Gnosticism

Reading N°41 in the History of the Catholic Church

 by

 Fr. Fernand Mourret, S.S.

A less ephemeral success than that enjoyed by the Ebionites and the Elcesaites crowned the attempts of those who sought to revive the Jewish spirit by its union with the Hellenic. This was the origin of Gnosticism, which is the evolution of Jewish thought, stimulated by Greek philosophic speculation.^[1] This applies especially to the first phase of the Gnostic heresy.

St. Irenaeus (AD 139-202) was the first Christian author to use the term
Gnostic in reference to the proponents of the new heresy.

If we consider the whole history of Gnosticism, we shall see that it is an effort of Greek thought to absorb Judaism and Christianity, as well as an effort of Jewish thought to assimilate Christian and Greek thought without itself being transformed. May we not also discover therein an effort of the Christian spirit - an effort legitimate in principle, but less so in its actual development - to give philosophic expression to the doctrines and practices of Christianity, or, if you wish, to transpose into the language of ancient philosophy the doctrinal and moral teaching of the sacred Books? Tertullian remarks that, in the strangeness of its formulas and symbols, Gnosticism did in reality broach the greatest problems that stir the human mind, namely: What are the possible relations between God and the world? How can the Pure Spirit, the infinite Being, know, produce, and govern the material and the finite? What is the origin of evil, and how, once it has been committed, can it be repaired?^[2]

The history of the Gnostic movement includes two distinct phases. During the second phase especially, toward the close of the second century and beyond, we meet that multiplication of systems, with strange names, mysterious and sometimes shameful ceremonies, and obscure theories, in which theurgy, so-called "illuminatism," and magic are more in evidence than philosophy. The first phase, appearing in Hadrian's time and continuing to the reign of Antoninus Pius, is, on the contrary, marked by the intellectual worth and relatively high moral attitude of the leaders of the movement.

The idea inspiring Gnosticism possesses a certain majesty. Jewish monotheism is plainly its starting point. There is primarily a desire to conceive a very pure and lofty idea of the Divinity. To make this idea as pure as possible, it is stripped of every notion applicable to human nature, until it is impossible to speak of it except by calling it the Great Silence (Sige). To make this idea as lofty as possible, they conceive God as an infinitely remote Being, infinitely separated from 'man and nature, and they call Him "Chaos" (Bythos). An eternal silence in the depths of an infinite chaos: this, they say, is the only concept worthy of the Divinity.

But matter is here, palpable and unrefined; evil is here, visible and distressing; the heart of man is here, aspiring to purification, to liberation from matter, to union with God. How is this appalling dualism to be solved? It is on this question that the schools divide.

In the time of Trajan, a certain Saturnilus of Antioch, spoken of by Hegesippus,^[3] taught that, between the supreme God, whom no one can know or name, and the visible world, there were intermediate spirits, created by God. After a dazzling image, fleet as lightning, which came to them from God, they created, or rather they tried to create, man. They succeeded in producing only an incomplete, crawling creature. This was primitive man. But God, recognizing therein some image of Himself, took pity on it; He sent it a spark of life which made this creature a man, and which is destined some day to return to the divine principle.

This is merely a rough outline of the great systems that Basilides, Carpocrates, and Valentinus elaborated in Hadrian's reign.

Basilides was born in Syria. He taught at Alexandria^[4] and he gave out his doctrine to be a traditional teaching going back to the Apostles, professing to derive his ideas from St. Peter through the intermediary of a certain Glaucias, and also appealing to the authority of St. Matthew.^[5] His theory was not much more than an amplification and more systematic statement of Saturnilus' doctrine: the idea of an inaccessible divinity, of an evil world, of intermediate spirits whom God employed to act upon the world, forms the basis of his religious philosophy. He adds the notion of a division of the spirits into good and bad angels, and he gives an important place to magical operations.^[6]

Carpocrates of Alexandria, a contemporary of Basilides, is openly a Platonist. According to him, the first principle of all things is the Monad, in which eventually every spirit will be absorbed in perfect bliss. All souls, before their earthly existence, have contemplated the eternal truths; but some keep a more vivid memory of them than do others. Great men are those in whom these memories are the more perfect. They possess the Knowledge (Gnosis), which is the supreme good. The line of great men includes Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and, most eminent of all, Jesus, in whom the eternal ideas, which he had perceived in the bosom of the Father, were so present and living. Virtue, says Carpocrates, is an ascent toward the Monad, or toward the Father, by a progressive liberation from human conventions and laws. It is evident to what excess such a doctrine might lead. Carpocrates' disciples made immorality a means of salvation.^[7]

Valentinus of Rome was a mighty spirit. He was metaphysician, psychologist, and poet. Of God, man, nature, the various forces that move beings and their deepest antinomies, he purposed giving a complete explanation capable of satisfying the philosopher by its closely reasoned logic and of being grasped by the populace by its lifelike figures.^[8] For him, Bythos and Sige (Chaos and Silence) are not two names of the Primal Being, but the divine Couple, the supreme Syzygie from whom everything emanates. Like his predecessors, Valentinus did not hide the fundamental antinomy between spirit and matter, God and the visible world. His whole effort consisted in showing how this infinite gap is filled with an infinite number of intermediary beings unequally perfect, how this radical opposition is corrected by a gradual yielding of the ascending and descending powers, and by the intervention of beings of pacification and harmony, placed in the world by the supreme couple who are at the summit of all things.

From Chaos and Silence are born Spirit and Truth. This is the primal Tetrad or Quaternion: Bythos, Sige, Nous, and Aletheia. Spirit, united to Truth, gave birth to the Word (Logos) and to Life (Zoe); and these communicated existence to man and to the Church. The blessed Ogdoad is thus constituted.

