Yet the phenomenologist theologians of the first half of the 20th Century cooked up their notions while worshipping with that very Mass. It may be the Mass of "so many Saints," but it is also the Mass that Karl Rahner and Yves Congar celebrated while they wrote their most important works.
The seminarians of the past 40+ years have been literally deluged with the phenomenological thinking that pervades the Conciliar documents and the writings of John Paul II. These will be the priests who will deliver the sermons at these wide-use Indult Masses.
It is important to understand that at Vatican II, Phenomenology replaced Scholasticism as the "thought of the Church." I advise everyone to read the works of Fr. John F. Kobler, C.Ss.R. on the subject.
The basis of Phenomenology is to look at a familiar thing "in a new way."
Take, for instance the notion of the Church as the "People of God." Of course, taken by itself, "God's people" is a perfectly legitimate term, used by Scripture, the Fathers, and the Doctors. But the phenomenologists can tweak it to mean their new vision of the Church.
One of the forerunners of Vatican II, Dominic Koster, O.P., specifically proposed in 1940 that "the People of God" displace "the Kingdom of Christ" and "the Mystical Body of Christ" as the principle way of understanding the Church. The latter two concepts are "too triumphal" and "too otherworldly."
"The People of God" connotes a Heideggerian People-In-This-World who work together, animated by the same Holy Spirit (see Congar) to live the Social Gospel message of helping the poor and working for peace and justice, as a "light to the nations."
While that paradigm of the Church is certainly assisted by the "horizontal" Novus Ordo, it can certainly be furthered by use of the "vertical" Traditional Mass -- especially when the TLM is merely an "indulgence."
I would not be so concerned if this were something from outside the Church. But when each one takes as his mission to criticize everything, when each one sets out to rewrite dogma and morality according to his own wishes, the Church disintegrates. When the center of unity becomes the target of the most impassioned attacks, each one feeling that he has the right to criticize the successor of Peter before the whole world on any point whatsoever, the Church herself is therefore wounded. Those who take this liberty do not fully realize what they are doing. Regardless of what pretext they may invoke, however, they are turning their backs on the gospel of Christ, and they scandalize, in the fullest sense of the word, many of their brethren.
Whether they wish to or not, they encourage the formation of small groups whose sectarian pretensions are equalled only by the poverty of their spirituality. The weakening of faith is coupled with the decomposition of the Christian community. They insult all those who hold on to what their faith requires of them as Christians. Inasmuch as it depends on them, they ruin the Church. A Church in which this form of disorder exists and where such morals are accepted is doomed.
*Yeah, the truth of what you demean has nothing to do with the Good News.
And when the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the seat of his majesty. And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in:
Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee? And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.
Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink. I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you covered me not: sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. Then they also shall answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee? Then he shall answer them, saying: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me. And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting
Thomas Aquinas College Lecture
Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D.
Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. Fr. Sokolowski came to the College as part of the E.L. Wiegand Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Program, which was established to bring distinguished educators to Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College. Following is abridged from a lecture he gave at the College on March 26, 1999.
I'd like to begin with a rather confrontational claim: That phenomenology can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science. Phenomenology, in its classical form, understands the human mind as ordered towards truth, and this is the understanding of the mind that prevailed in classical thinking. Phenomenology develops this understanding through its doctrines of intentionality and evidence but with a consideration of modern problems. This revival of classical thinking is both desirable and important. In spite of the many advantages the modern age has brought us over the past 500 years, it has also contributed to a kind of undermining of our human self-understanding and a skepticism about our ability to know both ourselves and the world in which we live. I think phenomenology can provide an alternative to both the modern and the post-modern predicament because it provides a new understanding of mind as ordered towards truth.
Phenomenology began with the work of Edmund Husserl, whose first major work appeared about 100 years ago in Germany. While other phenomenologists came along after him (such as Heidegger, Scheler, and Sartre), I want to concentrate on him because I think the strengths of phenomenology are found more in him than in the others. He was able to overcome the problem that has plagued philosophy throughout the modern age: The isolation of thinking from being. Sometimes we call that "the egocentric predicament" - the problem of claiming to know only ourselves.
