RESTORING THE SACRED IN A SECULAR AGE: #1 Secularism and the Crisis of Modernity

[Music] [Music] amen welcome everyone for our this is our sixth year of summer school of faith so this is our actually our seventh program if you count up all the programs so we've we're old friends now we've this year's program is themed restoring the sacred in a secular age you might recall last year we looked at this same kind of topic in the context of Catholic renewal in the writings of Pope Benedict we're going to broaden the lens now this year to look at secularism as a cultural phenomenon and try to understand more how that has impacted not only culture but the church and as we proceed we'll see that secularism is a kind of heresy about the doctrine of creation and we'll develop that more as we go but our theme for this year is how to restore a sense of the sacred the transcendent in a secular age these are two quotations in your handout one from George Orwell which kind of captures the drift that has been occurring in culture in the West over the last several hundred years and we will develop more what that consists of as we go through today's class and then you have the quotation from Karl Marx which he was famous for in his early writings that philosophy is really about revolution and change productive in society our topics for this this program then is let's look at secularism in the crisis of what's called modernity which is really the time we're living and sometimes you might be see it referred to as post-modern we won't make those fine-grained distinctions for today or this class because there not necessarily helpful but modernity means the times we're living in today and all of the cultural assumptions and philosophical positions that go with it affects the arts literature music and so forth then we'll look at how secularism has crept into the thinking and practices of the church specifically the Catholic Church this is not meant to be a bead on the church like a pinata class but it's more just to identify how the church has embraced the worst elements of secularism and how that has obscured the sacred the transcendent the beautiful and we'll spend some time on that so that we can then know how to respond to it then the next three classes are really the a presentation on the church as sacrament Vatican 2 described the church as a kind of sacrament in the context of the universal call to holiness that we all have the church functions as a kind of sacrament the next class then is on human sexuality as a sacred covenant and we will retrieve and reclaim and elaborate a framework for understanding human sexuality which is lacking today and will show how the church historically has worked out of a framework from a teaching standpoint that perhaps has not been as helpful as it could be then the last class is a spiritual reflection on the fall and rise of st. Peter as a kind of model for purification and redirection and renewal of church leadership and frankly ourselves as well as some of you have commented to me in the past and others have noted this era that we're living in given with the failures of leadership in the church may be a moment a opportunity for us as lay people to begin to provide guidance and erection and participation in different ways to help the church walk through this difficult time so we'll spend some time on that in the last class you'll note that the week of July 1st were off for the 4th of July holiday so we'll we'll skip one week and then we'll jump to July 9 lastly I would mention all of this what's coming is on YouTube and all of the past year's summer school of faiths are also on YouTube so you might have missed that but YouTube Church of st. Mary Charles Craig mile if you type that into the find section of YouTube up will pop my smiling face and some music so so let's begin let me summarize where we're heading and you'll get a feel for what are we up to in this year's program as I said earlier we are currently living through a secular culture and I put a little more content to that it's actually a cultural marxism and neil hill ism or nihilism culture that we're living - we're living in and so I'll put a little more flesh on that skeleton as we go in this class tonight but what is that and as I mentioned here secularism really means the political philosophy that we can define our own sense of existence without reference to God or the judeo-christian heritage without reference to religion or the transcendent the sacred of any kind we can pull ourselves up by our earlobes in a secular point of view we even recall this the phrase the separation of church and state which of course doesn't appear either in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence but it's spouted as if that's part of our founding documents and it is not so secularism is actually a kind of toxic heresy which we will elaborate on secular culture itself is in breakdown as I call it you you may you would have to be living on Venus or not sentient to know that our culture is fragmented divisive no shared sense of what it means to be a human being anymore no shared sense about what is the common good what is our origin what is our destiny when those things are no longer shared or there's no consensus about them we see the fragmentation in our culture today the core reason for that fragmentation is that secularism does not have a rational foundation you might say that's an interesting way to put it we thought you might say it doesn't have a spiritual foundation well it lacks that too but prior to that it lacks a rational foundation what is the origin of human rights after all nothing has been persuasive or convincing in the absence of God or the sacred the next point I make here is that the crisis in the church today the most obvious example is the sexual abuse crisis and the collapse of the bishops leadership I'll argue that's a symptom of this broader crisis of the embrace of secular godless culture so it's in the news about the sexual abuses of clergy on innocent people that's how this has shown up but it's been preceded by decades perhaps centuries of embrace of toxic secular culture and class - we'll we'll see what that looks like in music in architecture and in some of the core theological teachings and opinions of certain people I also mentioned here that secularism is a gnostic heresy concerning the doctrine of creation I will talk more about what I mean by Gnostic in a moment but for those of you who attended past years you know that Gnosticism is an ancient philosophy ancient heresy in the Catholic Church in the first four or five centuries basically what Gnosticism is is a recognition incorrectly that there's an antagonism between spiritual reality and material reality that the two don't go together that they can never go together and so the Gnostics ancient Gnostics solve the problem of evil in the world by saying well there's a good god of the Spirit and there's an evil god of matter that's a one way of solving the problem of evil so Gnosticism at its root is not comfortable with the congeniality of spirit and mmin and matter which we do affirm in Catholicism and Christianity in most cases last point here is only through what I call the reverence of the sacred can we heal a wounded and broken culture and we will elaborate that as we go particularly in classes 3 4 and 5 so I should mention that we will now start with tonight's topic Bishop Sheen who I had the opportunity to be an altar boy for do you need some water ok you have water ok very good that's