According to the distance to which beings go from the Primal Principle, they lose, by imperceptible diminution, something of the divine; yet they remain fecund and by generating form a series of superior beings or Aeons, which together constitute Fulness, or Pleroma. In this Pleroma, every Aeon aspires to complete comprehension of the Chaos; and this aspiration constitutes its life and joy.

It also produced the evil of the world. For the lower Aeons, those who descended as far as the limits of the Pleroma, have been jealous of the perfect Spirit, or Nous. In vain have the spirits of the Confines tried to restore harmony in the Pleroma; a lower Wisdom, a degraded Reason, was born in the midst of these conflicts. It is Achamoth. Being exiled from the Pleroma, Achamoth joined with Chaos; from these two was born the Demiurge, or Creator of the material world, and the whole of the material world has constituted the Kenoma (Void, Nothing). The decadence did not halt, but continued even to the supreme Evil, to Satan, Belzebuth, the Master of the lower world.

Man finds himself between these two worlds. The Demiurge made him material, but Wisdom infused a spirit into him. On the confines of the Kenoma, but aspiring to the Pleroma, man is divided between two worlds. Who will save him? A higher being, Jesus of Nazareth, whom the Spirit gradually purifies and who eventually will lead the elite of mankind with him into the Pleroma.

In consequence of these troubles, there was produced a division in mankind. It thenceforth includes the Materials (Hylists) , the Animals (Psychists), and the Spirituals (Pneumatists). These last no longer have need of good works or virtues; they have Knowledge (Gnosis). Whoever knows the mysteries, possesses salvation; whoever knows the enigma of the world, is freed from all rule; whoever has knowledge, no longer needs faith or law.^[9]

Footnotes

[1] Cf. Duchesne, Early History of the Christian Church, I, 113.

[2] Tertullian, De praescr., VII; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta a Theodoto, 78.

[3] Eusebius, H. E., IV, xxii, 5.

[4] Basilides taught about the years 133-155. Cf. Harnack, Chronologie, p. 290.

[5] Or St. Matthias, according to the variant readings of the manuscripts.

[6] Such is the description given by St. Irenaeus (Haereses, I, xxiv, 3 ff.). The author of the Philosophumena (VII, xiv) gives a different interpretation; but all the evidence leads us to suppose that we have to do with an evolution of the doctrine of Basilides, such as it was in the third century. (See Dufourcq, Saint Irénée, pp. 62-64.)

[7] St. Irenaeus, Haereses, I, xxv; Dufourcq, op. cit., pp. 64-66.

[8] The spread of Valentinus' ideas at Rome began about AD 135. Cf. Harnack, Chronologie, 291.

[9] St. Irenaeus, Haereses, I, xi; Dufourcq, Saint Irénée, pp. 48-53.

***

Join the discussion at:

The Protesting Pope

In the 500 years since its inception, the Protestant revolt has evolved from the erroneous opinions of a single mad monk into a thousand-headed hydra of heresy, with each head snapping at the other almost as frequently as at the Catholic Church itself. Nonetheless, the many heads have remained joined at one common point - a point which Protestant theologians such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer desired to see writ large on the flag of modern Protestantism: Ecclesia semper reformanda est, i.e. "The Church is always to be reformed."

Today, speaking to bishops and faithful gathered in Florence, Pope Francis made this profoundly Protestant thesis his own, quoting it verbatim.

As disturbing as that may be, it was not the most unsettling part of Pope Francis' speech. That honor goes to his diatribe against what is becoming a major theme of his pontificate, i.e. the "Pelagianism" he sees as infecting the Church. National Catholic Register's Edward Pentin reports:

Pelagianism, the Pope told faithful gathered in Florence cathedral, "prompts the Church not to be humble, selfless and blessed. And it does so with the appearance of being a good." Such an approach, he added, "brings us confidence in structures, organizations, in perfect planning because it’s abstract." 

But often "it leads us also to take a controlling, hard, regulatory style," he said. "The law gives to the Pelagian security to feel superior, to have a precise orientation. This is its strength, not the light of the breath of the Spirit." 

"In facing evils or the problems of the Church," the Pope went on, "it is useless to look for solutions in conservatism and fundamentalism, in the restoration of practices and outdated forms that aren’t even able to be culturally meaningful."

Of course, we've heard Pope Francis speak on the subject of Pelagianism before. In fact, his barbed quip "self-absorbed promethean neopelagians" - aimed squarely at faithful Catholics of the traditional sort - has become something of a defiant self-appellation among the same. And that Pope Francis frowns upon any effort to restore the time-honored traditions of the Church - including her ancient liturgy - is not exactly news. So, what's so unsettling about this speech?

A combination of context and historical precedent. 

It was none other than Martin Luther himself who leveled the charge of "Pelagianism" against the Catholic Church on the eve of his own revolution. In his monograph entitled Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther on Original Sin and Justification of the Sinner, Jairzinho Lopes Pereira of the University of Helsinki explains (p. 312):

Complaints against the Pelagian trend of theology of his own time is recurrent in young Luther. One of the most striking is found in Operationes in Psalmos (1519-1521). What is worse, he stressed in this work, is the fact that there was a new form of Pelagianism; the one he was fighting. It was worse than any other because it was not declared. It was Pelagianism disguised as an orthodox doctrine. The Reformer regarded Pelagianism as the most dangerous and pernicious of heresies (Inter omnes autem gladios imiorum maximum et nocentissimum meo iuditio merito pelagianam impietatem censebimus) and the source of all sorts of idolatries (hic error fons est universae idolatriae). Not surprisingly, he identified it with the very human tendency to state human righteousness (iustitia hominis) to the detriment of that of faith (iusitia fidei). 