Husserl said that the discovery of intentionality is the central move that establishes the phenomenological movement. He claimed that consciousness is intentional, that is, it is always conscious of something. When we know, we don't just know our own ideas; we know something other than ourselves. This looks like a trivial remark but it contradicts the modern notion that the mind is immediately aware of only itself and of events that occur in itself.
henomenology claims that consciousness and the mind are presentational - they let things become present to us - and not just things like chairs and tables and walls and ceilings, but things like past memories and groups and art and judgments and numbers and mathematical equations. These things are not simply constructs that the mind builds up on the basis of impressions or ideas given to it. The mind is made public; it is with other things and not just with itself. Phenomenology describes these different forms of presentation.
Perhaps Husserl's greatest contribution to philosophy is his treatment of the theme of absence. He gives absence a kind of reality. He shows that all presences are accompanied by absences; all presentation is accompanied by intending something that is not present. This counters the modernists who assert that mind only knows itself.
Husserl says whenever we perceive an object there is a mix in it of parts that are present and parts that are absent. If one side is given to us, we always cointend the other sides. The presence of an object involves both presence and absence. It also involves sequence. As one aspect comes into presence, the other one slides into absence.
Now there can be different kinds of absence. Consider how when a sentence is beginning we already anticipate the end, even though it's not there yet, and how we're all waiting for the period of the sentence because the meaning isn't clear until that period is reached. And when we come to the end, the beginning has already been gone for some time. It is in this unusual mixture of presence and absence which stretches through time that the identity of the sentence is recognized. Also, a sentence may be given to us even though its meaning is absent, when we don't "get it." The same can be true when we see a painting, say of Matisse. It is physically present to us but it may be aesthetically absent. The painting comes to life when we finally "get it." We see that all of these distortions are actually a part of a pattern that makes sense.
Consider situations where we can turn our minds to something entirely absent to us. We can talk about the Empire State Building and intend that building in its absence. We might do this through words, but we might also do it through imagination and memory. We can stretch our minds towards things that are far away or past or future. What is absent is meant in its absence. In fact, its absence can be palpable, indeed, even sorrowful, if it is something we deeply regret, or is the absence of someone we love, for example. And we do not have to account for absence by appealing to a present representative of the thing that we are aware of. The mind ranges over the absent as well as the present. And "being" includes absence as well as presence.
Consider how fiction is different as a kind of absence, even from history. Fiction projects a world that never existed at all. Or consider the definitive absence of someone who has just died. This absence is conclusive; it is different from someone going far away. Or consider the absence we have in a picture. A man might have a picture of his wife and children in his office. But it is not the same thing as just putting their names there. Their names impose a different kind of absence. The picture draws the presence of the person there in a way the name does not. Finally, consider absence in theological issues. The absence of God allows the Incarnation to take place. Only because God is so different from the world can He become man.
Another aspect of phenomenology is the theme of identity. Normally in classical philosophy, identity was treated as the permanence of an object through time or the permanence of an object through changes. But there's another aspect to identity that comes out in the presence and absence theme because an object is the same in its absence and in its presence. If we intend the Empire State Building and then go see it, it has the same identity we intended, first absently and now in its presence.
Once I went to see a golf tournament when Jack Nicklaus was playing. I had never seen him play, but I had read about him. That's one kind of absence. I saw his picture in the newspaper. That's another kind of intending of Nicklaus. And then I went to the tournament, and I saw leader boards with the names of the players, including that of Nicklaus. So there I had another intending of him. Then I saw his famous caddy, and that was a kind of associative intending of him. Finally, I saw Nicklaus. I identified him, but I had been intending him in his same identity even when I didn't see him. I'm sure I was the only guy at the tournament thinking of identity this way!
Phenomenology also concerns personal identity - identification of the self or the ego. Our own identity is especially involved with presentation, since what lets us be human beings is most fundamentally being rational animals. We are what we are because things appear to us and because we can let them appear. We identify things, but we are identified also; we are "identified identifiers."
Now Husserl uses several very interesting techniques to bring out what personal identity is. One such example is the theme of memory and imagination which are similar to one another. He argues strongly against the idea that in memory or imagination what we have is an internal picture that tells us about something past or something non-existent. We tend to think of memory and imagination working like a little movie screen in which we look at images of something past. But he rejects that understanding. In memory or imagination we have a displacement of the self. We double ourselves, as it were.