all right Bishop Sheen who I had the opportunity to be an altar boy for once said that there appears to be major crises in the life of the church every five hundred years or so so in the first five hundred years we have what are called the christological controversies who is Jesus is he god is he merely a man is he a confused mixture of kinda-sorta both or one or the other who is Jesus and we have the beautiful formulations of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD which we pray at Mass and an even greater refinement in the Council of calcined 451 ad but who is Jesus that was the controversy of the time the next one is the schism between East and West between the Eastern Churches the Orthodox churches and the Western churches in Rome so the conflict between Rome and Constantinople who is the head of Christ's body the church in the next 500 years we had the Protestant revolt or Reformation who is Christ's body who's the church who's the authentic community of God and in a deeper way how am I saved how am I really saved the question Luther asked the crisis of our time Bishop Sheen noted was the crisis of the world what does it mean to have a world what does it mean to be a human being can I have a world and be human without dependency on God this is the crisis of our time and they seem to occur every five hundred years I'll read a quotation to you from someone who's in your bibliography eric vogelin who wrote a book on this very subject science politics and Gnosticism and he notes that crises like this cultural crises seemed to occur during rapid change in society now he's talking about ancient crises particularly in this passage which I'll read you the collapse of the ancient empires of the East the loss of independence for Israel and the Hellenic Greek States the population shifts the deportations and enslavement s-- and the interpenetration of cultures reduce men who exercised no control over the Proceedings of history to an extreme state of for Martinus in the turmoil of the world of the intellectual disorientation of material and spiritual insecurity it's a lot like our time now isn't it of the profusion of Gnostic experiences and symbolic expression one feature may be singled out as a central element in this varied and extension of extensive creation of meaning the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which you must find his way back home to the other world of his origin the world is no longer the well-ordered cosmos in which Hellenic Greek man felt at home nor is it the judeo-christian world that God created and found good for him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape if man is to be delivered from the world the possibility of deliverance must first be established in the order of being in the ontology of ancient Gnosticism this is accomplished through faith in the alien hidden God who comes to man's aid sends him messengers and shows him the way out of the prison of the evil god of this world be he Yahweh or Zeus true philosophy Springs from love of being it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order and attune himself to it the order of being gnosis desires dominion over being in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system the building of systems is a Gnostic form of reasoning not a philosophical one so he's referring to ancient Gnosticism and as I just touched on the good God of the Spirit was not the guard God that Jesus incarnated Jesus incarnated the god of matter which is why the Gnostics could not affirm that Jesus was God because God doesn't get involved directly in matter so that was the ancient Gnosticism that exists today we have similar Gnosticism z-- today as well which I will point out so you have a clash which Erich vogelin hints at during historical crises you have the class between a Greek medieval what I'll call classical philosophy or metaphysics which is love of order a recognition of order in nature in the universe logos is the Greek word for logic or rationality or reason in the beginning was the word in Greek in the beginning was the logos so it embraces the order found in nature in the universe and it is given we don't construct it we discover it we recognize it it's a source of morality in classical thinking the cosmos was not indifferent to behavior if you read the whole cycle of Greek philosophy particularly Plato and marched into medieval times nature the universe is signposts to how we ought to act because we are part of the cosmos and in fact the cosmos is for us Gnosticism before I touch on that I mentioned also the God revealed in the history of the people of Israel in the Old Testament is the god of classical times and we even have wisdom books in the Old Testament that have a influence from Greek philosophy things like sea rock proverbs and so forth Gnosticism rebels against external being as given it doesn't want that it doesn't like that it seeks to liberate itself from any notions of anything given which we will see and it typically shows up in dualisms between spirit and matter the finite the infinite how does it show up today it shows up today for example in the area of sexuality where what your gender is is has no relevance to what your biology is matter should not determine what my sexuality is I don't even want to use that word sexuality anymore because it is a biological connotation I'm dragging this boat anchor of matter my body behind me so my spiritual self my true self determines my gender sex means biology gender means my spiritual self you see how Gnosticism show up today we'll touch on this in class too Gnosticism is also show up in a worship of the earth oddly enough the spiritual earth where human beings should give sacrifices to the earth like the Aztecs did and it shows up today and we will go through the data of this it's not just me saying this in the extreme versions of the global warming movement of today of licking the earth as Pascal would describe this worship of the earth that ancient tribes and barbarians did we now have our modern mythology for Mother Earth and if we worship the earth there's no reason to worship anything else utopian movements well we'll touch on several of them today but the one I just mentioned is a kind of return to a pristine atmosphere for the world deindustrialization we need to return to a simpler time environmentally speaking this is this misplaced utopian because we've rejected an eternal life by heaven after this life so we need to substitute something to keep ourselves sane and as I mentioned here the latest course offerings in the humanities at any major university if you read them if you read the curricula of major universities in the humanities in social sciences in philosophy it reads as one long grievance party the grievance industry I hate to say it but if you read the minutes of the Catholic theological Society of America it reads as one long grievance industry it's been largely corrupted not completely largely corrupted by secularism so with that let's keep rolling so these are the historical crises that I touched on before and they're Gnostic alternatives as I mentioned and covered briefly Jesus is not God because God doesn't have anything to do with matter this was the ancient debates that occurred in the first several centuries of the church modern Gnosticism in the sense of modern philosophy that occurred and started in the 17th century and continued largely midway through the 19th century the essence of this is the turn toward the self remember Descartes I think therefore