Augustine, Luther pointed out, fought Pelagians as declared heretics. He himself was fighting the very same heretical trend in men protected by the Church, under the skin of orthodox theologians. So Pelagianism, Luther stressed, is a timeless threat to Christian faith. [...] After Augustine's death the heresy rose; it not only did not find opposition, but also was openly allowed to rule within the Roman Church and universities. Nothing can be more dangerous, yet it remained in the Church, Luther claimed (pelagianos error vere omnium saeculorum error est, saepius opressus quidem, sed nunquam extinctus).

Sound familiar?

As one brave priest noted, the once-rhetorical question, "Is the Pope a Catholic?" no longer provokes laughter. Perhaps it is time to replace it with a more pointed question: "Is the Pope a Protestant?"

Homicide

Thirty-Seventh in a Series on Catholic Morality

 by

 Fr. John H. Stapleton

To kill is to take life, human or animal. It was once thought by a sect of crazy fanatics that the Fifth Commandment applied to the killing of animals as well as of men. When a man slays a man, he slays an equal; when he kills an animal, he kills a creature made to serve him and to be his food; and raw meat is not always palatable, and to cook is to kill. "Everything that moves and lives," says Holy Writ, "shall be unto you as food."

The killing, therefore, here in question is the taking of human life, or homicide. There can be no doubt but that life is man's best and most precious possession, and that he has an inborn right to live as long as nature's laws operate in his favor. But man is not master of that gift of life, either in himself or in others. God, who alone can give, alone may take it away. Sole master of life, He deals it out to His creatures as it pleases Him; and whoever tampers with human life intrudes upon the domain of the Divinity, violating at the same time the first right of his fellow man.

We have an instinctive horror of blood, especially human blood. For the ordinary individual, the Mosaic enactment that forbids murder is almost superfluous, so deeply has nature graven on our hearts the letter of that law. Murder is abominable, for the very reason that life is precious; and no reasonable being, civilized or savage, dealing death unjustly unto a fellow man, can have any other conviction in his soul than that he is committing a crime and incurring the almighty wrath of the Deity. If such killing is done by a responsible agent, and against the right of the victim, the crime committed is murder or unjustifiable homicide.

Which supposes that there is a kind of homicide that is justifiable, in seeming contradiction of the general law of God and nature, which specifies no exception. But there is a question here less of exception than of distinction. The law is a general one, of vast comprehension. Is all killing prohibited? Evidently not. It is limited to human beings, in the first place; to responsible agents, in the next; and thirdly, it involves a question of injustice. What is forbidden is the voluntary and unjust killing of a human being. Having thus specified according to the rules of right reasoning, we find we have a considerable margin left for the taking of life that is justifiable. And the records of Divine revelation will approve the findings of right reason.

We find God in the Old Law, while upholding His fifth precept, commanding capital punishment and sanctioning the slaughter of war; He not only approved the slaying of certain persons, but there are instances of His giving authority to kill. By so doing, He delegated His supreme right over life to His creatures. "Whoever sheds human blood, let his blood be shed." In the New Testament, the officer of the law is called the minister of God and is said - not without cause - to carry the sword; and the sword is the symbol of the power to inflict death.

The presence of such laws as that of capital punishment, of war and of self-defense, in all the written codes of civilized peoples, as well as in the unwritten codes of savage tribes, can be accounted for only by a direct or indirect commission from the Deity. A legal tradition so universal and so constant is a natural law, and consequently a divine law. In a matter of such importance, all mankind could not have erred; if it has, it is perfectly safe to be with it in its error.

These exceptions, if we may call them exceptions, suppose the victim to have forfeited his right to live, to have placed himself in a position of unjust aggression, which aggression gives to the party attacked the right to repel it, to protect his own life even at the cost of the life of the unjust aggressor. This is an individual privilege in only one instance, that of self-defense; in all others, it is invested in the body politic or society which alone can declare war and inflict death on a capital offender.

Of course, it may be said that in moral matters, like does not cure like, that to permit killing is a strange manner of discouraging the same. But this measure acts as a deterrent; it is not a cure for the offender, or rather it is, and a radical one; it is intended to instill a salutary dread into the hearts of those who may be inclined to play too freely with human life. This is the only argument assassins understand; it is therefore the only one we can use against them.

Faith: The Gate of Grace

First in a Series on the Life of Grace

 by

 Fr. Raphael M. Moss, O.P.

Of all the many beautiful sayings of our blessed Lord recorded by the evangelists, it would be hard to choose out one more beautiful and more significant than that recorded by St. John in the tenth chapter of his Gospel:

I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. (John 10:10)

These words contain the summary of all His teaching, they are the revelation of the divine designs, the explanation of the Incarnation. For our blessed Lord was not a mere reformer or philosopher, like so many who had gone before Him and were to follow Him, whose names are written large in the history of mankind. He came indeed to change the world and to reform it, and to teach the fullness of all truth, but the results towards which His reformation and His teaching tended were not bound by the limits of this world. The "life" He came to give in such abundance was a life beyond the powers of sense and understanding, seeing that its aim, its end, its means and principles, were altogether of another and higher world. Yet it was the life for which God made us, the only life that satisfies the strange mysterious longings of our human nature, and gives our complex being its full perfection.

Its beginnings are in time, its foundations and its early progress can be measured by the lapse of years and the span of mortal life, but its completion belongs to eternity, and hence we justly speak of it as supernatural.

We purpose in this series to contemplate the workings of this supernatural life, to understand the sources of its power and energy, the means to which it has recourse in time of weakness and failure and the consequences of final triumph or defeat. Vital questions, surely, and most practical, and therefore worthy of our best attention, for if the proper study of mankind is man, we have before our minds the noblest thought of that same study when we contemplate man's real life in all its varied stages and consider the greatness and the goodness of the infinite Creator in this, the most perfect work of His hands.

