Faking History

Christian Order ^ | November 2004 | Editor

[Land of the Irish]

As Hans Küng declared: "… the motto of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – have come to play a singular role in the Council’s texts." Which is cause for rejoicing according to religious commentator Henri Fesquet, who wrote: "This liberation of Catholic thinking, long a prisoner of the negative current of the Counter-Reformation, somehow permitted it to work together with the trilogy of the French Revolution, which turned around the secular world before it was taken up by Catholicism, which had long deformed it. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’: this glorious motto was, after all, that of Vatican II."

[Land of the Irish]

Ping

[escapefromboston]

ping

[derheimwill]

I disagree with the secular humanists for all the reasons you mentioned. I disagree with Rome for what I believe to be its' errant Mariology and Christology and for its errant doctrines concerning Purgatory, Sanctification, Transsubstantiation and a host of other things totally unrelated to revisionist accounts. You seem to be implying, however, that, since Secular Humanism is of the devil, that its' enemies must be of God.

[dsc]

"I disagree with Rome for what I believe to be its' errant Mariology and Christology and for its errant doctrines concerning Purgatory, Sanctification, Transsubstantiation and a host of other things"

The essence of protestantism is rejecting the spiritual wealth of the Church.

[dsc]

...
more interested in the creature comforts of episcopal office than finding out what is really going on beyond the narrow confines of their cosy liberal enclaves;

content to swagger about having their boots licked and being told what they want to hear;

contemptuous of Catholic truth, law and tradition;
untrustworthy and lacking all self-awareness;

wedded to their socio-political standing as ‘reasonable men’ who favour realpolitik over stubborn moral principle;
utterly devoid of courage and leadership;

more at home with the homosexual lobby than the Latin Mass;

illiberal and bullying towards priests who won’t toe the liberal party line;

increasingly despised by laity sickened by all the duplicity, the systematic deceit and wanton waste of their money on the sort of heretical and scandalous activities mentioned herein.

Vapid and deluded, gaily unpacking the foundations of the Faith laid by the Catholic giants who went before them, these Modernist pygmies are able to manipulate past and present realities to suit and vindicate themselves...

Gee, does that sound like anybody we know?

[derheimwill]

The essence of protestantism is rejecting the spiritual wealth of the Church.

Most of the Catholic doctrines I reject did not exist in the first millenium. They were inserted later, starting in ernest with Gregory.

Christ dispenses salvation, not the church burocracy. Catholics and Protestants both tend to confuse the bride and the bridegown. That's just part of materialism.

[DBeers]

Christ dispenses salvation, not the church burocracy.

I think you are confused in debating either or on something that does not occur. Salvation is not dispensed -salvation if obtained is obtained by grace -coming closer to God through Jesus Christ's teachings; not the concept of Jesus -the teachings of Jesus. So, how does one gain understanding in and obediently embrace these teachings -osmosis?

[dsc]

"Most of the Catholic doctrines I reject did not exist in the first millenium."

Someday someone is going to hit me with an argument against Catholicism that is not grounded in factual error.

Someday...but not, apparently, today.

All the doctrines you named in your previous note existed well before the second millennium. Whatever source told you differently is in error.

While the doctrine of purgatory was first formalized in 1013, the Council of Trent (Sess. XXV) noted, "Whereas the Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Ghost, has from the Sacred Scriptures and the ancient tradition of the Fathers taught in Councils and very recently in this Ecumenical synod (Sess. VI, cap. XXX; Sess. XXII cap.ii, iii) that there is a purgatory..." (Denzinger, "Enchiridon", 983).

The "ancient tradition of the fathers" takes us back to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries.

It is also worth noting about purgatory that, "At the beginning of the Reformation there was some hesitation especially on Luther's part (Leipzig Disputation) as to whether the doctrine should be retained, but as the breach widened, the denial of purgatory by the Reformers became universal, and Calvin termed the Catholic position "exitiale commentum quod crucem Christi evacuat . . . quod fidem nostram labefacit et evertit" (Institutiones, lib. III, cap. v, 6). Modern Protestants, while they avoid the name purgatory, frequently teach the doctrine of "the middle state," and Martensen ("Christian Dogmatics," Edinburgh, 1890, p. 457) writes: "As no soul leaves this present existence in a fully complete and prepared state, we must suppose that there is an intermediate state, a realm of progressive development, (?) in which souls are prepared for the final judgment" (Farrar, "Mercy and Judgment," London, 1881, cap. iii)."

"Christ dispenses salvation, not the church burocracy."