I am kohji toe ergo zoom he wrote it in French first and then later translated in Latin reference back to the self to construct knowledge that we have so there is a rejection of material being as a starting point a disconnect it's me myself and I in my subjectivity trying to understand my thoughts and get back to things whether it's Descartes Hume or Immanuel Kant they never get back to things so material being is withdrawn that's the modern Gnosticism of the 17th and 19th century the cosmos the universe is no longer a source of wisdom classical metaphysics of understanding what is the good the true the beautiful no longer on the menu that is constructed by the human mind will spend maybe a little time on that but that's more of a heavy-lift and there's probably not enough caffeine and the cokes to keep us going and then contemporary Gnosticism I refer to Marx and Nietzsche here who were both 19th century philosophers this is the culture we're living in and through a series of text in your handout I will show you how we are all living in a cultural marxism now in the West and that secularism this heresy of the doctrine of creation is fed by the streams of Marxism and nihilism from Frederick Nietzsche so we'll spend some time on that I want to quote from a passage from pope benedict xvi which you've you saw last year and you actually saw a few years before that but it's such a powerful summary of the Enlightenment program we all feel like we're part of the Enlightenment where we're kind of critical knowledgeable people now we all have subscriptions to the Economist in the New York Times and so we're enlightened we feel well the things of the past you know they were limited in their knowledge of science and and other things that we're aware of now so look at how the Pope describes the Enlightenment project and as I put there at the top the whole program of the Enlightenment was to establish the non controversial claims of Christianity without appeal to the church or God so things like God exists or you have a soul or the common good in society the project of all those philosophers Descartes David Hume John Locke Hegel the whole group of them without appeal to the church or classical metaphysics of the Greeks and Aristotle and Aquinas let's reestablish these important concepts God soul the common good let's see how Pope Benedict just looks at it quote but at this point speaking as a believer I should like to make a proposal to those outside the church in the age of the Enlightenment the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that these would be valid even if God did not exist think of the holy wars of religion so-called of the 17th century and back into the 16th century the Enlightenment program was trying to say if we stop killing each other for a moment let's find agree without appealing to God or any religion or Church in the situation of confessional antagonism that's what I'm talking about though the religious wars and in the crisis that threatened the image of God they tried to keep the essential norms of morality outside the controversies and to identify what he calls an evidential quality in these values that would make them independent of the many divisions and uncertainties of the various philosophies and religious confessions the intention was to guarantee the basis of life in society and in more general terms the basis of humanity at that time this seemed possible since the great fundamental convictions created by Christianity were largely resistant to attacked and seemed undeniable but that is no longer the case the search for this kind of reassuring certainty something that could go unchallenged despite all the disagreements has not succeeded anyone here at Cartesian today anyone here a follower of Immanuel Kant or George William Frederick Hegel no so it has not succeeded the attempt carried to the extremes to shape human affairs to the total exclusion of God leads us more and more to the brink of the abyss towards the utter annihilation of man and so you see the trajectory of thinkers down below there and in in three minutes I will summarize them unfairly but part of my job here as the job description of summer school of faith is to summarize 500 years of history and about three minutes and capture all the nuances but think of Descartes he was a mathematician the Cartesian coordinates the XY axis some of you are still in school and you maybe studied some geometry or some basic math you remember the equation y equals MX plus B for a line that's on a Cartesian coordinate Descartes Rene Descartes a very intelligent human being a great mathematician probably the greatest French figure after Napoleon he was a rationalist and he wanted to establish that God exists you have a soul morality by looking at undoubtable thoughts and like in geometry making conclusions from undeniable axioms the problem is that he failed at that because what he came up with with whatever was clear and distinct is true and we can reason from that but what if it's not clear and distinct to you that God exists because he has to assume the existence of a good God to validate his sensory knowledge in the meditations unfair move philosophers have exposed this for centuries and so note that as a result no one takes Descartes particularly seriously but he started a trajectory in thought in the 17th century early 17th century David Hume he's an empiricist very similar to the sciences today in some sense think of a pool table David Hume as an empiricist said any idea you have has to be tied back to a sensory impression all your ideas are feint copies of your sensory impressions so all these ideas about God your soul causality a big metaphysical concept in Aquinas don't exist because I don't have an impression of causality for example David Humes pool table you all play pool you hit the cue ball you see it moving you see a click and it hits another ball if you say the cue ball caused the other ball to move you didn't see causality you heard a click and you saw motion but the idea of cause doesn't have an empirical basis it's just our psychological expectation uh-oh so that led to a skepticism which Immanuel Kant wanted to correct by creating something called the a priori conditions of mind now what on earth is that think of navigation latitude and longitude do they exist no they are a construct of the mind to organize navigation on the globe they organize experience and make it true there is an equator there are countries on the equator so the a priori conditions of mind mold our sensory experience so that we can conceptualize about it you see the withdrawal from material being to concepts of the mind by which I synthesize my experience Hegel took that further and said why make those conditions subjective they are in history Geist was the German word he used God spirit thought in history working out concepts Karl Marx is going to have a lovely field day with that notion of history being progressive for Hegel it was a secular version of God's providence working in history for Marx it will be the class conflict in history leading to revolution that's why I put Avalanche area there because with Hegel it's the end of the happy path of reason in the Enlightenment and we get thinkers now like Karl Marx where we now see the breakdown of secular reason we see how obvious it is that it was a failed project in Karl Marx and Frederick Nietzsche what does Marx claim and we won't do a whole thing on Karl Marx here it's only three slides but I put three slides in here because you will