How many there are whose lives are failures, in the worst sense of the word, simply because they are so purely natural, for to live a natural life when we are made for something supernatural is to fail most pitiably! How many others, too, there are whose feet have trod these higher paths, and then strayed from them - unfinished monuments, exposed to wind and rain, and falling to decay in consequence - how often have we met with such and wondered at their folly! Like the whitened bones on the desert sand, or the buoy that floats above the sunken ship, they tell us of the dangers that beset our course, and warn us to be careful, but the clearest warnings are unheeded if we cannot understand them. We must know all we can therefore, and act upon our knowledge, and so we shall succeed, and in saying this we are only pointing to the familiar Catholic doctrine of faith and good works. Let us begin with faith.

Faith! The very word would seem to be repugnant to the apostles and disciples of that modern craze known as free-thought. It is quite true that they know very little about it, but, no doubt, they think they know enough, and in their opinion, faith is but another word for self-abasement and self-degradation, or as Pascal crudely puts it, "Pour avoir la foi, il faut s'abêtir." ["To have faith, one must become stupid."] Could anything be more untrue or more misleading? For what do we mean by "faith"? We are speaking, of course, of divine faith, and the definition given in our Catechism is familiar to all of us:

Faith is believing without doubting whatever God has revealed.

Yet this simple definition is clear enough and deep enough to furnish a reply to all their so-called difficulties and objections. It tells us that faith implies the assent of the mind to supernatural truths on the authority of God's word. If we accept the existence of God, we must also accept the existence of truths of the supernatural order; and whether we consider these truths objectively and in themselves, or subjectively with reference to our minds and the criteria on which we base our assent, we are bound to admit their absolute superiority to those which are within the natural reach of our understanding. For our assent to these truths is not based on the evidence they give of themselves, or on first principles, but rather on the infinite knowledge and truth of God, who reveals them - and, for this very reason, the assent which we give to them is firmer and surer in every way than any mere natural certitude, and, without a misuse of terms, cannot possibly be called "blind" and "unreasoning."

It is quite true that the object of our act of faith is something out of sight, something which is not evident to the understanding. But whilst we admit all this, and grant most willingly that a dogma of faith cannot be known by its own intrinsic proofs, yet it can put forward such a power of what we may call extrinsic evidence as to become at once eminently credible. Hence, as Cardinal Cajetan points out, although we cannot prove to demonstration the mysteries of faith, we can most clearly demonstrate their credibility; and as it would be simple folly to deny a fact which proves its truth by its own intrinsic evidence, so also is it foolish and most wicked to refuse assent to truths which are divine, and which, by reliable extrinsic evidence, proclaim themselves worthy of our credence.

Now let us try to see how necessary this faith is to everyone, and the wonderful part it has to play in our supernatural life. According to St. Paul, it is its first and most essential condition. 

Without faith, it is impossible to please God, for he that cometh to God must believe that He exists and is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)

Faith in God, therefore, and in His generous love of us, is the beginning of the spiritual and supernatural life, the life of grace; it is the gate of that bright pathway of the just, "which as a shining light goeth forward and increaseth even unto the perfect day." (Proverbs 4:18)

We have defined faith as a firm assent of the mind to a truth revealed by God. It is, therefore, a species of knowledge or vision by which the mind apprehends certain truths of which it would be otherwise in ignorance. For, as an eloquent French writer has so beautifully pointed out, we may distinguish three separate and distinct worlds in which the great Creator manifests Himself and His exceeding glory. He made man for Himself and for the vision of Himself face to face, but, for a time at least, the full perfection of that vision is deferred, for "we see now as in a mirror and in a dark manner;" (1 Corinthians 13:12) and in these three worlds, and by means of them, as by three marvelous stairways, the soul of man mounts up to the throne of God.

First of all, there is the world of nature. To see the great hills towering aloft, half veiled in driving mist, or the fields and woods and gardens bathed in sunshine, to stand before the ocean and gaze out upon the mighty plain of tossing waters, to look up at night to that dark blue vault above our heads, which our great poet fitly calls "the floor of heaven, thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," to think of all these worlds separated from us and from each other by distances which can be counted only in heaven, and all following their appointed paths across the wildernesses of space - surely all this lifts up the mind and heart to God, and makes the trembling soul fall prostrate in fear and adoration at the thought of His unspeakable magnificence.

Now, all these wonders are revealed to us by that great power of sight which God has given to us. It is the eye of man which leads his soul abroad, and shows him all the beauty of his earthly home. Yet, of what use is the eye without the mind? What pleasure could it bring us, unless the mind were there to guide the eye and help the soul to learn its easy lesson? And so there is another world of no less beauty than the world of nature, yet utterly beyond the powers of sense, an immaterial world, of thoughts and laws and principles, to which the mind alone has access; and when the mind is wanting, when the understanding and intelligence of man forget their work, he passes by this world as ignorant of it and its lessons as the poor blind man is ignorant of the gorgeous rainbow that spans the sky above his head. But great minds, on the contrary, can find such real pleasure in these higher joys revealed to them by their keen powers of thought, that for their sake they patiently endure the loss of all beside. It is naught to them, as Milton wrote so grandly in his years of blindness, that earth should be in darkness, when "in a purer clime the being fills with rapture, and waves of thought roll in upon the spirit."

And then, once more, beyond the world of nature and the world of knowledge there is another world higher still, and far more wonderful, to which they are but as the stepping-stones across the river to the meadow lands beyond: the supernatural world of grace. It is a world which shows us God and His infinite being, His powers and His perfections, His dealings with His creatures and His revelations of Himself, not one world only, but rather many worlds of infinite beauty and attractiveness, far, far beyond all that the eye of man can see or the heart of man imagine. How, therefore, could man hope to know its wonders, unless the great Creator and efficient cause of all, who gave him eyes to see, and a mind to understand, had not once more been at his side to help him, and, by the gift of faith, completed His own handiwork and man's perfection? This, then, is the place of faith, this is its sphere of work most natural and most reasonable.

