There is a philosophical problem we’ve faced in the West for some time that can be summarized as follows: “In the movement of post-Kantian thought, conceptual knowledge was indeed called into question. For Schleiermacher, the human concept was relativized by human feeling, for Hegel by the infinity of God, and for Marx by the historical process. Indeed, the ability of the human mind to grasp reality in concepts remains a central philosophical problem today.”
We have lost confidence in the moment of the concept, resulting in a weakening of the formal, categorical dimension of human knowledge. This philosophical problem has migrated into Catholic theology as well, weakening confidence in defined Catholic dogma or what Yves Congar, OP referred to as “monuments of Tradition.” This trend can be discerned in the theological writings of Karl Rahner, SJ. Patrick Burke stated in his major work, Reinterpreting Rahner, “there is a foundational weakness in Rahner’s system. The role of the concept in his epistemology is weak.”
Traces of a similar trend can be detected in a recent article penned by John Finnis, Robert P. George, and Peter Ryan, SJ, entitled “More Confusion About Same-Sex Blessings”. These authors point out a subtle effect from the “silences and complacencies” of the Holy See in reigning in public blessings that clearly go beyond the conditions laid down for their administration in Fiducia Supplicans. They declare that these “silences and complacencies, while not denying Catholic doctrine on sexual activity, tend to suggest that that doctrine does not matter very much.”
The weakening of the concept in knowledge here registers as an overall feeling that in our day Catholic moral teachings, previously defined and believed “settled,” are now in some way inadequate.
This epistemological trend, however, is further compounded by the increased presence in the West of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism places greater importance on the seemingly unlimited dimension of “spirit” over the more defined and limiting conditions imposed by “matter.”
Today’s gender ideology is a prime example. The noumenal content of one’s self-understanding, now fully in flux due to the weakening of the formal, categorical content of conceptual knowledge, facilitates fluidity in gender. There are no determinations resulting from embodiment due to the post-Kantian awakening in the mind that liberates it from the confines of matter in the name of freedom. It’s a chimera, however, since a creature by definition is limited, both formally and materially.
But Gnosticism predates the post-Kantian philosophical problem. Saint Irenaeus addressed it in the second century, and it surfaced again during the Middle Ages in the form of Joachimism among early recruits of the Franciscan Order. Joachimism arose when certain friars began reading the Scripture commentaries of Abbot Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135-1202) who envisioned history as Trinitarian. There was the Age of the Father during the Old Testament period and the Age of the Son during the New Testament period. What was novel, however, was how he foretold the coming close of the Age of the Son and the rise of the Age of the Holy Spirit. The Age of the Spirit would be inaugurated by “two new Orders” led by a “monk” and a “hermit” on fire with the love of God.
In short order, some of the early Franciscans identified the hermit on fire with God’s love with Saint Francis of Assisi. They believed that the Franciscan Order would be instrumental in inaugurating the New Age of the Spirit. In fact, the Franciscan Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, while studying at the University of Paris, published a work in 1254 entitled Introduction to the Eternal Gospel. He declared, based on his reading of Abbot Joachim, that the Age of the Spirit would commence in 1260. More troubling, however, were the signs of the New Age. He predicted the coming of a new Church marked by an ecstatic bond of unity in the Holy Spirit that would render the institutional Church superfluous and unnecessary. Saint Bonaventure’s first order of business when elected Minister General of the Franciscans in 1257 was to address the Joachimite crisis in the Order, a task well documented by Joseph Ratzinger in his professorial doctorate entitled The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure.
The Joachimite movement among the early Franciscans represents a shadow side of Franciscan history. There is no doubt that Francis of Assisi emphasized following the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. He exhorted the friars “that, beyond all, they should desire to possess the Spirit of the Lord and His holy operation” (Regula bullata, ch. 10). But Francis never vacated his faith of the visible, more institutional dimension of the Catholic Church the way the Joachimite friars did and the Joachimite tendency hasn’t completely gone away.
