We regard Philip Tower's new book of sufficient importance that we are publishing this as a separate supplement

 

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The Catholic Church and the Counter Faith

 

The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith, by Philip Trower. Family Publications,, 6a King Street, Jericho, Oxford OX2 6DF. www.familypublications.co.org] £12. 50

Francis Phillips writes : This book is the eagerly-awaited sequel to Turmoil and Truth (2003). (See review, below) In his earlier volume, Philip Trower provided an acute analysis of what happened within the Church both during and following the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5. Here he explores the root and the branches of the intellectual and spiritual malaise in the West today and how they have affected the Church. After surveying the unrest in the Church from within, he now looks at it from without, as it offers a supernatural alternative to an aggressive secularism.

The main thrust of his argument is that the 18th century Enlightenment has been the root cause of modern man's problems. The Enlightenment, unlike the Romantic period that followed it, was not a passing literary or artistic fashion. In dethroning God and putting man in his place, it was akin to a new world religion. Its core tenets are still with us today: a trusting belief in perpetual progress; a conviction that reason alone can solve all human problems; a tenacious adherence to the notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. As such it is the parent of liberalism, socialism and Communism; although their means differ they share the same goal: the attempt to realise a paradise in this world.

Even as I type this I can recognise the clear-thinking and courage needed to enunciate such a thesis, for so entrenched are the assumptions of the Enlightenment at every level that they seem almost the 'normal' position; to criticise them appears reactionary and to dislodge them folly. Even Catholics are not immune, often thinking that progress, rather than the struggle between good and evil, is the motor driving history. Perhaps this is why a 'sub-creation' such as JRR Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is so popular; it provides an imaginative truth for those hungering for it that is not available elsewhere.

It is also what it makes it so hard to enter the mindset of pre-Enlightenment man, who believed that was answerable to God first; who wrestled against sin; whose behaviour sought to accord with divine as well as human laws; and who looked towards a life after death that would resolve all the sorrowful enigmas of earthly existence. Even the word 'Enlightenment' seems to imply a previous intellectual darkness which has now happily been dispelled by the light of reason and common-sense. Of course, as Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out in his writings, there is no conflict between faith and the right use of reason; it is when reason jettisons faith that a fatal unbalance occurs.

Trower shows that what makes the Enlightenment - and its fruits - so hard to combat from the Church's point of view is that it is a Christian heresy, indeed a "secularised Christianity", with its own "confusing blend of benign and toxic elements." He carefully unpacks the ideas of "liberty, equality, fraternity" - the intoxicating slogan of the French Revolution - in the light of Christian faith and demonstrates how easily they can be perverted when cut adrift from God.

The book's great strength is the author's ability to express complex ideas with brevity and clarity and always to examine them in the light of eternal truth. He writes, as it were, sub specie veritatis, so that the common reader - at whom the book is pitched - is truly enlightened, able to pick his way through the siren songs of all the different intellectual movements of the last 200 years and the personalities behind them. Trower is as conversant with Kierkegaard as with liberation theology, with Nietzsche as with Darwin. He is never overawed by their brilliance or academic standing, employing a dry and gentle wit that conceals a sharply critical acumen: Kierkegaard was "a kind of hot-gospeller for intellectuals"; Nietzsche was "a deranged visionary and soothsayer"; Teilhard de Chardin, whose star has now waned, was simply "a visionary". He is especially good on the weaknesses of Darwin, who "made it possible for men who do not want to believe in God to believe the impossible…namely, that things can make themselves." As with his earlier volume, the footnotes and ironic asides are both entertaining and instructive.

If my synopsis suggests over-simplification of a large and complex field, this reviewer is at fault. Trower, like the historian Paul Johnson, is an erudite general man of letters. In an age of over-specialisation it can appear an amateur position; in fact Trower is a civilised man par excellence - shaped by his faith and the "civilisation of love" (to quote Pope Paul VI's fine phrase) - and thus discerning about all other ersatz civilisations. In his self-deprecating way he describes his genre of writing as haute vulgarisation. What this means is that for those of us who have neither the leisure nor the ability to make wise judgements about the movements that follow one another on the world's stage, Trower makes an admirable guide, pointing out the pitfalls and always helping us to higher ground.

After analysing the 19th century freethinkers' response to the 18th century's "transference of power from God to Demos", he concentrates on 20th figures such as Freud, Jung, Buber, Karl Barth and Heidegger, whose negative influence from outside the Church is examined alongside one of the most influential writers within the Church: Karl Rahner. Rahner gets three chapters to himself - an indication of his baneful influence. As always the author is concerned to demonstrate how ideas that can seem innocent in themselves such as Martin Buber's emphasis on community, can, when divorced from objective truth, lead to error. Such error, taken up enthusiastically by Catholic intellectuals, gradually infiltrates the parish pew leading to the notion that the "community" at Mass takes precedence over the celebration of the liturgy.