appreciate what we're living in now man is simply a being unto himself anything outside of himself creates dependency alienation he is self-sufficient complete in himself now Marx doesn't argue for this materialism he just says it's obvious and as he says somewhere on metaphysics if you give up on your abstractions you'll give up on your questions all history is a history of class conflicts first line of the Communist manye manifesto there's an antagonism in the classes historically speaking and all history can be read through the lens of this clash between whether it's feudalism and the serfs all the way through to bourgeois societies and the conflict between capital and capitalists and owners and labor and the proletariat is for marx this kind of unique they didn't necessarily ask to be part of the proletariat particularly if you spent most of your time behind barbed wire but the proletariat functions as the people of Israel in a secular form for Karl Marx they are working out salvation history small s this overcoming of alienation between man and the fruits of his work and the conflict between capital and labor so the proletariat for Karl Marx in X this political and economic salvation history for now in time not some imaginary afterlife which is alienating because it doesn't come from me and I in some way would be dependent on it so the concept of an afterlife is just a fiction created by a certain higher class to alienate the rest of us these mythologies about God and heaven are all crushing dependencies on our shoulders so you see the antagonism that starts with descartes between subject and object this alienation which then works itself through the small intestine of Hegel of Geist spirit in history this antagonism between a rejection of metaphysics and material being plays itself out and Marx saying political history this alienation has played out between capital and labor and I am telling you how we overcome this alienation without reference to this nonsense of God and what is transcendent which caused the alienation in the first place so let's look at a few quotations you'll hear this expression dialectical materialism about Carroll Marx and it really comes from dialectical idealism of George W Hegel so a few quotations from Marx philosophy makes no secret of it the confession of Prometheus in a word I hate all the gods is its own confession its own verdict against all God's heavenly on earth who who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity there shall be none beside it I should note that Hermes replied to Prometheus saying you are grabbed by a certain kind of madness which will connect later to something Nietzsche wrote called the madman but continuing with Marx and that was from his doctoral dissertation when he was a young man but in the next quote mankind becomes master of nature but man the slave of man the result of all our inventions and progress seems to be that material powers become invested with spiritual life while human life deteriorates into a material force we find ourselves agreeing with that actually to think of the the new technology that's available to us in some way it captivates us and makes us captive thinking of the cell phone and how we are so dependent on the internet now we become in some ways reduced and material things like the Internet become spiritual eyes social media this antagonism between modern industry and science on one side modern misery and corruption on the other side this antagonism between the forces of production and the social conditions of our epoch is a tangible overwhelming and undeniable fact we recognize in this antagonism the clever Hegel's cunning of Reason which keenly proceeds in working out all these contradictions we know that the new form of social production to achieve the good life needs only new men and Marx is commenting on the revolutions of a forty-eight that occurred all over Europe note that we would be mistaken if we thought Marx was first proposing an economic and political theory of revolution that first rests on changing what it means to be human there's a metaphysic here that is primary and it's something that Marx never abandoned he's in he's proposing actually an entirely different view of what it means to be human and to have a world a world without God the foundation of eerily irreligious critique is this man makes religion religion does not make men indeed religionist man's self consciousness and self-awareness insofar as he is either not found himself or has lost himself again man who sought a Superman in the imaginary reality of heaven and found only a reflection of himself will no longer be inclined to find just a semblance of himself just a non man where he seeks and must seek his true reality the summons to abandon illusions about his conditions is a summons to abandon a condition that requires illusions namely a religious culture the critique of religion is therefore an embryo the critique of the veil of Tears of which religion is the halo the struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma religion is the groan of the oppressed creature of the heart of a heartless world the spirit of the spiritless condition it is the opium of the people and this was taken from his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right this is present today for example in state and our federal court rulings that what before was a default position of recognizing the role of religion in the public sphere now the default position is religion has to establish that's not violating other secular commitments for it to be recognized for example the Bay who doesn't want to make wedding cakes for homosexual couples he had to demonstrate that his convictions were surely held and that it didn't violate or he wasn't looking to violate directly the rights of the homosexual couple to a wedding cake you see how what's different today versus 150 years ago in this culture the default position is religion you must demonstrate that you are a secular participant now that you will behave at cocktail parties that you won't raise subjects that we just assume not talk about and so on and so on and so on there's been a flip-flop so secularism is not just some benign option that the founders really intended secularism is an enemy it's not a neutral space in any sense of the word and Marx is telling us that as we read from Augusto delle noche it's also in your bibliography he wrote a work called the crisis of modernity therefore the core of Marxist philosophy which is already found in the writings of his youth and to which he remained always faithful must be identified as the rejection of every form of dependence on God on the common good on what is true on what is beautiful what is loving and thus the extinction of religion since God is the archetype of the worldly Lord hence the revolution represents a transition not just from one social condition to another but from one stage of mankind to another the transition from one to another requires a revolution capable of transforming human nature itself you see how its political and economic theories are based on this atheistic materialistic metaphysics which we are currently living under in the West so with that happy note let's turn to you know what Karl Marx's mother said about him I've I've said this before he talks a lot about capital I wish he'd go out and make some that was the role of Frederick Engels for those of you who are historians who was the son of a factory owner who bankrolled Marx throughout his whole life so we'll just