics] wish them to say.” With the truth of Scripture effectively so erased, men “take away the principle that there is anything divine outside this visible world”; that in turn “take[s] away all check upon the unbridled passions even of the lowest and most shameful kind,” enslaving the mind, the seat of reason, to those passions and thereby negating “the morals of individuals and of civil society.” Absent moral authority, “the only check” on lawlessness governments retain is force. The rule of force causes men to “become discontented with everything,” to “proclaim the right to act as they please,” to “stir up rebellions” and “provoke revolutions, often of extreme violence,” which end in “overthrow[ing] all rights human and divine.” “The very liberty that belongs to the law of nature is trodden underfoot; and men go so far as to destroy the very structure of the family, which is the first and firmest foundation of the social structure.” With the rejection of Christ, the corner stone, the architecture of Church and state must collapse. 

Hence what began as a circumstance opposite to that seen by Gregory threatens to become something nearly identical to that circumstance. Catholics “must, above all else, have recourse to prayer, both public and private, to implore the mercies of the Lord and His powerful assistance.” But prayer is “not enough.” Gregory rebuked a bishop who had retreated to a life of solitary prayer, a man who “fail[ed] to go out into the battlefield to combat strenuously for the cause of the Lord.” Even a bishop cannot set an example if no one sees him—out of sight, out of mind. Catholic clergy must engage the errors of their time, preaching the truth of Church doctrine, especially Christian moral principles, and more “to show charity towards all, to  temper with Christian love the bitterness of social inequalities, to detach the heart from the goods of the world, to live contented with the state in which Providence has placed us, while striving to better it by the fulfillment of our duties” and “to thirst after the future life in the hope of eternal reward.” Only then, if God so wills, can “these principles be instilled and made to penetrate into the heart, so that true and solid piety may strike root there.” There is prudence and then there is prudence; not all forms of prudence are genuinely prudent at all. To concede anything to modern “science falsely so-called” bespeaks a “prudence of the flesh” and to fail to preach, teach, and fully to practice the Gospel is a failure of prudence, not the exercise of it. Gregory’s “spirit of energetic action” caused “the whole medieval period” to bear “what may be called the Gregorian imprint,” seen in “the rule of ecclesiastical government, the manifold phases of charity and philanthropy in its social institutions, the principles of the most perfect Christian asceticism and of monastic life, the arrangement of the liturgy and the art of sacred music.” Christendom proceeded to see “the ever more perfect observance of the natural law inscribed in our hearts,” as “the ferocity of the barbarians was…transformed to gentleness, woman was freed from subjection, slavery was repressed, order was restored in the due and reciprocal independence upon one another of the various classes of society, justice was recognized, the true liberty of souls was proclaimed, and social and domestic peace assured.”

Pius finds his second example of Christian statesmanship in St. Anselm of Canterbury, who served as archbishop from 1093 until his death in 1109—that is, beginning three decades after the Norman Conquest. Anselm did not confront barbarism but state oppression of the Church, the problem Pius has seen in contemporary France and Portugal. Anselm won freedom from the monarchic domination of Kings William II and Henry I, signing a concordat in which Henry renounced his claimed power to invest bishops. 

Anselm was capable of accomplishing this and other statesmanlike tasks because his soul consisted of “a wonderful harmony between qualities which the world falsely judges to be irreconcilable and contradictory: simplicity and greatness, humility and magnanimity, strength and gentleness, knowledge and piety, so that both in the beginning and throughout the whole course of his religious life” he was could “calm the angry passions of his enemies and win the heart of those who were enraged against him,” who ended by “prais[ing] him because he was good.” [7] He did this not by hedging on Church rights, “as though any compromise were possible between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial,” but by firmly asserting them. Nor did he restrict his resistance to the political realm, joining the intellectual battle against “the quarrelsome and the sophistical, ‘the heretical dialecticians’ of his time, as he rightly calls them, in whom reason was the slave of the imagination and of vanity,” even as imagination and vanity had prevailed in the minds of heretics in Pius’ day. Anselm described the heretics he saw as souls in whom “reason which should be the king and the guide of all that is in man is so mixed up with corporal imaginations that it is impossible to disentangle it from these, nor is itself able to distinguish them from things that it alone and pure should contemplate.” Such men are false philosophers who, as Anselm wrote, “because they are not able to understand what they believe dispute the truth of the faith itself, confirmed by the Holy Fathers, just as if bats and owls who see heaven only by night were to dispute concerning the rays of the sun at noon, against eagles who gaze at the sun unblinkingly.” With such men, “it must be shown to them reasonably how unreasonable is their contempt of us,” to show “the reasonableness of our faith.”