Of course, there is no absolute necessity obliging God to speak to us and tell us all these wonders of Himself; but once we grant that God created us and made us what we are, because of His exceeding goodness, once we grant that that same love and goodness prompted Him to raise us to a supernatural state, the end of which is nothing less than intimate union with Himself, then revelation follows as a natural consequence, and is itself the proof of love. This is the reasoning of St Thomas:

If the end of man be the vision of God face to face, then must man do his best to tend to God, and cling to Him by knowledge and by love, and not by any sort of love or knowledge, but only by that which we call supernatural, because the means must be proportioned to the end.

But "means" which in themselves are supernatural can only be bestowed by God, and hence we have revelation and the gift of grace. So, on the other hand, the act of faith by which the soul of man accepts God's revelation is man's return of love and highest pledge of loyalty. It is the worship of the understanding, the sacrifice of our best possession, the offering of the brightest jewel in our crown in tribute at God's feet. God might have acted very differently. He could have drawn aside the veil and made His revelation so complete that not a shred of mystery remained, but then our faith would cease to be a sacrifice, much less a means of merit, or rather, to speak truly, it would cease to exist. It is impossible to believe and see at the same time. We believe in the existence of Jerusalem, supposing we have never been there. We know there is a city called Oxford, and there is no sacrifice on our part or merit to be found in our admission of this geographical fact. The apostle St. Thomas refused to believe in the Resurrection; he craved that lower and more natural certainty which comes from knowledge, and so drew upon himself his Master's kind rebuke:

Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed. (John 20:29)

Still, there was a blessedness of faith which the apostle could claim, for, seeing Jesus risen from the dead, he believed in His Divinity. Hominem vidit, says St. Gregory, et Deum confessus est. He saw a man before him, and confessed Him to be God. So must it be with us. Our faith is given to us to pierce the darkness of the supernatural world and manifest what otherwise would be hidden from us. It is the "evidence of things that appear not," (Hebrews 11:1) a mighty power which only God can give, enabling the soul to hear the voice of God above the tumult of the world, and to accept with humble submission all that He has revealed.

But, though the manifestation of supernatural truth is the first and greatest work of faith, it would be a mistake to limit it to this; and it will help us greatly to appreciate its powers and worth, as well as to reject the foolish sophisms of "free-thinkers" if we reflect upon the well-nigh universal work of faith in every plane of life. Divine faith is its highest evolution, but there is a human faith as well, and what would be our life without it? The shallow-minded men, who talk so glibly of their freedom from all mental shackles, and express so loudly their conviction that all faith is but a superstition, overlook the fact that not a day can pass for any one of them without an act of faith of some sort or another. When we study history, what is it but an act of faith? And, to descend to commoner things, so also is the reading of our daily papers. A cup of coffee in the morning is an act of faith; still more a dose of medicine. And who will call us credulous because we do not summon an experienced analyst to our breakfast table or to our bed of sickness before venturing to take one or the other? Yet, even then, we should have to make an act of faith in the skill and truthfulness of the analyst. So also in our social and domestic life. How strong the bond of love that binds together parents and their children, yet what is its foundation but an act of faith? An introduction at a dinner party is a triple act of faith; in fine, wherever we go, whatever we do, how ever we may live, an atmosphere of faith and blind dependence upon others must surround us, and we can no more escape it than we can escape the air we breathe, and nobody calls it humbling or degrading. Yet, whilst we are obliged to put faith in each other in this universal way, there are not wanting those who try to make us shrink from faith in God, although our faith in Him and in His word, unchangeable, eternal, can never know the doubt or shadow of a cloud which human faith must ever feel! Humanum est errare.

Returning, then, to our comparison of God's three great worlds and those distinct mysterious powers which show them and reveal them to us, it is well to note how, though distinct in every way, they yet are bound together in the closest union for mutual help and ready service. The straight oar dips into the water, and at once seems broken, but reason comes to our assistance, and reveals to us those laws of light and its refraction which explain the erring judgment of the senses. So is it with our reason and our faith. The one explains the other.

We have already shown the work of reason in the act of faith. It is the reason which examines and decides the value of the motives of credibility. It is the reason which unveils to us the why and wherefore of God's revelation, the work it has to do, the need we have of it and all the good it can bestow on us. And this has ever been the teaching of the Catholic Church and of those great minds whose intellectual greatness is the harvest of her blessing and her guidance. There have been some amongst her children who have sought to minimize or even to deny the work of reason in what pertains to morals or religion, but the Church rejects their wild suggestions, and, on the contrary, has ever asserted the doctrine so magnificently developed by St. Thomas in his explanation of the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and confirmed by her with all the weight of her authority in the [First] Vatican Council. There, she first of all emphatically denies the possibility of opposition between faith and reason, and then explains their close relationship.

Although faith be altogether above reason, there can never be a conflict between the two, for the same God who reveals mysteries, and infuses faith, likewise gives the light of reason to the soul, and God can never contradict Himself, nor can one truth be at variance with another. If at times such opposition seem to exist, it is either because the dogmas of faith are imperfectly understood, or the assertions of mere opinions are put forward as the dictates of reason. [...] And not only can faith and reason never be in opposition, but they always give each other mutual assistance, for reason shows and proves the groundwork of faith, strengthening by its light the knowledge of divine things, and faith in its turn safeguards reason from many errors, and assists it in many different ways. (Vatican I, Session 3, Chapter 4)

Then she goes on to brand with her anathema all those who hold the opposite extreme and, claiming for themselves the name of "rationalists" and "free-thinkers," maintain that human reason or "free thought" is the one and only measure and criterion of all truth. "Free thought" and "free thinkers!" Were ever words so outraged? Faith and faith alone gives us free thought and makes us true free thinkers, for it is faith which shows us God, the one eternal and unchanging Truth, and this is perfect liberty, as defined by Christ Himself.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)