On the question of the liturgy, Trower is balanced and fair, describing the abuses of the New Rite while recognising that traditionalists have often ignored or not known about the important liturgical scholarship of Romano Guardini, Pius Parsch, Jungmann or Louis Bouyer. "The use of the vernacular would have been an unmixed blessing if it had not been so total", he observes.

This fine book, at 300 pages a superb summary of the bad fruits of the Enlightenment, is essentially a clarion call to Catholics to educate themselves so that they can give reasons for their faith in the face of the sophisticated rationalism surrounding them. "Atheism is an act of unreason", declares Trower. I recall in my student years being struck dumb in the presence of a dandified don, propping himself up against a pub bar and explaining to me with weary courtesy that now he was an adult he did not need a "Daddy in the sky" any more. This embarrassing memory prompts me to suggest that this book be purchased by every diocesan school education committee for use in Catholic VI forms by those intending to go on to higher education. Alongside Mgr Alfred Gilbey's beautiful compendium of the faith, We Believe, it would provide an excellent preparation for the flawed thinking of the fashionable gurus young Catholics will encounter at university and elsewhere.

Philip Trower's final challenge is "Can the Church save the West from the results of the Enlightenment?" He believes that the liberal democracies under which we are currently governed are destined to decline. For too long they have been living off the patrimony of Christianity while inhabiting a post-Christian milieu. "How do you govern a nation where the majority of the citizens are at least practical atheists?" he asks. It remains a haunting question.

 

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The following review by Frank Morris was published

in The Wanderer, January 2007

 

 

'Trower's New Book Is A Masterpiece Of 'Philosophical Detecting'.

'With a just-published sequel to his 2003 book titled Turmoil & Truth; The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press/Family Publications: 2003). British scholar Philip Trower has completed a study of how and why the Church founded by Christ has been affected by the modern world's plunge into secular disbelief. The second book is more pointedly titled than his first - The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith: A Study of the Roots of Modern Secularism, Relativism, and de-Christianisation (Family Publications, 6a King St., Oxford, UK 0X2 6DF, 2006). Together, the two works establish Trower as among the most keen analysts of what the author, quoting from Pope Paul VI's closing talk to the Second Vatican Council. calls the encounter of "the religion of God made man" with another faith conceived by the Enlightenment, "the religion of man aspiring to be God" (Aufklärung was the 18th century German term.)

As the title suggests, the second book 'zooms in" more closely and pointedly than the first on specific events and their consequences, and on personalities, a few still in our midst. It is somewhat of a detective, or "crime," story, where the suspects are identified and brought to indictment. In doing this, Trower has recognized and fulfilled what has often in Church history been the duty of the informed and loyal Catholic, including the lay person. And doing so is fully conciliar, well in keeping with Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's document of religious liberty.

When reading this excellent work that is both objective in scholarship and reasoning and yet apologetic regarding the faith, there came to mind G.K. Chesterton's very early allegorical fiction published 99 years ago - The Man Who Was Thursday. In that book we meet a policeman who is involved in "philosophic detecting." He explains, "We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime." In The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith, I find Trower to be performing just such a course of detection. He sometimes seems to be saying, and for good reason, just what this philosophic detective Chesterton did: "We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosophers."

It was the Enlightenment that Trower comes to almost immediately in his detecting role:

Unfortunately: there is much that is dismaying uncovered in Trower's investigation:

"Many of the western faithful of all kinds and degrees are now children of the Enlightenment first and Catholics second. They think in categories of the Enlightenment, make its priorities their own, and see progress, rather than the struggle between good and evil and the salvation of souls, as the central theme of human history'. (p. 34).

Against this the author cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church's forthright insistence, that "the Church is the goal of all things" (p. 34, footnote 17). He also points to St. Benedict's courage and perseverance in sowing seeds of a new civilization even when civilization itself was collapsing around him. Trower asks: "What comparable motive for courage and perseverance can atheism offer in the face of history's inevitable setbacks and tragedies?" (p. 35).

Another citation in that page's footnote 18 is to Fr. Frederick Copleston, SJ, who wrote in his memoirs that nowhere in the Gospels is Christ found to have had to advise "that if His followers encountered difficulties or opposition they should set to work revising His teaching and adapting it to the spirit of the age."