put that aside so Frederick Nietzsche another 19th century philosopher 1844 to 1900 is the murderer of God philosophically and the prophet of nihilism what is nihilism it's hard to say comes from a Latin word meaning nothing negation and nihilism is that all ideas and values must be rejected and the only fundamental outlook is the human person in freedom all other things that come from the outside are in positions and veiled attempts at will to power counterfeit dehumanizing Bernie Chi examples in history of will to power and that the healthy will to power is the individual freed from these things that are relative made absolute by others like the church like monarchies like the flabby governments of Europe of the 19th century Victorian eyes Christianity of the 19th century weak limp effeminate Christianity and someone who was similar to Nietzsche but also very different Soren Kierkegaard compared the clergy of his time to tea leaves wrapped in four pieces of paper that had been used three times before they had no tang they had no zest they had no evangelical conviction they were just three hots and a cot keeping the doors open getting their stipend which characterises much of Christianity in Europe and in this country and Catholicism as well we've lost our tang were stale like those tea leaves so man and freedom is the only stand point for Nietzsche Nietzsche is attractive to us today because the political messianism the utopianism of marx is a difficult thing to square with history meaning Marxism other than in academic faculties in certain political candidates no one really thinks it's a credible political philosophy Nietzsche knew this and though Marx and Nietzsche it's not clear they ever read each other or even knew each other there's no group messianism for Nietzsche he was too much of an elitist himself which is why the ubermensch we translate that quickly a Superman that has connotations to superheroes now so most philosophers who reflect on this might translate that super race Nietzsche is trying to call out members of races which will be reused by the Nazis to this special calling that only a few can accomplish the courage to choose one's path freely and you can see echoes of this in our culture today he had a great deal of psychological depth more than Marx did in terms of the psychological impact and I want to read to you something from Nietzsche from the joyous science the German word is a word where we get our word frolic from so kind of the playful science and Nietzsche suffered from migraine headaches his whole life he suffered from nausea and so he wrote in what are called aphorisms short little bursts of insights in various passages and let me read you one of the most famous ones from Nietzsche and it it captures the psychological stakes of what's at risk that Nietzsche even recognized while being an atheist so this is entitled the madman have you not heard that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning light ran to the marketplace and shouted incessantly I seek god I seek God as there were many people standing together who did not believe in God he caused much amusement as he lost s-one did he wander off like a child yes another is he hiding did he is he afraid of us has he gone to sea has he emigrated and in this manner they shouted and laughed at the man then the madman leaped into their midst and looked at them with piercing eyes and cried where did God go I will tell you we have killed him you and I we are all his murderers but how did we do this how are we able to drink up the sea who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon what did we do when we unchain this earth from its Sun where are we heading away from all the Suns are we not constantly falling backwards sideways forwards in all directions running around is there still an above and below are we not straying is through an infinite nothingness do we not feel the breath of empty space has it not become colder this night not falling evermore must not lanterns be lit in the morning do we hear nothing yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God do we smell nothing yet of the divine Putra fication for even god's putrifying god is dead god remains dead and we have killed him how shall we the most murderous of all murderers ever console ourselves the holiest and mightiest thing that the world has ever known has bled to death under our knives who wash this blood clean from our hands with what water might we be purified what lustration 'z what sacred games shall we have to invent it's not the greatness of this deed too great for us must not we become God's ourselves if only to appear worthy of of it there has never been a greater deed and because of it whoever is born after it belongs to a higher history than all history before and then here the madmen fell silent and looked again at his listeners they too were silent and stared at him baffled at last he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and it went out the madman said I've come too early this is not yet the right time this tremendous event is still on its way and headed towards them word of it has not reached men's ears yet even after they are over and done with thunder and lightning take time the light of the Stars takes time to reach us and deeds to take time before they can be seen and heard this deed is further away from them than the farthest star and yet they have done it themselves so we may not agree with the conclusions but Nietzsche accurately describes the psychology at work in atheism and its need to find substitute realities and make them absolute even while denying the absolute so we see from Erich Volgin this final quote the underlying significance of this symbolism is now clear and Diogenes this was Nietzsche was actually doing a riff on an earlier story about Diogenes who went out in the marketplace and said where is man so I'll just point that out so the new Diogenes does seek God but that does not but not the God who was dead he seeks the new God in men who have murdered the old one he seeks the Superman the mad man is therefore looking for man but not the man of the philosopher he's looking for the being that Springs from the magic of the murder of God and continuing with vogelin this is the motive of the murder of God the aim of the parry you a stick parousia you might remember that Greek word in the New Testament meaning the coming of the Son of Man parousia so this Peruzzi a stick Gnosticism the secular version of the coming of the Son of Man is to destroy the order of being which is experienced as defective unjust and through man's creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order lower co2 emissions now however the order of being may be understood as a world dominated by cosmic divine powers and the civilizations of the Near East or the creation of a world transcendent God in judeo-christian symbolism or as an essential order of being in philosophical contemplation it remains something that is given that is not under man's control in order therefore that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated the order of being must be interpreted rather as an essentially under man's control and taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated it requires the decapitation of being the murder of God the murder of God is committed speculatively by explaining divine being as the work of man man makes religion it does not suffice therefore to replace the old world of God with the new world of man the world of God itself must have