In Part I, I presented the claim that the Church has lost sight of the fact that mystical encounter with Christ is the aim of the Christian life. The great saints of our tradition have understood the importance of this spiritual bond, in all its ineffable majesty. They have also warned against degrading the gift of a personal relationship with Christ by reducing faith in Him to an arid set of rational principles.
Titled The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, Joseph Ratzinger’s postdoctoral dissertation caught my attention due to some important aspects of the thinking of the Seraphic Doctor of which I was already aware. On reading Ratzinger’s work, I discovered, for the first time, St. Bonaventure’s warning about the dangers of a purely rational speculative theology. Prompted by the theses advanced by the Aristotelians at the University of Paris, such as the eternity of the world and the unity of intellect in all men, his critical response was elaborated and developed in many sermons and lectures. This critical response even appears in the last major text that has come down to us: his commentary on the first six days of creation, Collationes in Hexaemeron, a series of lectures delivered at the University of Paris a year before his death in 1273.
His language is apocalyptic, borrowing biblical terms directly from St. John’s Book of Revelation, interpreted in a symbolic-allegorical key. For St. Bonaventure, the eschatological end of history began with the infiltration of a heretical form of Aristotelianism into the minds of the professors at the University of Paris. Specifically, he refers to the growing doctrine that reason and philosophy are not mere means to engage the intellect in preparation for intuitive, mystical knowledge, fundamentally supported by supernatural faith.
Bonaventure’s prophecy
On the contrary, this erroneous doctrine privileges forms of self-sufficient knowledge, and reductive and exclusive modes of enquiry based on the ‘light of natural reason.’ As a direct result of such an epistemological attitude, the mind serves a deceptive function similar to the magicians of Pharaoh who try to compete with Moses by performing false miracles. Even more radically, in another treatise written in 1268, Collations on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, St. Bonaventure—as Ratzinger points out—identifies “this heretical Aristotelianism with the Beast of Apocalypse.” The three errors resulting from the purely speculative exercise of reason devoid of the guidance of supernatural faith are enumerated in St. Bonaventure’s “Collatio VIII: De Dono Intellectus:”
The error against the cause of existence is related to the eternity of the world, such as asserting that the world is eternal. The error against the nature of understanding concerns fatal necessity, like claiming that everything happens out of necessity. The third error concerns the unity of the human intellect, as in positing that there is only one intellect in all individuals.
These theological and philosophical errors “are symbolically referenced in the Book of Revelation by the number of the beast. It is said there that the beast’s name had a number, six hundred sixty-six (666), which is a cyclic number.” Furthermore, in the comments on the Hexaemeron, St. Bonaventure reiterates this interpretation, showing that the rationalistic Aristotelianism that he attacks is the smoke rising from the abyss, with false philosophers being both victims and carriers of the darkness that enveloped Pharaoh and the Egyptians who opposed Moses (Exod 10:22). However, the most categorical statement, based entirely on his symbolic-allegorical interpretation of Holy Scripture, refers to one of the most intensely debated episodes in the entire Biblical tradition: the two trees in Paradise, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:9).
Speaking of these as one of the “sacred mysteries,” St. Bonaventure says that “the one who only seeks knowledge tastes of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Collationes in Hexaemeron, XVII, 27). Thus, by seeking only what can be called “the exterior science,” they will become the slaves of the “Assyrians”—one of the biblically-inspired appellations by which St. Bonaventure designates the fallen angels (i.e., demons). The consequence represents the most remarkable part of the entire interpretation. It is a prophecy concerning the end of history, which will reproduce, on the mystical body of Christ—the Ecclesia militans—what happened to the Divine Teacher at the end of His earthly life:
Believe me, a time will come when the ‘gold and silver vessels’ (Exod 3:22; 12:36) i.e. rational arguments, will no longer be of value. There will no longer be any justification of faith by reason, but only by auctoritas. As an indication of this, in His temptation the Redeemer defended Himself not with rational arguments but with arguments from authority, even though He certainly must have known the arguments of reason well. In this way He predicted what would take place in His Mystical Body in the coming trial.
Commenting on this prophecy, Ratzinger shows that in the age of its fulfillment, “Ratio and auctoritas will stand apart, clearly separated and in opposition to one another.” Reading Ratzinger’s comments, we can infer that his warning that “the end of rational theology is coming” has already been realized. All major events at the beginning of the modern era, starting with the ‘Galilei affair’ and Descartes’ sceptical and anti-traditional doctrine, followed by the plethora of schools and currents of thought that led to fragmentation and, ultimately, the complete relativization of any form of ‘rational’ knowledge, were the preliminary stages leading to the fulfillment of St. Bonaventure’s prophecy.