For there are golden chains which honour and adorn, as there are common fetters which humble and degrade. To know the truth and place its yoke upon our minds is liberty, but in the minds of these would-be philosophers we see the lowest form of intellectual slavery. We should not approve of liberty which allowed a man to pick our pockets or break into our house, we should call it license, and the ruin of all liberty; and justly so, for civil liberty supposes laws which safeguard all just rights. And has not intellectual liberty its laws also, and does not the defiance of these laws mean intellectual license? God made us free, because He made us to His own image and likeness; and when a man professes his belief in God and in God's teaching, he declares that he allows no barrier in the way of intellectual freedom, save the barrier of God's truth! "I believe in God," he says, and in those words sums up the Magna Charta of the mind. That is the free thought for which our nature craves, far different from the state of mental chaos and confusion which is the antithesis of faith, and everywhere involves a blind obedience to the changing dictates of our own strong passions, or the opinions of the latest fashionable writer.

From the mutual relations of faith and reason we pass on to a closer consideration of the virtue of faith in itself. When we quoted the definition of faith given in the Catechism, and tried to show that it implied and proved the eminent reasonableness of such an act, we were looking at it, if we may say so, from a purely objective point of view, or, in other words, with reference to the truths proposed for our belief. It will help us greatly if we likewise try to look at it subjectively, for since we showed the act of faith to be an act of knowledge, the subject in which this intellectual act takes place, or the power which gives it being, is necessarily implied, as well as the object known. So we may say at once that, to enable us to give an assent to any supernatural truth, we stand in need of what is called the light of faith - in other words, a supernatural virtue bestowed upon the understanding by Almighty God. This is a defined dogma of the Church, and follows from the very meaning of the definition.

An absolutely supernatural truth is one which is beyond the reach of any mind, actually existing or even possible, unless its natural powers be supplemented by an additional gift which we call the light of faith. It is a light because it manifests certain truths; a light of faith because, as we have shown above, these truths cannot be demonstrated by their own intrinsic evidence. The act of faith is, therefore, an act of knowledge, elicited by the understanding, strengthened by this supernatural power, and moved thereto by an act of the will. It is an act of the understanding because its object is a revealed truth, and truth is the natural object of the mind. But it is an act which is due to the influence of the will, because the object of faith is a hidden truth, and therefore is incapable of causing an assent of the mind, or that entire adhesion which is certitude. Hence the knowledge which there is in faith accompanies the assent, but is not its necessary cause, and this explains the rationale of temptations against faith. So, concludes the Angelic Doctor, the intellect concurs in the act of faith by the assent of adhesion, and the share of the will is its consent to the adhesion of the intellect.

Now note what follows: This influence of the will, having for its object a supernatural good, must be in itself a supernatural act, for the nature of an act depends upon the nature of its object, and as the will left to itself cannot be the principle of a supernatural act, it follows that it must owe its action to a gratuitous supernatural help, or in other words, an actual grace from God. Summing up the whole question, St. Thomas says:

To believe is an act of the understanding, assenting to a divine truth, being moved thereto by the will under the influence of grace. "With the heart we believe unto justice." (Romans 10:10)

Evidently, then, we cannot guard too zealously or too carefully this most precious gift of God, which, like so many of God's gifts, seems so dependent on our feeble care, and that we may better realize the dangers we must shun and the efforts we must make, we may take a parable from nature.

When the wintry days are over, and the warmer winds of spring begin to wake the life that sleeps within the cold, dark earth, the little plant slowly pushes its head above the ground, and gradually thrives and nourishes until the flower and fruit seem close at hand. Yet, even then, we know that it may be a failure. Perhaps day after day the hot sun beats down upon it until the earth around it is parched and broken, and the moisture which gives it life is all dried up, and one by one the green leaves droop and fade, and the stalk bends lower and lower, until at last the plant is withered and dead. Or, on the other hand, the sun may hardly ever shine at all, but hide himself for weeks together behind the cold grey clouds, and the sweeping rain may fall incessantly until the rich earth is turned to mud, and the roots rot away in the water.

Now the soul of man is like a plant in the garden of God's supernatural world, "a tree planted by the running waters," (Psalm 1:3) and we may liken faith to the beautiful flower that crowns it, and slowly ripens into the rich fruit of good works. But we have seen what faith implies - lowliness of mind and heart, submission of will - self-surrender, therefore, carried to its uttermost limit, and all this is very hard to flesh and blood. For there is ever whispering in the fallen heart of man the secret voice of self-love and self-worship, urging him to rise up against his Maker and tell Him to His face: Non serviam! I will not obey! (Jeremiah 2:20) If the soul listens and consents, the result is obvious. The soft falling rain of grace will cease, the heavens will become as brass and the earth as iron, and the heart becomes as hard as a rock, so that faith, which is the beginning of the spiritual life, seems quite impossible. We have an instance of this in the Egyptian Pharaoh, who saw the wonderful signs wrought by Moses, and "hardened his heart" (Exodus 11:10) and would not believe. Another, yet more striking instance is put before us by the Scribes and Pharisees who listened to the preaching of the Son of God Himself and saw His miracles and would not believe. They were the wise and prudent of this world from whom were hidden the things of God to be revealed to little ones, whose hearts were humble and submissive, whereas the hearts of these blind leaders were hardened and burnt up with deadly pride. For it is just this pride of heart and mind, this independent self-sufficiency that God will destroy at any cost, because it is so hateful in His sight. He demands of us the avowal of our own littleness and dependence on Him. He exacts the humble confession of our own utter inability to look on Him face to face, and it is only when the soul has done this, it is only when she has fallen with her face in the dust, and declared her nothingness apart from Him and her readiness to accept what she cannot see or understand, it is only then that God stoops to look down upon the lowliness of His servant, and pours into the mind the glorious light of faith. We humble ourselves therefore, but only that we may be exalted by God.