been a world of men in God a work of man which can therefore be destroyed if it prevents man from reigning over the order of being the murder of God must be made retroactively lease must be made retroactive speculatively this is the reason man's being himself is the principle point in Marxist gnosis and he gets the speculative support an explanation of nature and history is a process in which man recreates himself to his full stature the murder of God then is the very essence of the gnostic recreation of the order of being MLM metaphysical lives mentor classical metaphysics medieval Christian theology matters and it's not optional if we want to live in a sane society so summary we can take a breath and yes there will be time for questions at the end but I wanted to get through the material as I said we fought two world wars in the last century and defeated from a military standpoint and a political standpoint fascism and communism as political and military realities what I'm arguing is that in the West today we have embraced with both arms the metaphysics of cultural Marxism and nihilism we have embraced it so we've just celebrated the 75th anniversary of the landing at Normandy d-day where we defeated fascism in the form of Nazi Germany and 75 years later we've embraced the very irrationality and nihilism that was at the root of the Nazi ideology and my exhibit is B and C would be the latest ruling on abortion law same-sex marriage the limitations of the church to provide adoption services in this country Catholic Charities in certain states cannot offer adoption services unless they offer children to gay couples or transgendered couples so this is not theoretical this isn't Charles reading long-winded passages from Karl Marx than Frederick Nietzsche this is happening right now and I know all of you are aware of that and many of you are on the front lines of that battle this is the ideology that undergirds the opposing side when you talk to someone who's perhaps living a lifestyle that isn't according to the gospel the response is you should walk a day in my shoes who are you to tell me what I should think and do me myself and I I am the source of my own sense of what is good true beautiful and any appeal outside of myself is an imposition is a crippling alienating imposition from outside of myself in class number two we'll see how this has affected the church teaching on conscience and has obscured it but I have to give you teasers for class - that's what I call functional atheism so if you took a person aside or or people aside are you an atheistic say no I believe God exists but maybe as a secondary factor as Cardinal Newman John Cardinal Newman the great Anglican convert said most of us don't live our lives first according to the will of God we live our lives according to our own will without offending the will of God so no one would say I'm an atheist per se we just gotta say a secondary factor like my physical therapy appointment or my tennis lesson it's on my calendar it's on the to-do list but is it the reason why you even have a to-do list so we are left with this limpid flaccid philosophy of well-being today you see it in the car commercials the open road it's the journey not the destination really what if that open road as a cliff so and yet this is in our DNA our cultural DNA it's the journey not the destination why because if we start talking about goals and purposes in nature and creation and the dependency it implies on the God who made it that's an awkward conversation I have to now align myself to something outside of myself that is not me that might prick my conscience to start having all kinds of unpleasant thoughts so we emphasize means not ends today we're all connected to global community you see the IBM commercials on TV the internet blockchain artificial intelligence for what now there are many good things about those things don't get me wrong I I'm in technology I run a technology company but we're talking about philosophy now and the secular world has absolutely nothing to tell you about ends we're all connected through cell towers but what are we connected for I love amazon.com also what is it for what is it all for so if the question of the 17th century or even go back one's the sixteenth century of Luther is how am I saved here I stand against the Catholic Church how am I saved ultimately that answer will be grace does not make real contact with me the transcendent doesn't touch my nature which is corrupt you remember the images Luther uses we are a dung heap and God snows on us with grace covers the dung heap and declares us justified or we're like a cub in the mouth of the lioness the lioness takes us or horse and rider where the human nature is the horse God or the devil is the rider there's no real contact there's no rejuvenation of human nature there's no beatitude within nature it is corrupt in the transcendent can never touch it what's the question of modern philosophy and how was it answered how do I know material being never makes real contact with the human mind the transcendent the objective what is a part for me can never touch me to form a true thought of that thing in itself what's the question for today in today's Mill Hill ISM today's Gnosticism of the separation of spirit from matter the to never touch each other so what today the philosophy of well-being through technologies how do I overcome the material limitations that my true self my spiritual self is living under if I'm a young couple and having trouble having children let me experiment with the latest medical technologies of in vitro fertilization or in artificial insemination cloning perhaps on the horizon you see how there's a a separation of the good that we find in God's creation as normative is rejected my true spiritual self are these goods that the church says I should have a family so I should be able to pursue any means even if they violate this grasp of a divine order in human nature so the philosophy of today is how do I overcome material limitation a dualism now obviously I'm a big supporter of modern medicine to enhance and build upon what is natural to us or therapeutic to us an organ transplant isn't terribly natural for those who have gone through it but it promotes and enhances the good of the overall person in a real biological way so we'll spend some time on that another teaser for you in the class on human sexuality which is probably the most visible thing we have in culture today of this nihilism this tearing asunder of spirit and matter of spotty and soul - here's a long quote well we'll go through it quickly and it's from a an interesting writer named David Bentley Hart we're coming toward the end don't worry so what have I been describing the late modern picture of reality is culturally speaking something altogether unprecedented in the days of say Thomas Aquinas there was no particularly cogent alternative to seeing nature as a rationally ordered continuum in which all things witness to a final good at once cosmic and moral not so now the modern person's failure to find a moral meaning in nature's forms is not simply attributable to a perverse refusal to recognize objective truths there is now a story that makes nihilism in the technical sense of disbelief in any ultimate meaning or purpose beyond the physical plausible and powerful with the rise of the mechanical philosophy modern persons begin to conceive of natural ends not as inherent purposes but merely as useful functions even those who believe that the exquisite clockwork