St. Charles Borromeo is Pius’ third Christian statesman. As Archbishop of Milan and a member of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Borromeo reformed both the Church and the city of Milan in the sixteenth century. More broadly, he proved a staunch defender of the Church during the Counter-Reformation. “In those days,” like today, “passions ran riot and knowledge of the truth was almost completely twisted and confused.” Calling “perversion of faith and morals a reformation,” “in reality” the Protestants” “were corrupters” who “undermin[ed] the strength of Europe through wars and dissensions,” thereby “pav[ing] the way for those modern rebellions and apostasy” Pius opposes today. To counter Protestant doctrines, Borromeo emphasized the need for “Christian instruction”—even as Pius has condemned the “public schools, lacking all religion, where everything holy is ridiculed and scorned,” “stronghold[s] of the powers of darkness” which traduce “the rights of religion and the family.” Pius thus distinguishes “between true and false reform.” False reform, “imitating the fickleness of the foolish, generally rush to extremes: exalting faith while neglecting good works or, contrarily, overlooking faith and God’s grace by “canoniz[ing] nature” in the form of human virtue, making it seem as if human beings can become self-sufficient. Such reformers never achieve reform because their extremism undermines the discipline upon which any reform depends. [8] Borromeo, his example now followed by Pius, undertook true reform, founding schools and colleges and promoting the example of Mary. “The Catholics of our days, together with their leaders, the Bishops, will deserve the same praise and gratitude as Charles as long as they are faithful to their duties of good citizenship,” obeying even evil rulers “when their commands are just” while resisting commands that are unjust,” avoiding the “impious rebellion” of seditionists as well as “the subservience of those who accept as sacred the obviously wicked laws of perverse men” who “uproot everything in the name of a deceitful liberty and then oppress their subjects with the most abject tyranny.” In Borromeo’s words, “It is a certain, well-established fact that no other crime so seriously offends God and provokes His greatest wrath as the vice of heresy.” But the warfare touched off by today’s heresies are “far more dangerous than those former conflicts which crowned Borromeo with such glory.” The religion of humanity is worse than Protestantism.

Writing of Borromeo, but likely thinking of himself, as well, Pius cites “the divine word saying that men will remember the just man forever, for even though he is dead, he yet speaks.” This is possible because the Roman Catholic Church “alone conceives, nourishes, and educates the noble family of the just.”

 

Note

1. In his letter, “For the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Immaculate Conception”—i.e., of the reaffirmation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX—Pius X elaborates: “If we know how to make ourselves the light of the world by our teaching, and the salt of the earth by our example; to put it in a word, if we employ the resources of virtue and doctrine that Paul enjoined on his own disciples, Titus and Timothy, namely sanctity and perfection of life, strength in teaching the spirit of sacrifice and self-denial, active and enlightened zeal, charity that is at once strong and gentle, then we will win the love and veneration of the good, yea and the esteem and respect even of our enemies.”
2. See also the Iam Dudum of May 1911, in which Pius condemns a similar law of separation in Portugal, also by a secularizing republican regime, which “proclaims and enacts that the Republic shall have no religion, as if men individually and any association or nation did not depend upon Him who is the Maker and Preserve of all things.” In Portugal, “the harshest and gravest stroke of all” against “the domain of the authority of the Church” was aimed at “the formation and training of young ecclesiastics,” who must now “pursue their scientific and literary studies which precede theology in the public lycées where, by reason of a spirit of hostility to God and the Church, the integrity of their faith plainly is exposed to the greatest peril”; what is more, “the Republic even interferes in the domestic life and discipline of the Seminaries, and arrogates the right of appointing the professors, of approving of the textbooks and of regulating the sacred studies of the Clerics”—in all, an attempt “to deprave the morals of the clergy and to provoke them to abandon their superiors.”
3. See Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening, edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016. See also “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website.
4. See Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. See also “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.
5. See Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times. Edited and translated by Paul Seaton. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022. See also “Manent on ‘The Religion of Humanity,” on this website.
6. See Tzetan Todorov: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Richard Howard translation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1982]. See also “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
7. For a summary of the Thomistic argument reconciling humility with magnanimity, see David Bobb: Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2013.)
8. For example, Pius condemned the “Mariavitas,” a group of young Polish priests who had “turned aside from the right road and from the obedience they owe the Bishops” by proclaiming “a certain woman,” a Franciscan nun named Maria Franciszka Kozlowska who claimed to have experienced mystic visions, “to be most holy, marvelously endowed with heavenly gifts, divinely enlightened about many things, and providentially given for the salvation of a world about to parish,” consequently “entrusting] themselves [to her] without reserve and to obey her every wish.” (Tritus Circiter, April 5, 1906.) The priests seemed to be putting Maria Franciszka on a par with Mary—an instance of extremism, indeed. As a good Thomist, Pius could be depended upon to view such mysticism with suspicion.