It resurfaced during the 1980s in the theology of Leonardo Boff, then a Franciscan. In his book Church: Charism and Power Boff declared that Christ never intended for there to be an institutional Church which “evolved after the resurrection”. He asserts that the primitive Church “felt the powerful need to organize” and that hierarchy, “as a term and as a concept, is a result of this process.” According to Boff, the truly Catholic attitude is “fundamentally open to everything without exception” and rids itself of the “dogmatic and doctrinaire” which inevitably lead to the “repression of the freedom of thought within the church…”
But there’s an added element to Boff’s Gnosticism that did not saddle the Joachimism of the early Franciscan friars. Boff is a post-Kantian figure, and his variety of Gnosticism was riddled with a Marxist relativization of the human concept by history. The magisterium in the Catholic Church is not the end product of an historical process of a sizable group of people needing to organize themselves. Jesus calling “the twelve” by name to follow Him gave rise at Nicaea in 325 to a “monument of Tradition” in creedal form that declared the Church “apostolic” by divine design, not historical exigency. Cardinal Ratzinger understood this when, soon after becoming Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), he engaged Boff in dialogue over his book. In the end, Boff was no longer permitted to teach Catholic theology.
The loving devotion of Saint Francis toward the humanity of Christ separates him from the gnostic heresy in the Church and even serves as its remedy. But we would also do well not to align Francis’s wariness about books and study with a post-Kantian critique of knowledge. The post-Kantian dismantling of the human concept often vacates the mind of all that went before in favor of something “new” on the way. This trend accounted for the charge of “dead on arrival” leveled against the Catechism of the Catholic Church when it was published in the 1990s.
Francis of Assisi would have nothing to do with any of these trends. He is not a post-Kantian figure in history. His concern with books and study came not from the writings of post-Kantian authors, but the Bible. He was concerned with a pharisaical knowledge akin to Christ’s warning about the scribes and Pharisees when He taught: observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice (Mt 23:2-3). Saint Francis’s wariness about books and study, therefore, should lead, not to a post-Kantian critique of knowledge, but an examination of conscience in light of the Gospel.
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Ah, Fr. Dan Pattee, the only Franciscan with whom I could ever have an adult conversation… How I miss your down-to-earth wisdom and your goodness towards all!
Thank you for this. St. Francis heroically lived the teachings of Christ. Following Christ, St. Francis never blessed sin. Amoralist Laetitia points the way to endless pastoral heresies.
Pope Francis has not (cannot) change the teachings of Christ. His pontificate has simply made an ambiguous mess to better dismiss doctrines like the sixth commandment in practice. Hence the absurdity of heteropraxy:
Kind concubinage.
Faithful fornication.
Gallant adultery.
Loving sodomy.
Should not other new ways to minister be blessed if this pontificate is to build a bridge?
Peaceful polyamory?
Paternal pederasty?
Think of the pastoral possibilities…
My blood vessels, whose constrictions raise my blood pressure but are eased again by laughter, thank you.
Today, in addition to KANT and RAHNER, another god of the illuminati in red hats is Eastern mysticism…
This, from two conceptually-challenged synodalists: HOLLERICH: “In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the European logic of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites in Japan without changing your point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich.
And from the “walking-together” GRECH, well, we’re tutored about an obscure “’unity of differences’ rather than ‘uniformity of thought’.” The synodal patterns and plasticity of thought?
On definitive thought, this from the synodally-eclipsed (!) Second Vatican Council: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, is the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await not further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Lumen Gentium).
And, from the beginning, the conceptually-backwardist (!) ST. PAUL: “do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind [!]. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–His good, perfect and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).
About today’s post-conceptual “silences and complacencies”…we are reminded of the earlier POPE HONORIUS who, decades after his passing, was anathematized not for what he did (about monothelitism; analogous to today’s anti-binary/homo/monosexuality, or a unisex hierarchy?), but for what he did NOT do: “He [Pope Leo II] did not reproach him with heresy, but with negligence in the suppression of the error.”