of the universe has been assembled by an intelligent designer still regard physical nature as an amalgam of intrinsically aimless energies upon which order have been extrinsically imposed and so not as a natural revelation of the divine logos pervading all things then with the rise of Darwinism and finally of an essentially mechanistic neo-darwinism entirely new and seemingly exhaustive account of physical order and causality came into being one in which there was no such thing as intrinsic natures but only local coalescence 'as of devised of diverse and meaningless material forces so in effect I'll just stay with the headlines here the cosmos is no longer seen as enchanted as some writers described it but merely an object for study by the Natural Sciences no longer a source of moral wisdom what's true in moral or merely historically agreed to preferences what other appeal would you for them there's nothing objective about them next the human person is no special dignity why would the human person have any special dignity versus the environment versus and a thousand-year Reich what's one person in comparison to the Reich nothing meaningless subject to provisional raw material for history working out itself metaphysical questions need to be suppressed now I mentioned two examples there which we've talked about in past years DNA which functions like computer code for the assembly instructions of amino acids which are the building blocks of life written in a way that is more complex than any novel any any work bears the traces of a metaphysical question of could that be iterated to by chance in 12 billion years in 12 trillion years in a hundred trillion years and the answer is no from basic probability or the origin of the universe any mechanical physical cause or law that Stephen Hawking might refer to still has to exist the law of mathematics of two plus two equals four doesn't put four dollars in my pocket the laws of physics do not cause beam these questions must be suppressed especially in schools lastly and this gets back to the illusion that the secular is just a benign space for us to have a dialogue this substitution of the sacred for the secular is not a benign substitution why we were made for the infinite our hearts were made for the O Lord and they are restless until they rest in thee we were made for the infinite and if we're an atheist and we don't find it we have to create infinities causes utopian movements to replace the God and the heaven that we've rejected so for secularists they make as I mentioned the relative absolute they're guilty of what they criticize Christianity for it so with that this crack up as john paul ii and pope benedict called is the eclipse of the sense of God and man life without foundations and as a result we are going through what they call decomposition culturally socially individually shards they refer to it as sharp objects you break something that is whole and integral on the ground you don't get a nice array of things and order smooth edges you get shards that will cut you you drop a wineglass a beautiful wine glass or a vase if it's expensive of vaz and it breaks into pieces that are shards that will cut they don't go back together and in the end we should take comfort from the fact that the church has faced heresies before and secularism is this heresy regarding the doctrine of creation namely as I put it that reality is not complete in itself it cannot give an explanation of itself namely how did it even exist what are these norms of morality we sense and see and argue for throughout history are they nothing as Nietzsche thought or Marx thought the denial of cultures in the West that are denying their origins when John Paul the second was Pope the United Nations could not even acknowledge the Christian origin of Europe and so these acts of self suffocation as Cardinal Serra describes them in the West unique to the West almost of this rejection of our origin of this rejection of creation the doctrine of creation that God created it and it was good this rejection has led to the decomposition and it is a heresy on a basic doctrine of creation the element that I put here at the end is that there's a rebellion so secularism is not just a neutral stance of I don't think God created the world it is a rebellion from dependency on God it is toxic it is a foaming pathology in culture not to recognize dependency on God it's not just simply another option on a form that you check secular ISM cultural Marxism don't lead to a dead end they lead to a cliff and this is the warning this was the basis in many ways of John Paul the second pontificate Pope Benedict the 16th program of pointing out the relativism of Europe and the West as a danger the current Pope Francis in his clear moments I just want to see if you were listening talking about the throwaway culture that's what they're all pointing to and so this pathology is in the heart of our culture in the West now and so with that I'll end on a happy note and it tees up the other classes that are coming up secularism is not the final word it's not even the first word we have a loving ordered rational origin we are not a cosmic afterthought with an irrational blind chance origin in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God he was in the beginning with God all things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be what came to be through him was life and this was in this life was the light of the human race the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we saw his glory the glory as of the father's only son full of grace and truth God says yes to nature God says yes to the cosmos and God has entered time and space the infinite has become finite the transcendent has become imminent the alienation that Marx and Nietzsche talked about was healed in the Incarnation and so this is the actual good news this is the real revolution not the godless mad dog foaming at the mouth variety of Marx or Nietzsche we think of Paul at Athens remember in the Acts of the Apostles chapter 17 and he points to a monument to the unknown God and the Greeks we're like oh that's interesting tell us about that God and and Paul is telling them about it and then he says oh and by the way Jesus Christ who became a man suffered and died and rose from the dead to save us and they said it's cocktail hour we'll hear you on this another time we're not we have to be careful what we bargained for here God has come to us in Jesus Christ if the transcendent Saints stays transcendent and safe I don't have to make this radical commitment but if he does come and he has in Jesus Christ that changes everything so that's what I wanted to cover tonight the next classes will be how has the church embraced some of the worst elements of secularism that I described in this class and thank you for soldiering on with me but it's important what we know what the enemy is so we don't chase shadows if the church only did this if they only had this administrative Commission to review all cases of sexual harassment then we would have everything solved in my judgment and this is the argument I'm making that's just a symptom the administrative bishop is that tea leaf that has lost all of its tang who's talking about how do we prevent it from occurring in the first place sexual abuse imagine if you are the CEO of McDonald's and McDonald's I looked up beforehand serves about a billion or two billion hamburgers every day throughout the world and it's believed that 1% or so more or less of of priests in the