Back in 1982, Dr. James Hitchcock of St. Louis University
published The New Enthusiasts and What
They Are Doing to the Catholic Church.
Intended as an updating of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm from 1950, it has two serious flaws from our point of
view, neither of which diminish its value.
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| Dr. James Hitchcock |
One, there is no index, at least in the edition we
have. That means we have to put slips of
paper with notes on them for anything we think we might want to reference in
the future, and we can’t look for something specific unless we remember (sort
of) that we read it and where in the book.
(We really don’t like writing
in books.)
Two, it didn’t really make us want to read Knox’s book
(crime of the century). It (sort of)
seems to assume that the reader is already familiar with Enthusiasm, and by concentrating on what Knox didn’t cover, leads a
reader away from, rather than toward it.
In our opinion, anyway.
Still, where Hitchcock’s The
New Enthusiasts might not make you want to read Knox’s Enthusiasm, readers of the latter should want to read the former. It helps put things in order, and correlates
the historical evidence — which for Knox stops at the admittedly arbitrary year
of 1823 — with what happened following the Second Vatican Council in the
1960s. Hitchcock’s book therefore
provides a useful (if, from the Just Third Way standpoint, somewhat incomplete)
guide to the application and development of the enthusiastic spirit after
Vatican II.
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| The Catholic Church attacked from the inside and the outside. |
As we’ve hinted more than once in this series, events
following Vatican II are examples of what G.K. Chesterton described as attacks
on the Catholic Church (and, indeed, the whole of western society) from inside
and from outside the Church and western civilization. This, in Chesterton’s and Knox’s opinion
(and, as we shall see, that of Fulton Sheen as well), constituted not merely a
new religion, but an entirely new concept of religion.
As a direct result of the shift from the basis of knowledge
of the natural law based on human nature to personal opinion (from the
Intellect to the Will, as it is usually put), an omniscient and omnipotent God
was no longer to be at the center.
Instead, as adherents of theosophy and other New Age systems insist, the
abstraction “humanity” was the focus.
Promising utopia, the collective was to be the new God. As Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson had a character reflect
on the Antichrist character in his dystopian novel Lord of the World (1907), his lurid and biting satire on Edwardian
England,
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| Novel and author. |
“There should be war no more:
that bloody spectre was dead, and with him the brood of evil that lived in his
shadow — superstition, conflict, terror, and unreality. The idols were smashed, and rats had run out;
Jehovah was fallen; the wild-eyed dreamer of Galilee was in his grave; the
reign of priests was ended. And in their
place stood a strange, quiet figure of indomitable power and unruffled tenderness.
. . . He whom she had seen — the Son of Man, the Saviour of the world, as she
had called Him just now — He who bore these titles was no longer a monstrous
figure, half God and half man, claiming both natures and possessing neither; one
who was tempted without temptation, and who conquered without merit, as his
followers said. Here was one instead whom
she could follow, a god indeed and a man as well — a god because human, and a
man because so divine.” {Emphasis added.]
Following Vatican II, the primary symptoms of the shift from
the Intellect to the Will were, one, the interpretation of Catholic social
teaching. Based officially on the sound
philosophy of Aquinas, this was now to be understood as de facto or explicit socialism, as permitted (some would say
mandated) by the socialist-leaning philosophy of William of Occam and various
New Age theories.
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| E.F. Schumacher, New Age Guru. |
Two, the focus of theology became meeting purely human wants
and needs. Spiritual matters were either
of no importance, or would achieve overwhelming importance and develop
naturally as people fulfilled the wants and needs of others; materiality and
spirituality were joined in ways that subsumed one into the other, depending on
the desired goal.
Books like E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973) and A Guide
for the Perplexed (1977), essentially rehashes of Fabian socialism and warmed-over
theosophy, respectively, seemed heaven-sent to people searching for answers in
a world that seemed to be breaking up in chaos.
At the most superficial level, these and other works by various authors seemed
consistent with the “new” openness following Vatican II.
This, however, was as misleading as the New Age itself, as
we will see in the next posting in this series.
#30#