Trower finds Jean-Jacques Rousseau rapidly undermining the meaning of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. "The only relationship that mattered for Rosseau was a legal one (the 'social contract'). Men agree to give up some of their liberty for the advantage of communal living." Darwin further undermined human brotherhood by abolishing our first parents and making the behavior of Cain toward Abel the model for human advancement.

Trower also questions the Enlightenment thinking of the late Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ, who "seems to have believed' that the government or state can be "religiously or philosophically totally neutral." Trower comments:

The author looks at the blows delivered to the philosophia perennis of the great medieval thinkers, especially Aquinas, by the modern world's philosophic doctors. Descartes' "systematic doubt" called into question all realities outside the human mind. Locke gave modern science its empirical conviction that only what can be touched or seen can be the object of certain knowledge.

There is no time to transmit Trower's considerable analysis of existentialism and personalism, important as it is. But his conclusion should not be overlooked:

He also sees in the stress on feeling and experience that has followed upon the rise of existentialism an explanation for much of today's widespread dissent from doctrine:

Trower sums up well for us the limitations of existentialism that have so badly eroded the trust in learning reality as it truly exists from the philosophia perennis:

Personalism, Trower warns, offers the idea that 'people are not fully human to start with but become so ... through having a Thou to enter into relationship with." It follows that relationships are more important than persons: "Encounters and relationships are treated as goods and ends in themselves and given the kind of substantiality usually associated with concrete things." As a footnote to that, Trower points to the many parishes where "generating a feeling of community has supplanted the worship of God. The worship of God is being made to serve a purely pastoral purpose" (p. 109, footnote 86).

Trower notes that in the personalism of Max Scheler (1879-1928), personhood "grows and shrinks in keeping with response to religious experience." This leads to a philosophy of values. This can subjectivize the good on the basis of how the individual judges and chooses certain "'values." Good is determined by how and what it is that appears to us rather than what is in itself good.

A variety of these ideas is phenomenology, something held to by Pope John Paul II and the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand. Phenomenology gives special stress to feelings and emotions - with the "heart" as man's deepest center for interaction of human faculties. Trower points out, however, that the late Pontiff insisted, in Veritatis Splendor "that freedom ceases to be true freedom when it is not linked to knowledge of the truth."
But Trower hints that the great Pope's resistance to subjectivism may have come too late to undo the damage set loose by an all-out assault upon the philosophia perennis, which aims at supplanting it with subjectivism and relativism. The successful subversion of theology by those errors is evident, and only time will show how irremediable that catastrophe might be.

The Catholic Church's encounter with a dangerous religious rival calling itself Catholic in the second half of the 20th century is the defining burden of Philip Trower's latest work. Trower does an admirable job of bringing down to realistic size the major figures of that counter-faith, overblown into gigantic stature by their liberal admirers.

The late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. SJ, is among the most prominent of these self-anointed revelationists. Trower deftly peels away much of the Teilhardian mystique woven for him by wide-eyed addicts of philosophic and theological novelty. When much of what he said is read objectively and realistically it is obvious this Jesuit was consciously involved in myth-making at odds with both tradition that reveals the Church's experience of Revelation and Tradition with a capital T that is that Revelation itself.

Teilhard did not hesitate to proclaim just what he was about. In the following idea Teilhard comes as close to anyone has since the days of classical paganism to reducing Christ to an Olympian deity stumbling along His way, subject to forces that are beyond His control:

"What increasingly dominates my interests is the effort to establish within myself and diffuse around me, a new religion (call it a better Christianity if you like) where the personal God ceases to be the great neolithic proprietor of the past to become Soul of the World which the stage we have reached religiously and culturally calls for" (quoted by Trower on p. 145 from a letter written by Teilhard to his cousin Leontine Zanta).

This makes dear that Christ, both as Son of Man and Son of God, and His heavenly Father are subject to mindless forces of change at work in the universe. Trower (p. 149) cites critic Wolfgang Smith's conclusion about the Jesuit's thoughts along these lines:

Trower explains how Teilhard beat an easy path for liberalism's current understandings of Catholic progressivism:

Trower's perception of the baleful influence on thought from liberal Catholic gurus is helpful in understanding the complacency of too many of the faithful as their children received doses of modernist theories. In the area of psychology the Catholic understanding of spirituality was all but dissipated by Jungian (Carl Jung, 1874-1960) emphasis on "gnostic 'wisdom,' sexual freedom, eastern mysticism, pantheism, goddess worship, and accommodation with evil" (p. 173, citing Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, in The Wanderer, July 27, 1995).