u.s. maybe it's less has abused someone and the response of the bishops has been well we need to set up committees and review boards to prevent this from happening imagine if the CEO McDonald's said well this is a Western phenomenon we're gonna set up centers in every major town if you ate a cheeseburger and got cancer please report to this Center and will adjudicate your claims maybe you had something before you ate the burger we'd like to take a blood sample to see what was in your blood maybe you're taking drugs well if you're CEO McDonald's wouldn't you say solve the problem why are we cooking burgers that are giving people cancer it's called the product recall root causes I ran an operation for a food company we had four factories in the u.s. one in Mexico we had a product recall once so we had to decide well did it come from all the plants or one plant oh it came from one factory okay phew so we start narrowing it down what materials are they using that are different from the products that are manufactured in the other sites that are identical oh and we narrowed it down and found the root cause to prevent Listeria so the Bishop's who are concerned with process administrative process to adjudicate claims it's the worst kind of response because it's hopeless it's it's the drudgery of the bureaucrat the soulless gray grim processing of insurance claims ridiculous where's the discussion of virtue where's the discussion of a spiritual life what are the under parent underpinnings of a spiritual life we haven't heard much about that some bishops are talking about it but let's pray for the bishops meeting in Baltimore this week their agenda is about process but let's hope there's an awakening as well about root causes which are in the spiritual life which is classified so very good we we started a bit late I ran two minutes overtime are there any comment and thank you so we Charles you spend a lot of time critiquing Marxism what about and I'm paraphrasing the evils of capitalism that can also breed secularism did I capture that correctly and that's a very good point and the Pope's in their social teaching in particular John Paul the second but even going back further have talked about unbridled capitalism generates its own kind of slavery to consumption of goods without a stewardship of the common good or reference to God so capitalism can be just as godless as Marxism in history the difference though is capitalism is not inherently atheistic Marxism is so capitalism is a tool by which supply and demand of goods and services are coordinated freely through the free exchange of transactions of individuals there's nothing inherently atheistic about that there is something inherently atheistic about revolution which must be violent and that the dignity of the human person is not rooted in God but rather has no transcendental dignity at all so when the Pope's talk about Marxism it's always condemned largely because it's inherently atheistic inherently antagonistic toward the faith and in history has been a disaster for Humanity most of Eastern Europe was turned into a large barbed-wire concentration camp in the 20th century I am saying in general and we can just speak in generalities at the moment and then market capitalism has created an economic miracle in all of civilization West and now East over the last 300 years that has been unparalleled in human history have there been perversions of it absolutely but Marxism is inherently perverted because it is godless and if you look at just life expectancy or quality of life metrics number of people living in poverty number of life expectancy in 1900 versus today it's about a 30-year difference all due to higher standards of living driven by market capitalism in innovation those are features of market capitalism what are features of Marxism empirically speaking if we looked at Marxist societies what would we find we would find bread lines we would find camps we would find school curricula that is determined by the state oh wait a minute that's the u.s. no I'm sorry let me get another example but I I'm being light-hearted but we would find brutal facts and Marxist society that we would find completely unacceptable that we do not find in largely market capitalist societies but very good questions that I'm thank you for asking them yes way in the back how are you but I expect that for the question thank you so the question is if Jesus is the answer why is the world still fallen and summer school of faith 2014 in class 4 no but to answer your question in a more serious note good and evil are always wrapped up with human freedom the reason why there is even a sense of fallen in the first place is human freedom if we are free to be Saints we're free to be Devils what good is that if we were good the same way grass is green or diamond shine does God have need of things that have virtue in that same way if a universe of diamonds built up to the stars what does that light compare with one free act of a human being under grace for the good that was worth God dying for the God who made the Grand Canyon and mountains and the Stars what need of he does he have for things that are good like robots none whatsoever boring but if life is a theater of character making a drama where your charm is so beautiful because you say yes even though you have the possibility of saying no that's worth it and that's why we live in a fallen world God didn't solve it in terms of how we would expect him to but he solved it truly by his death and resurrection by overcoming sin and death which are the fruits of evil well natural law is part of classical metaphysics and the order in the cosmos that the Greeks recognized and that medieval philosophy and even in the first millennium of Christian philosophy recognized that creation was created good and his revelatory of God's design for us and for all of humanity and that a natural law emerges out of the fact that this order in the cosmos has implications for the order of the human person it was a member of the cosmos we don't stand apart from the cosmos we're in the cosmos and it is revelatory of purposes and we find in human nature remember Aristotle the majority of Aristotle's treatises are on biology he's studying functions and purposes he finds in organisms what's a good Apple well it's an apple it doesn't have a Worman what's a good knife it's a knife that can cut its function is seen in its design to achieve a purpose if it's a good knife its sharp it cuts it achieves the purpose for which it was made human nature what's its purpose remember from the Baltimore Catechism in this world to be with him in the next that's our purpose and we see the echo of that in our nature and it is fully revealed in Jesus Christ so nature it turns out is pretty important to make rational our faith our faith isn't irrational there's a congeniality between grace and nature they work with each other they're in some ways knitted together yes well good you've all been very good we'll see you next week thank you [Music] you

Channel: Church of St. Mary Summer School of Faith

Views: 3,541

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: charles craigmile, secularism, hegel, nietzche, marx, kant, catholic, modernity, catholic church, voegelin, eric voegelin, john henry newman, crisis of modernity, lake forest illinois, first presbyterian church, st james church, kenosha wisconsin, restoring the sacred, theology, philosophy

Id: AcS6WXVr6GU

Length: 84min 34sec (5074 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019