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Showing posts with label Teilhard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teilhard. Show all posts

Saturday, March 2, 2019

UPDATED: Christopher Dawson's Profound Understanding Of Modernity


I turn once more to the ideological roots of the Current Crisis and, in an ultimate sense, even of what the Russia Hoax is largely about. Big Picture stuff.

When I was growing up I lived in a house that was full of books, and of great importance for me was my father's collection of books by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), the great English historian. He's little known now, and sometimes sneeringly referred to as an "autodidact" and enthusiast of the Catholic nostalgia for the Middle Ages. But he was much more than that. Dawson was a philosopher of history--as you can learn from these Dawson references on this blog. In his day he was ranked with such as Toynbee and in the 60s was sought after for lectures at Harvard.

So I was delighted to discover a Twitter feed that preserves the memory of Dawson's profound understanding of the nature of Modernity. Dawson died in 1970, but already in the 1930's he had a clearly developed understanding of the coming tyranny of Modernity that we see emerging in fully developed form around us--Post Modernist, Gramscian Marxism. And the "Church of Vatican II" is among the most ardent converts to the message of the Neo-Gnostic prophet of modernity, Hegel. (See, for example, by the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei: The Roots and Historical Consequences of Modernism)

Of course, such movements of thought or of the human spirit of rebellion, have deep roots. Dawson traced those roots to the Reformation but, as I've tried to show on this blog, the roots go much deeper into the Platonic and Augustinian traditions that are the true Western tradition. Here is the tweet that first caught my attention yesterday, in which Dawson captures in his typically condensed and trenchant form (almost a paradoxical style for a shy, retiring man) the roots of Modernity in the "Reformation":

Christopher Dawson:‏

@cdawsonquotes
What Hegel valued in the Reformation was in fact that it had destroyed the Church as a substantial unity and had restored the unity of human consciousness in one universal objective moral organism — the State.
12:33 PM - 1 Mar 2019

​And this is precisely the agenda of Modernism and of the Church of Vatican II (V2). Rather than two kingdoms, one of which orients Man toward Christ the King who directs Man on earth--with all the limitations of human institutions that implies--toward his transcendent goal, the V2Church rushes to embrace the tragic results of the Protestant Revolt--the State ascendant in all human life, an Ecumenic State for a new Ecumenic Age (Eric Voegelin's term). And this is quite explicit in the V2Church's embrace of and idealization of the two State sects--Anglicanism and Lutheranism, one named for a country, the other for a man.

​This explains, if explanation is needed, the nature of Bergoglio's "ecumenism", which is intended to include all men in a universal earthly State without borders--one State to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It also explains why the V2Church has no sympathy for persecuted Christians, e.g., in China or in Islamic realms.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Another Attempted Defense of Ratzinger's Orthodoxy

Sandro Magister has published a second blog in which a writer attempts to defend Ratzinger's orthodoxy against Antonio Livi's initial critique of RatzingerWhy Ratzinger Is Not a Heretic. As in the case of the first defense of Ratzinger that Magister published, this defense is written by a person who is not a professional, philosopher: Francesco Arzillo, "an administrative magistrate of Rome who is also an esteemed author of works of philosophy and theology." While avoiding addressing the specifics of Livi's critique of Ratzinger--which revolve around Ratzinger's concept of faith--Arzillo attempts to portray Ratzinger's views as substantially identical to those attributed in Acts to St. Paul in his address to the Greeks at the Areopagus. This metaphor has a certain significance. Paul's address at the Areopagus is regarded as a model for the Church's outreach to non-believers and an expression of the Church's natural theology, so Arzillo is using this metaphor to suggest the same regarding Ratzinger: not only is Ratzinger to be viewed as a bulwark against heretics but he's a model for outreach to non-believers. As we will see, however, Ratzinger's attempts to assimilate Paul's views to his own simply don't work. Arzillo begins his defense by quoting a number of passages from an address Ratzinger gave in Paris as Benedict XVI.