Readers may find for themselves the means by which thought destructive of traditional Catholic understandings invaded Catholic education, practice, and disciplines such as chastity. All in all it is the sad story of the Enlightenment's victory, temporal and temporary as it may be, over Catholic insistence on a goal for human fulfillment in a Kingdom not of this world.

As a climax to this latest study of what happened to the Catholic faith in the wake of Vatican 11, Trower cites the Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) and his influence on such Catholic -reformers" as Fr. Hans Kung and Fr. Karl Rahner, SJ. (Barth was a major influence for the conclusion of those such as Küng, for example, that what Catholic Tradition has always considered miraculous were actually what Barth called wunders - "signs" entering people's minds independently of the continuum of historical events. These came in "neo-orthodoxy" to be called 'faith events', - Soon new catechisms for Catholic use were calling the Resurrection and the Ascension "faith events', meaning they didn't happen as visible, tangible realities, but as entering the minds of the faithful, who in effect believe them into existence.

Theologians like Küng and Rahner were. happy to accept Barth's finding theologians, rather than the Church itself, providing the key to how to understand the Word involved in scriptural Revelation. Barth called the witnesses to both Old and New Testaments "theologians,- which meant they took the "risk" of taking Scripture as a "working hypothesis." Thus, we cannot safely accept teaching from "ecclesiastical antiquity" since today's theology seldom agrees with it. Trower points out that Barth himself compared theology to a bird in flight, 'changing shape as it goes' (p. 222). Trower also points out that Barthian views on theology and the role of theologians have "provided Catholic theologians with precisely the arguments they needed in their attempts to raise themselves to positions of authority on a level with that of bishops' (p. 227).

It is Fr. Rahner that Trower gives particular attention as exemplifying the influence of all these tides of thought bringing into today's Church a "counter-faith."

Further, Trower points out he illustrates "better than any other figure of the conciliar period" the Catholic scholars "who fall in love with their special subject and start subordinating the faith to it."

Trower suggests that in Rahner's "ascendancy Christology" and its explanation of the Incarnation "Christ is the climax of God's efforts to produce a creature capable of responding adequately to his self-communication when he sets the evolutionary process going.... In Christ, evolution produces the first man whose 'Yes' to God was total, and in reply God said 'Yes' to mankind as a whole."

This all means, of course, that the Second Person of the Trinity wasn't a pre-existing divine being who came down to earth, becoming man. Rather, the Incarnation is the start of a process that will find climax in man's full transcendence into God by means of God's self-communication (quote from Foundations of Christian Faith, wherein Rahner posits, "It is of the intrinsic nature of matter to develop towards spirit").

Trower quotes (p. 244) from 30 Days (October 1992, p. 50) Rahner, in a letter sent at the Second Vatican Council's beginning:

Trower turns to Msgr. Theobold Beer, writing in the international monthly 30 Days in 1992 and 1993, to explain just what Rahner's "ascendancy Christology" did offer:

"If Msgr. Beer is right, for Rahner, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not persons in the Church's sense. They did not exist with the Father from all eternity. They are functions of God, or 'modes of subsistence' which only come into operation as He begins to create or 'objectify' Himself. Rahner, says Msgr. Beer 'does not accept as having a biblical foundation, the personhood, distinct from the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit.' He 'seeks a God for whom the history of the created world is only one moment in the history of God Himself'."

Trower quotes Hans von Balthasar (Cordula, p. 108) to establish that "Rahner found no place in his system for a 'theology of the Cross.' He [Rahner) attributes our Redemption to God's saving will rather than to anything Christ did for us."

And, no wonder the "neo-orthodoxy" of the counter-faith is virtually without a piety of "offering up" anything in way of penance or pain, or of any reference to liturgical or traditional observance of Christ's and Mary' undergoing suffering. Just what the significance of the elevation of the chalice at the consecration can have to those of Rahnerian Christology becomes a mystery itself.

And as at least one reader of The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith, am deeply grateful to the author for bringing that bit of deep theological and ecclesiastical inadequacy to my attention. And it is only one example of the dismal failing of the counter-faith that came close to being accepted as the genuine Catholic thing, something some indeed are still striving to. accomplish.

 

www.thewandererpress.com

 

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The following review of Philip Tower's Turmoil and Truth

was published in CF NEWS on July 27th, 2003

 

'Turmoil and Truth; The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church'. By Philip Trower. Family Publications, Oxford, and Ignatius Press, San Francisco. ISBN 0-89870-980-6 Library of Congress Control Number 2003105702.