If I'm daydreaming about something I did yesterday, I am now doubled into the one who was doing what I did yesterday. My identity is not found primarily in my present self. It's found in between myself now and myself then. We have this duality within our own selves. We carry around our past and our future. We live not only in our immediate surroundings, but in the absence of the future and the past, and we see ourselves in that future and past. Indeed, sometimes the memory is so powerful and intrusive that it won't remain past. It becomes present constantly, and that's known as a kind of psychological difficulty. Overcoming that problem essentially involves distinguishing between one's present self and one's past self. And one's identity is the identity that occurs between those two.
Following another level of personal identity, we can sympathize with another person and yet know that the other person is always irreducible to us. Wouldn't it be scary to have someone else's memory come up inside of you? Isn't it odd how when we see somebody we haven't seen for 10 or 15 years that we think of them as somehow alien because we realize they have so many memories that we never shared with them?
Also, the way we are in our body is distinctive. So are the ways in which our various senses work - how touch is reciprocal. When you use your hand to rub your elbow you sort of think through your hand; but if your elbow started the rubbing, then you sort of think through it instead. There's a kind of reversibility of your own thinking within your own body because of the extendedness of your own consciousness and reason. Think about how reason is embodied in the human body - how the self expresses itself through voice; how sign language is conveyed and how it expresses emphasis in lieu of modulation.
Finally, there are many other ways in which phenomenology can be fruitful. Consider the play of presence and absence in friendship or hostility, or the patterns that occur in gratitude and in envy. Consider the sequences that take place when we redefine a personal relationship, when we are the same and yet not the same, after a particularly disruptive event in our lives. How is a writer present in the words written? How is a footprint or a flag there for us except as still new forms of presence and absence? These analyses will shed light on what it is to be human and in doing so revive the most classical form of philosophy.
Phenomenology is not just a local dialect in the human conversation, nor a temporary amusement, but part of the philosophical conversation that has been with us since reason first became aware of itself in the great thinkers of ancient Greece
*What? Is it possisble that actual good can be attributed to the work of ther most recent Ecumenical Council? Is it possible that actual good can be atributed to the work of Johannes Paulus Magnus? Well, by gosh by golly, it appears one actually can.
We better keep this quiet. We better keep this to ourselves.
Not speaking ill of an Ecumenical Council, not speaking evil of Johannes Paulus Magnus might signify you are a modernist heretical masonic judaiser.
Interesting observation, and it may be true. I will read Kobler's book. Have your read Fr. Jonathon Robinson's book on recovering the liturgy, The Mass and Modernity? It's excellent and he touches on this, although he, like the Pope in his address at Regensburg, locates the changinging philosophical conception much further back.
The question as to why Vatican II and its abuses were the product of people who grew up and were nourished under the old system is not really that hard to answer. Looking back, I would say that there was an undercurrent of rebellion and revisionism in the Church which had not been thoroughly dealt with during the attempts to stamp out the Modernist heresy at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th centuries. Those people had simply learned to go underground and stay below the radar. All Vatican II did was clear away any administrative and doctrinal obstacles, and let them emerge into the light of day. In fact, by destroying or removing the old liturgy and many of the external practices of the past that had served to keep Catholics faithful and remind them of tradition, it not only promoted this group but deprived their opponents of their traditional support and points of reference. I think that was why it was so important to the Vatican II folks to get rid of the Old Mass, even though Vatican II did not, initially, call for this.
Incidentally, I am not saying that the initial idea of Vatican II was bad (although it's hard to say exactly what Pope John XXIII had in mind). It could have gone either way: that is, the buried modernism could have been brought to the fore and confronted openly, not by relying on ham-fisted suppression and oaths of obedience that their takers must have snickered at even as they took them, but by a revived and reinvigorated understanding of tradition and a restatement of the traditional philosophical underpinnings of the Church (of which Thomism is simply one statement, since he did not break with the past, either). Catholic thinking did need a fresh look, and there was certainly room for analysis and reexpression.
However, this did not happen; instead, the very people who needed to be confronted ran up and took command. But I think that the liturgy is key to this, because if it had not changed so drastically, there would still have been a sort of fortress for orthodoxy to defend. As it was, there appeared to be nothing and people who were orthodox found themselves on a windswept plain, subject to attacks from all sides.
"light to the nations"
This is bad how? It is exactly how Simeon greated Our Infant Lord.