Then there is another obstacle to be avoided, another dangerous enemy to our faith of whom we must beware, and this obstacle, this enemy, is in many ways more evident and easy to discover, though perhaps no less difficult to overcome. Our blessed Lord Himself has pointed it out to us when He declared that, although He Himself, the Light of God, had come into this world to give light to them that sit in darkness, yet men fled from Him, and preferred the darkness because their deeds were evil.

For every one that doeth evil hateth the light and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. (John 3:20)

In other words, there are some hearts so corrupted, so buried in sin, that they positively shun the light of faith, and dread its brightness, because it shows them their own moral vileness in its true colours. In souls such as these, there is not even the wish to believe, and, as we have said, this readiness to accept the teaching of God is the essential condition of faith. Such souls may hear of those wonderful words spoken on the green hill-side of Galilee - "Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8) - but there is no answering echo in their hearts. They have no wish to "see" God, because their hearts are so unclean, so soiled with the love of all that is degrading. How can the flower of faith flourish in such a muddy soil? Slowly but most surely it must wither away and die, and leave the unhappy, uncrowned soul to be cut down and cast into the fire in punishment of a loss to which it has actually become indifferent. It is of souls like these that St. Peter speaks so indignantly, comparing them to the irrational beasts, to fountains without water, to clouds tossed about by whirlwinds, and assuring us that for them is reserved an eternal mist of darkness, the darkness of willful ignorance and unbelief in this world, and, in the next, the darkness of the hopeless loss of God.

All this, then, shows us the inevitable conclusion. Faith implies self-sacrifice. It cannot come to souls that worship the self, and if it has been given to such souls, it generally fades away and dies. It only flourishes in souls that are ready to pay the price it necessarily entails. Even when God does not demand the sacrifice of the body, the laying down our lives in martyrdom, He always demands the sacrifice of the soul, the sacrifice of the understanding and the will, as we have shown. A heavy price, our human nature cries, yet even human nature can appreciate the reward, the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. In life it gives us peace that no sorrow can destroy, like the peace that dwelt in the heart of Abraham when he led his son his only son towards the hill of sacrifice, and answered his inquiries with that magnificent act of faith: Deus providebit, God will provide a victim. (Genesis 22:8) And that same peace of mind does but increase as we near the dark valley of the shadow of death.

Look at the death-bed of the apostle of free-thought, Voltaire, an agony of misery and despair, and then turn to the passing away of that great saint and doctor, whose keen intellect had soared so high on the wings of faith, St Thomas Aquinas. "Full of calmness and peace," says his biographer, "patient as a child, gentle as charity itself," he waited for death to come. And when the Blessed Sacrament was brought to him, "I receive Thee," he exclaimed, "the price of my soul's redemption, for love of whom I have studied and watched and laboured. Thee have I preached, Thee have I taught, against Thee never have I breathed a word, nor am I wedded to my own opinion. In entire obedience to Holy Church, I now pass out of this world." And so he was taken from the twilight of faith to the glory of the everlasting vision. So was it with all the saints, so is it, and so must it ever be with all truly great souls, no matter what their work in life may be, for their faith is common to them all, and their faith is the secret of it all. So also will it be with us if we walk in their footsteps, and this same beautiful gift of faith, bestowed upon us at our baptism, shows us how to succeed by placing us at the entrance of that narrow way leading to the eternal home, where we shall see our Maker face to face. The journey may seem long and tedious, and full of strange and unexpected turnings, and our souls may grow weary and our hearts fail us in the darkness, but faith will ever guide us safely and surely, and enable us to cry out bravely when our poor human nature seems tried beyond its strength:

Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief!

Welcome to the War

If you've been paying attention to coverage of the Catholic Church lately, you might have noticed a spike in the appearance of terminology borrowed from the bellicose arts, with words like "conflict," "battle" and even "war" being used to describe the goings-on in and around the Vatican these days. While such talk is pretty standard fare for faithful Catholic publications, it has recently spread beyond the narrow borders of Catholic blogdom and entered the mainstream of polite society: Tess Livingstone of The Australian, Tim Stanley of The Telegraph, Ross Douthat of The New York Times and now Damian Thompson of The Spectator have all come to the same conclusion: we are on the brink of civil war.

Just more media spin? A bit of hyperbole to increase revenue? Some would like you to think so. Cardinal Donald Wuerl recently appeared on World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo in part to assure viewers that there exists "no division on the core teachings of the faith" among the bishops. We are, I suppose, to ignore voices such as that of Polish Archbishop Henryk Hoser, who recently stated that "some bishops [...] do not even accept the official teachings of the Church." And if we don't ignore them - if we reject the "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" narrative - and instead view events within the framework of a "politically partisan narrative," then we deserve to be silenced, as Ross Douthat found out after his commentary provoked the ire of a gaggle of progressive Catholic intellectuals and university professors.

That is, if it weren't for the fact that such talk of war is not limited to the authors of newspaper editorials. Just yesterday, Cardinal Maradiaga informed reporters that Pope Francis is "prepared to battle" his own Curia in order to push through his desired reforms. And in this morning's homily, the Pope himself trained his sights yet again upon the "Doctors of the Law" and fired off a characteristically veiled yet effective warning shot:

God has included us all in salvation! All! This is the beginning. We with our weaknesses, with our sins, with our envy, jealousies, we all have this attitude of excluding which - as I said - can end in wars.

While I congratulate Douthat, Thompson and the rest for refusing to go along with the official narrative and calling it like it is, I have to ask: Where the hell have you guys been for the last 50 years?