Why would you bother to make that argument? The Catholic Church has never taught that salvation comes from any source other than Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

[derheimwill]

'Dispence' is not the very best word. My point, though, was that Christ, himself, personally saves us. The power to save lies in Him. The church is more of a mechanism, albeit a necessary one. To say that the Church, or the Sacraments, saves us is like saying that my car gets me where I'm going. We understand what is meant by those words but, they are imprecise.

If you want to continue this discussion, it'll have to wait. It's way past my bedtime:)
Good night and God bless!

[swmobuffalo]

The "ancient tradition of the fathers" takes us back to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries.


Care to elaborate?

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP - Survive

[dsc]

"Appeals to the Fathers are a subdivision of appeals to tradition. In the first half of the second century begin the appeals to the sub-Apostolic age: Papias appeals to the presbyters, and through them to the Apostles. Half a century later St. Irenaeus supplements this method by an appeal to the tradition handed down in every Church by the succession of its bishops (Adv. Haer., III, i-iii), and Tertullian clinches this argument by the observation that as all the Churches agree, their tradition is secure, for they could not all have strayed by chance into the same error (Praescr., xxviii)."

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06001a.htm

[derheimwill]

I wasn't arguing against Catholicism. I was making the point that many "in the pews" of all traditions tend to seek salvation from the ceremony, instead of in the Person, Jesus Christ. Furthermore, where a misunderstanding of doctrine may be involved in such behaviour, it finds its' root in Materialism, which is pre-dates Humanism (the subject of the article).
Relax, it's 2005.

[livius]

Curiously, one of the problems we face now is that we have a heirarchy which itself has abandoned obedience (or perhaps, in the new Church of Fuzzy Theology, can be claiming to obey some new set of vague teachings), but invokes it to crush traditionalists and push through its latest Modernist ideas.

Lay Catholics used to be very obedient to their pastors and Church teaching, which was the reason we had a high birth rate, high church attendance rate, etc. But the obedience we had been trained to was used against us when the shepherds went astray, and all of a sudden we found ourselves following them out of the Faith.

No one has the obligation to obey someone who is in error simply because that someone is a bishop or a priest. Yet we are living in strange times, when more are in error than not, and members of the flock are forced to pick which shepherds they will follow, hoping that the Holy Spirit will guide them to the right choice. Even Rome seems to wobble and offer a multitude of messages, from which we have to determine the one that is closest to what we recall of the Truth.

I think order has been undone by heterodoxy and sin, and I think its restoration is going to be very, very difficult, because the acceptance of order also requires trust. And who among these dubious shepherds can you trust?

[Kolokotronis]

"I was making the point that many "in the pews" of all traditions tend to seek salvation from the ceremony, instead of in the Person, Jesus Christ."

Please allow me to put forward what may be a somewhat different view of this discussion than you two may be presenting, though I think it may be closer to yours, dsc, than to yours, derheimwill.

Two questions arise. First, what exactly is "salvation" and second, how is that salvation attained. My limited understanding of Protestant theology on salvation is that it is a one time event which occurs at a discrete point during the life of a Christian and there is nothing in particular that one can do to merit this salvation. Once saved by grace, the Christian will necessarily conform his or her behavior to the dictates of Christ and upon death, will be with God in some fashion. In Eastern Christianity, the Orthodox Church and those Eastern Churches in communion with Rome teach that salvation is a process called "theosis", becoming like God. This process is graphically illustrated by an icon called "The Ladder of Divine Ascent". The Ladder is a metaphorical representation of Christ who was prefigured by Jacob's Ladder, among other prefigurings in the OT. Ascending the Ladder (like St. Paul's running the race)involves increasingly dying to the self and focusing the soul on God until the soul becomes completely assumed by God. As the Christian dies to the self, the soul becomes ever more receptive to God's grace and it is that grace that allows progress "up the Ladder". As the icon demonstrates, the minions of the Evil One are constantly at work trying to get us to at least fall back a few rungs, at best to fall off the Ladder and into the Pit. The Father, through His Son and the Holy Spirit and His angels and Saints urge us on and "help" withstand the wiles of the demons. The goal, of course, is to be at one with God. How is this accomplished? The Eastern Fathers taught that we are a liturgical people, indeed the Greek word "liturgia" means "work of the people". We live out our lives and most of us work out our theosis within a Eucharistic Community which is where Christ promises us He will always be. This Eucharistic Community is the Church, made up of the people, the clergy and the hierarchy as we are taught by St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was appointed bishop of Antioch by St. Peter and who sat also at the feet of St. John. The Church has provided for us all that is necessary to strengthen us, through grace, in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and in Liturgies and other devotional praxis. In a sense we are in fact "saved" by participation in the "ceremonies" of the Church because these ceremonies, especially the Liturgy, impart to us who pray within the Eucharistic Community the grace we need to progress in theosis. We are also taught by the Fathers that in the Liturgy we enter into the "Life" of heaven and thus gain from our participation a sort of foretaste of the Life to come. Once, a number of years ago, I was down in Greece with my oldest son, who is now grown. One evening we went up to the nuns' monastery on the mountain outside of my mother's family's village to see the nuns. While we were there, a cousin of mine, a nun, asked if we would like to attend Vespers with the sisters. We did. Vespers was prayed in a tiny, freestanding 1000 year old chapel within the walls of the monastery. It was lit only with a few candles and as the nuns chanted, my then 13 year old son whispered to me "Dad, this must be what heaven is like!"