'This is a book that thoughtful and loyal Catholics have been waiting for a long time', (writes Francis Phillips). 'That the Church is undergoing a long period of turmoil and crisis which seems unprecedented in her long and chequered history, is obvious. Those of us who grew to adulthood before the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) and who have watched the subsequent developments in the Church, have felt anguish and dismay at the widespread disobedience to the magisterium, so-called 'loyal dissent' on the part of many of the intelligentsia, endless liturgical experimentation, scandals and sheer ignorance of the Faith that seem to bedevil the Church today.

In just 200 pages Philip Trower gives a lucid and readable account of how this crisis came about, deftly weaving all the different strands together to give an educated layperson a more comprehensive picture than is usually depicted by the different factions in the Church. At one extreme are the modernists, who want to change the whole nature of the Church; at the other are the traditionalists, who want nothing ever changed; in between are the vast numbers of the faithful, both hierarchy and lay, embracing all the shades of grey between these black and white antitheses.

At the centre is Vatican II itself, enthusiastically welcomed by some for the wrong reasons, deplored by others for equally wrong reasons. Nothing was wrong with the Church before the Council, say one group; everything was wrong with it, say another. With charity, wit and much erudition, the author seeks out the roots of this malaise and from his own deep personal faith gives a hopeful, if nuanced, perspective. For those of us (many, I imagine) who are pardonably confused by the sheer flood of words and debates on this topic, the author gives careful definitions as he goes along: the distinction between 'reform' and 'aggiornamento'; the difference between 'deduction' and 'induction'; why 'reform' that is good and necessary can develop into gradual 'rebellion' against truth. He analyses the state of the Church before the Council with great acuity, pointing out the temptations of the hierarchy (e.g. on bishops: 'the apostle vanishes inside the executive') and the failings besetting lay people during the same period. The chapters on 'The Flock' are particularly insightful and should put paid to the fallacious notion that Church was in a healthy state in the decades preceding the Council. We are introduced to the powerful theological personalities influencing the Council in their writings, in particular Father Yves Congar OP who, with fellow Dominicans, Fathers Chenu and Feret, was responsible for altering the definition of the Church from 'the Mystical Body of Christ' to 'the People of God'.

The footnotes are full of dry humour as well as illuminating the text and considerably deepening our understanding of the battlefield e.g. note 1, page 99, says 'Around the time of the Council, the forces of dissent launched the term 'the Constantinian Church'. The idea behind it was that with Constantine the Church entered into a permanent alliance with the State - any and every state apparently - in order to keep the laity in a condition of childlike subjection politically and religiously, a situation that was supposed to have lasted without interruption from 313 A.D. to 1958…' Note 4, also on page 99, discussing the vexed question of the role of the laity, is succinct: 'Modernist theology regards the roles of clergy and laity as more or less interchangeable. The conciliar teaching is that they are complementary: the clergy sanctify the laity, and the laity in their turn go out and endeavour to sanctify society or the world. This, fundamentally, is how the laity are to be involved in the Church's mission.'

It is a pity that Cherie Blair, the Prime Minister's wife, did not reflect on this more carefully, before her recent Tyburn Lecture, in which she happily 'clericalised the laity' with her enthusiastic statement, 'Indeed, there are often more lay people on the sanctuary than there are clergy…' and her wish for 'greater scope for active female participation in the Curia.' That it is more necessary for lay people to endeavour to sanctify society than crowd out priests in the sanctuary became painfully evident to me recently.

Taking my daughter to the local park, we encountered a chatty 6/7 year-old on the swings. Unprompted, he informed me that 'I don't have a Dad. I have two Mums. They're lesbians. And I have 200 pounds of equipment in my bedroom.' * In his conclusion, the author gives a thoughtful response to the question: what was the purpose of Vatican II? It is too complex an answer for me to do justice to it in a paraphrase so I will leave it for other readers to discover for themselves. There is also a moving description of 'eternal man' - 'who lives under the skin of every man and woman who has ever lived…' and whose voice we hear 'whenever the Psalms are sung or recited…' - which reminds us that our chief task is to know, love and serve God, and not the passing fashions of the spirit of the age. If I have a complaint about this absorbing book, it is that almost too much ground is covered in a short compass, particularly the chapter on the history of Modernism. However, the author promises a sequel shortly, dealing in greater depth with some of the questions he raises here about biblical scholarship, modern philosophy and personal experience, and their relation to truth. All those who love the Church and who want to be more fully informed about her and her importance for today's world, will look forward to it. I can only recommend this book by saying that I am about to re-read it'.