For the record: civil war is already upon us. Anyone paying attention knows that the walls have been scaled, the gates have been breached, and the enemy has set up camp in our own court. All that's left is the castle keep, surrounded on all sides by men brandishing torches. And now you think we are on the brink of civil war? Tell that to the three generations of Catholics who have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve every scrap of Sacred Tradition they can get their hands on from the corruption of the grand Aggiornamento. Tell that to those who were reduced to tears as sanctuaries were being desecrated, statues removed, altars broken, and communion rails torn out. Tell that to the scores of good men who were turned away from the priesthood because they objected to the rampant homosexualism of the seminaries. Tell that to the faithful who were cast out of the Church for having the gall to demand that she remain loyal to Christ's teachings 30 years ago.

The only thing new about the 2015 Synod was the brazenness with which the heretics and apostates pushed their revolutionary agenda. They're not even trying to prop up a 'Hermeneutic of Continuity' anymore. It's a rupture, a break - in other words, a schism - from Catholic Tradition. They know it, we know it, and it's time you guys start reporting on it.

Welcome to the war. It's about time you showed up.

(For my Spanish readers: Ahora en Español)

Aquila's Bible, the Ebionites and the Elcesaites

Reading N°40 in the History of the Catholic Church

 by

 Fr. Fernand Mourret, S.S.

The Jewish nation had just undergone a cruel chastisement under Emperor Hadrian, but the Jewish Synagogue was still free. Its faith was not proscribed in the Roman Empire, its places of prayer were left standing, its meetings were legal.^[1]

Reproduction of a 6th century map of Aelia Capitolina

Among the pagans who, under Hadrian, were engaged in the construction of Aelia Capitolina, was - so it was said - a Greek from the province of Pontus, a relative of the Emperor. His name was Aquila. The extent of his knowledge and the energy of his character persuaded the Emperor to appoint him to superintend the immense building project. Impressed at sight of the virtues and miracles that were in evidence among the Christians, he asked for and received Baptism.^[2] But, as his heart was not purified by humility, knowledge remained his supreme god. He was reproved on account of his passion for astrology. This angered him. He was excommunicated. No longer wishing to be a Christian, ashamed to become a pagan again, he became a Jew. He imagined a Judaism that would break all the bonds connecting the religion of Moses with the religion of Christ, and that would set up the Old Law in opposition to the New. For this reason, says St. Epiphanius, he wrote a new Greek version of the Bible, "suppressing such parts as bore testimony in favor of Christ."^[3] A learned rabbi, Akiba (Akiva), helped him in the undertaking.^[4]

Such was the origin of the famous Greek Bible of Aquila, an important work, ingenious, carefully done, showing a deep understanding of the Hebrew language, but slavishly literal and obviously colored in the Messianic passages, as was remarked by St. Justin, St. Irenaeus, Origen, and St. Jerome.^[5] The Jews favored it as against the Septuagint, and made use of it in spreading their doctrines in the Greek world. They employed it also to corrupt Christianity and to nourish, in the Church, that Judaizing spirit which, in the teachings of the Ebionites and the Elcesaites, tended to base the religion of Christ on a very gross interpretation of the Old Testament.

The Ebionites, whose origin we observed at the very beginning of Christianity, had, by fusion with the sect of the Essenes, taken on a new development about the year AD 100. We find their doctrine set forth in a series of sermons and adventure stories published under the name of St. Clement of Rome.^[6] According to Essenean Ebionitism, God has a form and members, because every being is finite and limited. Created beings are divided into good and bad. So, too, there are good and bad prophets. The latter are descended from Eve, the female, evil element of the world. From Adam are descended the good prophets, the greatest of whom is Jesus. He is the son of God, but he is not God, for God is the Unbegotten, the Innascible, and Jesus is the begotten and the son.^[7]

The Elcesaites, whose ideas and practices we learn from Origen, St. Epiphanius, and the Philosophumena, took their doctrine from the Book of Elchasai, which was held to be a revelation made in the third year of Trajan (AD 100) by a gigantic angel, called the Son of God, having at his side a wife of like size, the Holy Spirit. A curious baptism, with magical formulas and odd incantations, was the form of initiation into this sect. All the ritualistic laws of the Jews were kept. Christ, born of Mary, as other human beings are born, was merely a reincarnation, for he had already passed through several bodies and had borne several names. The Philosophumena adds that the Elcesaites had also certain secret beliefs and practices.

These strange sects would count for little in the religious movement of mankind. Before long, they disappeared. It is mostly their oddness that draws attention to them. Yet they have a symbolic significance. The Ebionite, like the Elcesaite, is the proud Jew, inconsolable for the loss of his nationality and for the failure of his gross Messianism, trying to obtain a compensation in a majestic but vain fancy in which he seeks to draw the nations after him.^[8]

Footnotes

[1] Champagny, Les Antonins, II, 75. There are preserved some Judeo-Roman tombs of this period, with the palm, the candlestick, the titles of "father" and "mother of the synagogue."

[2] St. Epiphanius, De mensuris et ponderibus, chap. 14.

[3] Ibid.

[4] St. Jerome, In Isaiam, 49.

[5] Cf. Batiffol, art. "Aquila," in the Dict. de la Bible. Aquila's translation is incorporated in Origen's Hexapla.

[6] The Recognitiones is a popular romance. The pseudo-Clementine writings will be found in the first two volumes of Migne's Patrologia Graeca.

[7] Tixeront, History of Dogmas, I, 165 ff.

[8] Ibidem, p. 168 ff.

***

Join the discussion at:

In Commemoratione Omnium Fidelium Defunctorum

The Great Day of His Wrath
John Martin (1789-1854)

Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day,

When the heavens and the earth shall be moved,

When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.

I am made to tremble, and I fear, till the judgment be upon us, and the coming wrath,

When the heavens and the earth shall be moved.

That day, day of wrath, calamity and misery, day of great and exceeding bitterness,

When thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them.