It seems to me that any discussion of the various beliefs which Christian people hold must start with a definition of what we mean by salvation since, of course, that is why Christ came and established His Church. The praxis to attain that salvation is what thereafter defines the very real differences between Protestantism and the teachings of the Churches within the Apostolic Succession.

Make any sense to either of you? Now I'm off to church for a while. By the way, Happy New Year!

[dsc]

Yes, that's pretty much the way I see it.

"It seems to me that any discussion of the various beliefs which Christian people hold must start with a definition of what we mean by salvation since, of course, that is why Christ came and established His Church."

I don't know if there is a moment in this life when one is "saved" in a permanent sense, because there is always the danger of falling into sin and separating yourself from Our Lord.

It seems to me that the goal is to hear Our Lord say, "Yes, this is one of mine." I'm totally unsure what level of effort is sufficient to meet that goal.

That sounds, I know, as though I'm saying we are saved through our own efforts, but that's not what I mean.

Clearly, you can't just say "Lord, Lord" and then go back to your old sinful ways. I think you have to put something into the process -- Ideo firmiter propono de cetero me non peccaturum, peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturm, and all that. Some people call it "cooperating with Grace," but to me it feels more like strenuous effort than cooperation.

Of course, without Grace all our efforts would be futile, but I don't think you can just say, "I'm saved," and stop trying to conform yourself to God's will. As you wrote, it's a continuing process of improvement, "adiuvante gratia tua."

And as I said earlier, I have no idea how much progress one needs to make or how much effort one needs to expend to avoid the torments of Hell.

[royalcello]

Excellent article; thanks for posting.

L'Anglaise et le Duc is one of the few movies I own; I highly recommend it. Here's an article from 2001 describing the controversy referred to above.

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An 'Englishwoman' in Paris sparks a revolution among cinema audiences
By Julian Coman in Paris
(Filed: 16/09/2001)

A DAMNING film portrait of the French Revolution has scandalised audiences more used to tales of Jacobin heroism than images of drunk, stupid and sadistic peasants waving heads on spikes.

The film, released last week and entitled, inaccurately, L'Anglaise et le Duc (The Englishwoman and the Duke), is directed by one of France's best-loved film-makers, Eric Rohmer.

Based on the testimony of Grace Elliot, a young Scottish countess living in Paris during the Terror, it presents a trenchant view of the Revolution as nasty, bloody and anarchic. Until last week, Republican France had never seen anything like it.

As indignant Parisians watched sans-culottes (revolutionary zealots) commit a series of unspeakable atrocities on screen, and bridled at the royalist sympathies of Miss Elliot, film critics began to launch their own revolt.

Within the space of a week, Mr Rohmer's film has been variously described as "revisionist", "heretical", "neo-monarchist" and "counter-revolutionary".

Mr Rohmer has previously been the darling of the French cinema-going public, following successes such as Claire's Knee and The Green Ray. Yet his current unpopularity cannot have surprised him.

In highlighting the horrified reactions of an Anglo-Saxon monarchist as she watches the bloodthirsty Paris mob, Mr Rohmer has thumbed a nose at previous tub-thumping French blockbusters.

Films such as Jean Renoir's classic, La Marseillaise, have depicted the Revolution as a triumph of Jacobin courage over aristocratic arrogance. In French schools, the crimes of the Terror are glossed over as a necessary if unfortunate stage in the birth of the Republic.

Seen through the eyes of Miss Elliot and Mr Rohmer, however, the Jacobins are anything but a collection of virtuous freedom-fighters. Most revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious and sadistic; the majority are stupid, and nearly all are drunk.

Innocents are arrested and executed on a whim; homes are looted and the streets of Paris witness an unceasing parade of heads on spikes.

As Miss Elliot travels through central Paris, she is confronted by an alcohol-fuelled Jacobin who forces the bloody head of an aristocratic friend through the windows of her carriage. Later she weeps as she hears the mob howl with delight at the execution of the king.