So, this from AUGUSTINE: Yes, “[w]e can say things differently, but we cannot say different things.”
Concept and conceptualization as defining categorical knowledge is the underlying discrepancy within Fr Patee’s philosophy. A “conceptual moment” is his interpretation of the intellect’s apprehension of things outside the mind. What the intellect apprehends is not a conception, rather the reality of things or beings. Conceptualization follows with memory of apprehension. However, that retained understanding is real knowledge of the external and not simply a mental construct or concept.
Although there’s a basic truth in this formula, its specification as concept exposes real knowledge to intellectual, imaginative constructs that differ from direct inference of what the mind apprehends. As understood, what apparently rescues Fr Patee’s conceptual theory is his faith. Fundamentally what he isolates as the conceptual moment is that invincible apprehension of the intellect of first principles. That which is known with certitude when subject and object are apprehended in one act of knowing. Whereas he correctly cites the “weakening” of the knowledge of first principles as defined by Aquinas, that weakening created by Kant’s disparity of noumenon from the perceived phenomenon. Nevertheless Patee exposes his thought to Kant in adopting knowledge of the intellect as noumenal [akin to Kant’s interior knowledge of God, the soul, the cosmos]. What there is instead are the principles of inferred knowledge that ultimately trace back to sense perception, first principle of all knowledge.
Fr Patee’s exposition of the historical Trinitarian theorist Abbot Joachim di Fiore, the notorious Marxist Fr Leonard Boff, attempts to reduce St Francis of Assisi’s scriptural orientation and fire of love, to a form of Gnosticism is most excellent and informative. Without saying it directly Fr Patee, as this writer perceives it, instead identifies the Gnosticism of Fr Boff, the present largely Jesuit inspired ecclesiology, with the conceptual freedom from regulation that afflicts the Church during this pontificate.
There’s room for debate over today’s collapse of knowledge as to its cause and exact nature whose finer points are better left to philosophers among us. My interest here, however, was mainly to untangle Saint Francis from certain trends now circulating in the West. These trends are too readily supported by an appeal, sometimes left unspoken, to Saint Francis of Assisi and his apparent distaste for books and study. Where faith and reason are both operative within the “monuments of Tradition,” it follows that we’re left with dismantled bits of knowledge when a crisis of faith prevails as it does today. Faith is difficult to foster and maintain in a mind riddled with skepticism and the human mind today is being worked over both by the dismantling skepticism of post-Kantian authors and the mind-emptying heresy of Gnosticism. Francis was a man of faith whose mind was fully intact with a clearsighted apprehension of truth and reality as it comes from the hands of God. His mysticism was not a factor of any ideology but faith whose primary subject was the Logos made flesh in Jesus Christ.
There is difference only in the isolated use of words Father. Although the right meaning comes through. I fully agree and thank you for your important articulation of the real Francis of Assisi.
Apprehension of existence beyond self is absolute knowledge, knowledge retained by the intellect as first principle of all knowledge. As Peter Beaulieu alludes, the retained knowledge called by Fr Patee the immediate concept is itself absolute as reality, although as Beaulieu rightly affirms it is not exhaustible knowledge. That doesn’t refer to the content of what we first apprehend, rather to that which the intellect infers from it. Eventually to the infallible, conclusive inference of reason that there exists a First Principle of all created things itself uncreated and perdurable. That is the premise by which the Apostle condemns the Romans for their unbelief in God, a truth comprehensible in nature, and their turning to worship of creatures.