The crisis of modernism
That’s why today, in the world after the French Revolution, which replaced the Catholic Religion with the blasphemous and atheistic “Culte de la Raison,” despite the desperate attempts of some thinkers—from Kant and Hegel to Husserl, Heidegger, Constantin Noica, and Jean-Luc Marion—to restore a universally accepted and recognized rational philosophy, it seems that no one can win a debate through the force of rational argumentation. Besides this fact, there are several authors who point to the value of St. Bonaventure’s scriptural interpretation for understanding our current situation. Among them, shining with an impossible-to-ignore magnitude is the philosopher Jean Borella (born in Nancy, France, in 1930).
Borella’s contribution to understanding the unprecedented crisis we find ourselves in today is invaluable. Among the multitude of books published over more than three decades, his extensive monographs stand out, including Le Mystère du signe. Histoire et théorie du symbole (1989), Symbolisme et réalité (1997), La crise du symbolisme religieux (2009), and Histoire et théorie du symbole (2015). In all of these, alongside a comprehensive conception of the concept of ‘symbol,’ we find insightful meditations on the causes that have thrust us into the most extensive crisis in the entire history of the Church. However, for this article, I will refer to a single work by Borella, in which all his contributions are synthesized.
In this book, entitled The Sense of the Supernatural (1996), Borella reveals the causes of modernist heresy as exposed by Pope St. Pius X in the famous documents Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). From Borella’s analysis, I will highlight one theme that exposes the external, cultural causes of modernism. These causes are the ones that led to both the replacement of the Roman Catholic Liturgy and gradually the replacement of the traditional faith with a counterfeit version of it. But first, here is Borella’s position in his own words:
The truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted with the most formidable problem that a religion can encounter: the scientific disappearance of the universe of those symbolic forms which let it speak for and manifest itself, that is to say those forms which let it ‘exist.’ This destruction was effected by Galilean physics; not because, as is ordinarily claimed, it deprived man of his central position—which for St. Thomas Aquinas is in any case the least noble and the lowest—but because it reduces the texture of the body, its material substance, to sheer geometry and, by the selfsame stroke, renders this world’s ability to serve as a medium for the manifestation of God scientifically impossible (or stripped of meaning). The theophanic capacity of the world is denied. In an indefinitely extensive and isotropic universe, neither the Incarnation, the Resurrection, nor the Ascension make the least sense. Gone is the sensible basis for the divine and the supernatural. Never had humanity suffered a similar ‘epistemological shock,’ and it has not recovered. Science was thus set up, whether it wanted to be or not, as the enemy of religion. Theology had to proceed, by degrees, with the revision of all its concepts; exegesis was condemned to rank all scriptural data under the category of ‘cultural curiosities,’ ‘primitive representations.’ One’s only choice is between ‘demythologising’ and ‘cultural neurosis,’ that is to say reducing all of Holy Scripture to a few words of ethical proclamation, or else carrying on as if one believed in events known to be quite impossible.
This excerpt references much of what can be said about the history of the modern world. The “epistemological shock” mentioned is the result of the spread of doctrines such as that of Kant, for whom any form of mystical knowledge is placed among phantasmagorical superstitions. Consequently, authentic miracles and theophanies become biblical notions that must be ‘demythologized,’ essentially excluding the supernatural dimension from the horizon of rational thought. Only in this way are ‘scientific,’ historical-critical discussions around the inspired texts of the Bible still permitted in academic circles. Simultaneously, the cosmos is conceived in strictly physicalist terms (regardless of how the confusing concept of ‘matter’ is understood), beyond which there is nothing ‘metaphysical.’ At best, the world is a machine whose Creator is completely alien to the course of things here, ‘below,’ on Earth. This is the case when God’s existence is not directly denied, which has become increasingly common in recent decades.
The world, the cosmos, are nothing more than conglomerates of ‘things’ devoid of purpose and meaning, so the exploitation and eventually the improvement of them through technology—as in the development of the post-humanist automatons/robots—are the only possible approaches. With nothing else but our material universe, the symbolic value of beings and things, whether from nature, Holy Scripture, or the sacrality of Liturgy and the Sacraments, is denied. Things are only what they appear to be, simple phenomena situated at a strictly natural level of existence, beyond which there is nothing. Man is no longer thought of as a being endowed with an immortal soul, but he is merely a sophisticated kind of automaton, subject to the laws of species evolution. Thus, the traditional apostolic Christian faith is not only rejected but also made impossible within a context that demands adherence to the rationalistic standards of positive sciences, leaving no room for categories that they do not accommodate.