In her diary, which forms the basis of the film's script, she remembers the day as "the most horribly sad that I have ever lived. The clouds themselves seemed to be in mourning".

She also charts the decline and fall of her one-time lover, the Duc D'Orleans, the cousin of the king, who voted for his death but then followed him to the scaffold.

Sophie Guichard, film critic for France Soir, said: "How can one not be shocked by this portrait of the typical revolutionary? How can one forget that this period also gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, from which we still benefit? The film lacks all balance."

Mr Rohmer is unapologetic. Claiming that L'Anglaise et le Duc "could have been an awful lot more violent", the director said: "I am showing mass murderers, the pits of society, people who killed for pleasure and under the influence of alcohol. I think Grace Elliot was mostly right about the Revolution - it was the end of a world, of a refined civilisation."

In Paris, cinema audiences are split between royalists and republicans. Sophie Boutin, a teacher, said: "This is a film made by an intellectual who is a Catholic and in all probability a monarchist. It's just a polemic against 1789."

But Jacques Ferney, a 24-year-old language student, disagreed. "It was about time someone looked at the Revolution from a different perspective," he said.

"As we grow up, there is so much pompous rubbish talked in school about how liberty, equality and fraternity arrived in 1789, but no one bothers to remember all the innocent people who were butchered. I think it's a good film."

	L' Anglaise et le Duc - tf1.fr [in French]
	The Englishwoman and the Duke - Upcoming movies.com
	Eric Rohmer - Foreign films.com

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[derheimwill]

- I call progress in the life of a believer "sanctification."
- I see "salvation" as the end goal - the entry into heaven - though this may be a distinction without a difference since "whosoever calls (present continuous) upon the Name of the Lord shall be (future) saved."
- "Point of salvation" is taken to an extreme among many Protestants. However, there comes a point of internalization, when one realizes, aha!, God has specific intentions concerning my life and I have an individual call to respond from the heart.
- "Justification" is what Jesus does when he grants us "the right to be called the Children of God." (not very precise but, I figured I'd include it.)
- Where Protestants disagree with the other branches (not the only place) is in the degree to which the Church, the Saints, etc. can act vicariously on behalf of the individual believer. Catholics and Orthodox disagree about the way in which the Father, the Son, the Liturgy, etc. interact, as well. I personally find much of this to be an argument about words. For example, I don't follow the details of Rome's transsubstantiation, and Protestants disagree on this one as well. But, after having faithfully participated in the Eucharist, we all may say of ourselves "I have partaken of the body of Christ." (I don't want to get off on this in particular. Point is, God does what He does whether we know the right way to describe it or not.)

Your thoughts?

[Kolokotronis]

"Clearly, you can't just say "Lord, Lord" and then go back to your old sinful ways. I think you have to put something into the process -- Ideo firmiter propono de cetero me non peccaturum, peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturm, and all that. Some people call it "cooperating with Grace," but to me it feels more like strenuous effort than cooperation."

The Fathers called this cooperation "syndeesmos", synergy or partnership and it implies a acceptance and action, but this cooperation is initiated by the grace of God. This concept of synergy appears all through the writings of the Fathers. For example, there is said to be a synergy among the hypostasia of the Trinity, a synergy within the Church among the the hierarchy, the clergy and the laity, a synergy within the soul among the nous, or eye of the soul, the logos, or reason and the spirit or love energy and finally a sort of synergy between man and salvic grace. In none of these syndeesmoi is there necessarily any kind of equality present or even implied. In no manner does this concept deny that salvation is from unmerited grace, but what this concept does posit is that by various prayerful practices we can increasingly focus our beings on Christ and thus develop a state of apathia, a state where one is free from the passions, which further opens us to grace and thus progress in theosis.

Is it strenuous? You bet. Its also dangerous. The more one dies to the self, the more the demons, ever more powerful demons, attack. Thomas Merton experienced this; holy monastics contend with this continually. It is also perilous since for most of us, our reach exceeds our grasp, and should we insufficiently prepared approach the uncreated light (as some Western Roman mystics have put it) it can destroy us. For this reason, in both Eastern and Western monasticism, only the most holy, most advanced in theosis of the monks are allowed out to live in a hermitage, and even those, as a general proposition come into or are visited by others from the monastery.

Like you, I have no idea how far up the Ladder we need to go to become like God; to the top I suppose. It has just occurred to me that the way you phrased your final comment fascinates me because it points up a difference in the mindsets of the Church in East and the Church in the West and how completely those mindsets become part of us. You spoke about the amount of effort to avoid the torments of Hell and when I read your comment, I thought of how much effort it takes to become like God. I suspect that that difference in mindset explains many of the practical differences between the Roman and Orthodox Churches, even if the end goal is exactly the same.