Christ, the Son of God, is not arrived at by reason. Rather our worship here is the work of faith. Faith that encompasses the whole person, intellect and sentiment. The latter referenced by Christ and found in the Psalms as assent or love from the heart. What defines loving God in spirit and in truth. Reason awaits to embellish what the gift of grace reveals to the heart of Man. An enlightenment from the ineffable eternal light that is Christ. As such we’re free to assent, or refuse. Love by nature must be freely given and freely received [which is why I say that what saves Fr Patee’s philosophical approach is his faith]. As a truth it is the most absolute in its intelligibility [which is why we believe and are saved or disbelieve and condemned], because it coheres perfectly, once assent is proffered with faith and reason.
Thank you, Father, for your clarifications. They are refreshing. Father, you wrote: “Apprehension of existence beyond self is absolute knowledge, knowledge retained by the intellect as first principle of all knowledge” which “doesn’t refer to the content of what we first apprehend, rather to that which the intellect infers from it.” At this point, we could enter into a discussion about the role of Saint Augustine’s “divine illumination” in human knowledge as represented, say, by St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, but I’d like to go another direction. Yes, the content from which the intellect infers even existence itself is the First Principle of all things, namely, God. This is what has been seriously weakened in our day. The notion of “existence beyond self,” which is so refreshing and broadening, is what can no longer be understood as evident in human knowing today because it has been obscured. In the midst of a crisis of faith, therefore, many persons can be left, especially among the young, imprisoned in themselves. What I have found, however, is that a revival of faith can help restore a person to “existence beyond self” through the revelation of Christ as “Other-than-me” in fact and in faith. As such, faith can help rebuild (heal) reason from the inside by restoring it to the First Principles from which “existence beyond self” can securely be inferred and known. Academically we can agree that things like God’s existence can be inferred and known from reason alone unaided by faith but in our day, when obscurity is in play as regards First Principles in human reason, faith remains a path by which reason itself can be healed even as we gain salvation through it.
Yes. Well put Fr Pattee.
Philosophers are quite correct in finally admitting God of infinity cannot be known by the finite intellect. However, they are ignorant of the only way God can be known, via the greatest commandment of loving God in totallity with all that we are, which is Western mysticism, and quite apart from Eastern mysticism which lacks that centrality of love. This is a failure not only of philosophers but most churchmen who are silent out of ignorance in teaching flocks how to positively experience God, which experience they lack, and this lack is what is decimating church attendance, as seekers come but find no teachers and no answers to that deepest yearning.
The principal concept of faith is that God is not an idiot and can not be an idiot. Therefore, it is impossible for God to lie to us. Therefore, it is impossible for truths of how we ought to order our lives together to change, the idiots in the church who subscribe to process theology notwithstanding.
The current misconception involves a few slippery steps…
The FIRST step is the insight that while conceptual truth is definitive, it is not exhaustive. The SECOND step is the harmonized Fiducia Supplicans dropping onto the synodal path–except that any such new vistas still must not be mutant. That is, new vistas cannot contradict what has been received from the beginning. So, the THIRD step is to slide sideways, separating pedestrian practice from formal doctrine. As if personal morality can be disconnected from faith in the incarnate person of Jesus Christ.
So, it’s a carnival shell game! A sleight-of-hand that doesn’t formally contradict.
And then, overlaid by Cardinal Hollerich (cited above) is his epiphany that a truth can walk both sides of the street, that it can be both black and white. The non-demonstrable first principle of non-contradiction is sidelined. Discernment of real contradictions is a culture-bound hangup. And, Cardinal Grech echoes his consent! Coherent intelligence is trivialized as unwarranted “uniformity of thought.” Instead, a “rainbow Church.”
A “rainbow?” What, then, about the “special case” continents overlooked by synodality?
Not only Black Africa, but white Antarctica! Millions of unheard, black-and-white Emperor Penguins also “walking together!” And, their harmonized droppings leave a path verified by the most modern overhead satellites…The Emperor wears no cloths!
Kant has one of his works on the Index of Prohibited Books. He isn’t reliable and his heresy/heresies have been revealed. Duty isn’t the essence of morality, charity is.