Theological modernism, defined by Pope St. Pius X as a “synthesis of all heresies,” is nothing more than the result of the misguided and deviant ambitions of certain intellectuals to adapt Christian doctrine to the new epistemological context. Clearly, the consequences of the spread of these ideas have been catastrophic. What we are experiencing right now, when we see an overflowing ecologism and completely foreign and hostile visions of authentic Christian morality being promoted at the highest levels of the Catholic hierarchy, is nothing more than the climax of the modernist infection rushing ever faster towards its end. Any consistent, traditional values have been completely excluded. The pro-immigration policies pursued by former Catholic countries indicate that the Gospel has been replaced by a self-destructive, nihilistic vision. The most striking thing is that, as was the case with communism in Eastern European countries, all this self-destruction is done in the name of ‘reason’ and ‘science.’
Fighting fire with fire
In the emerging cultural wasteland, the reaction of the pontiffs has not been appropriate. Pope Leo XIII had already begun, as Jean Borella points out, the revitalization of Thomistic studies through his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). However, a major mistake was made due to the desire to react against fashionable intellectual currents, led by Kantianism, from the perspective of a neo-Scholastic, rationalistic Thomism in which the mystical dimension of reality was marginalized. In other words, a metaphysical and epistemological system based on an excessive emphasis on speculative-rational thought was favored over a mystical/mystagogical theology inspired by the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Bonaventure (to name just a few), despite the fact that St. Thomas himself quotes the former more than any other authority throughout his works, and the latter was one of his closest friends and collaborators.
As J.R.R. Tolkien might have said, the evil forces orchestrated by Sauron and Saruman, were challenged by using the Ring, which, as revealed by the most authoritative interpreter of The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien, is nothing more than the ‘ultimate machine’ associated with magical artifacts. Kant and his followers, who deny any form of knowledge based on the effects of divine grace, can only be challenged through an authentic mystical life, which entails a re-embracement of the demands of holiness as we see in the case of St. Thérèse of Lisieux or Padre Pio. The key sentence by which Jean Borella describes the deepest root of the current crisis is nothing other than the reiteration of the prophecy of St. Bonaventure, whose fulfillment we are already experiencing in entirety:
By separating the intellectual from the spiritual, this neo-Thomism condemned theological work to be nourished exclusively by reasoning, thus cutting it off from the most vital of its roots, its mystical root. Basically it wanted to combat Modernism with Modernism’s own weapons: without being aware of it, it had already conceded defeat. The response demanded by the Modernist crisis should have been the elaboration of a theology of culture, chiefly in its sacral and religious forms, since it is these that are the irrefutable witnesses to the presence within us of a sense of the supernatural. Was Thomism capable of providing it? I doubt it. Anyway, to see only a profane rationality in human nature transforms it into an abstraction which has had a cultural existence only in post-Cartesian European philosophy.
Certainly, it would be wrong to consider the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas responsible for the excesses of rationalism among neo-Thomists. However, it is true that his metaphysics, based on the ‘natural light of reason,’ has been largely ignored by modern thinkers. Moreover, the Catholic clergy of today, with very few exceptions, no longer study it. That’s why, in addition to an emphasis on the mystical dimension of the life of the Angelic Doctor, which is evident in the canonization dossier prepared by his Dominican brothers, a reinterpretation of his thinking grounded in this neglected dimension would be welcome. In turn, not only highlighting the Dionysian, Augustinian, and Neoplatonist influences, but also a re-reading based on the criticism of St. Bonaventure, would be a scholarly project that could be beneficial in a creative retrieval of the Catholic mind.
Furthermore, the integration of Thomistic aesthetics, both from a speculative and, especially, a practical perspective, would be another part of the same project. The sacred hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, such as the famous Adoro te Devote, can change our perception of an author whose speculative thinking has perhaps been overemphasized. Before anything else, though, serious reflection on the relationships between the natural light of reason and supernatural grace, with an axiomatic postulation of the subordination of the former to the latter, is a first-order necessity. Only in this way can we resolve the most serious deviation signaled by Dr. Sebastian Morello: “We have lost the primacy of the supernatural.”
