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JEAN GUITTON AND THE MODERNISM XII - The Kenosis ProblemWe still have to refer to the last issue, highly important to the doctrine of certain theologians of the New Theology, which influenced the Vatican II doctrines, such as Karl Rahner and Urs Von Balthasar: The kenotic doctrine issue. The Greek word “Kenosis” is found in the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Philippians where one can read: “[Christ] Who being in the form (or nature) of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (Phil. II, 6-8). The term “emptied”, in Greek, is “ekenosen”, that literally means to empty one's self, to become nothing. Evidently, this emptying or annihilating of Christ cannot be understood literally. The Church has always explained this always in the analogue way, that is to say, that God has humiliated Himself when becoming man, with the becoming flesh of the Verb. Assuming the human nature, in Virgin Mary’s womb, the Verb of God degraded Himself until us, his serfs, for we are “nothing” when compared with Him. God assumed the human nature without losing His Divine nature. But this supreme humility of God did not make him to empty Himself, in the sense that God would become literally nothing, a not being, an emptiness, without substance. Saint Irenaeus had already condemned the emptying of God that was defended by the gnostics – the modernists “avant la lettre” – of his time: 13.6 - ” If, again, they affirm that that [intelligence] was not sent forth beyond the Father, but within the Father Himself, then, in the first place, it becomes superfluous to say that it was sent forth at all. For how could it have been sent forth if it continued within the Father? For an emission is the manifestation of that which is emitted, beyond him who emits it. In the next place, this [intelligence] being sent forth, both that Logos who springs from Him will still be within the Father, as will also be the future emissions proceeding from Logos. These, then, cannot in such a case be ignorant of the Father, since they are within Him; nor, being all equally surrounded by the Father, can any one know Him less [than another] according to the descending order of their emission. And all of them must also in an equal measure continue impassible, since they exist in the bosom of their Father, and none of them can ever sink into a state of degeneracy or degradation. For with the Father there is no degeneracy, unless perchance as in a great circle a smaller is contained, and within this one again a smaller; or unless they affirm of the Father, that, after the manner of a sphere or a square, He contains within Himself on all sides the likeness of a sphere, or the production of the rest of the Aeons in the form of a square, each one of these being surrounded by that one who is above him in greatness, and surrounding in turn that one who is after him in smallness; and that on this account, the smallest and the last of all, having its place in the centre, and thus being far separated from the Father, was really ignorant of the Propator.” “But if they maintain any such hypothesis, they must shut up their Bythus within a definite form and space, while He both surrounds others, and is surrounded by them; for they must of necessity acknowledge that there is something outside of Him which surrounds Him. And none the less will the talk concerning those that contain, and those that are contained, flow on into infinitude; and all [the Aeons] will most clearly appear to be bodies enclosed [by one another].“ 13.7 – “Further, they must also confess either that He is mere vacuity, or that the entire universe is within Him; and in that case all will in like degree partake of the Father. Just as, if one forms circles in water, or round or square figures, all these will equally partake of water; just as those, again, which are framed in the air, must necessarily partake of air, and those which [are formed] in light, of light; so must those also who are within Him all equally partake of the Father, ignorance having no place among them.” “Where, then, is this partaking of the Father who fills [all things]? If, indeed, He has filled [all things], there will be no ignorance among them. On this ground, then, their work of [supposed] degeneracy is brought to nothing, and the production of matter with the formation of the rest of the world; which things they maintain to have derived their substance from passion and ignorance. If, on the other hand, they acknowledge that He is vacuity, then they fall into the greatest blasphemy; they deny His spiritual nature.” “For how can He be a spiritual being, who cannot fill even those things which are within Him? “ (Saint Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, II, 13,6-7). Besides, the Cabala of Isaac Luria de Safed said that, in order to create the world, it would be necessary that the Divinity have made a void in itself so that the world could be created inside this void. Therefore, to Luria, the Deity has docked in itself creating thus a void in itself. Luria called Tzim tzum this movement of contraction of God, a kind of pulsing of the Deity. In an emptiness created this way, there would have remained leftovers of the divine light (the Reschinu), and yet the dejection of God, the klippoth (“peels”), because of the Deity, by making this emptiness in itself, took advantage of it for the purifying of its being, eliminating, as dejects, everything that was bad in It, what was evil in its substance. Therefore, to Cabala, the evil would have roots in the Deity itself, concept that makes Cabala a typical gnostic system. From the leftovers of the divine light – the Reschinu – and the klippoth, dejects or barks of the deity, the world would have been made, which would be, because of this, an evil due to the dejects of evil from the deity, and, at the same time it would be divine, due to the reshinu divine light imprisoned in the matter, which is evil in essence. One can find additional information about this doctrine of Isaac Luria in the work of G. G. Scholem, The Jewish Mystique, ed. cit. chap. VII pp. 247-291, as well as in the book of this same author, titled Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1973, chap. I, which deals with Isaac Luria’s Cabala. Scholem demonstrates how this doctrine of Luria would have precedents in the doctrines of the gnostics from the second century of Christianity: “Before we go ahead, it could be interesting to underline that this conception of the Reschinu has a close parallel in the system of the gnostic Basilides, that flourished around the year 124 A.D. We also find here the idea of a so-called primordial space that cannot be conceived, nor characterized by any word, although it has not been abandoned by the “Sonhood”, term that he uses to designate the more sublime realization of the universal Potentiality, of the Sonhood with the Holy Spirit, or Pneuma. Basilides asserts that exactly when the Pneuma became empty and took apart from the Son, even then, he retained, at the same time, his perfume, that impregnated everything above and under, and even the amorphous matter and our way of existing. Basilides also uses the example of the vessel in which a sweetly aromatic ointment fragrance remains, besides the vase has been emptied with great care.” “Moreover, we have an early prototype of the Tzimtzum in the gnostic “Book of Great Logos”, one of those creepy remnants of the gnostic literature preserved by the copta traditions. There we are informed that all the primordial spaces and their “paternity” became to exist due a “little idea”, the space that God left behind Himself, like the dazzling world of light, when He has docked Himself inside Himself. This draw back that precedes all emanation is repeatedly accentuated.” (G. G. Scholem, A Mistica Judaica, ed. cit., pp. 267-268). As we have said, Saint Irenaeus himself, in the first times of the Church, already condemned this idea of emptying of God expressed in the Gnosis of Valentino: “But whence, let me ask, came this vacuity [of which they speak]? If it was indeed produced by Him who, according to them, is the Father and Author of oil things, then it is both equal in honour and related to the rest of the Aeons, perchance even more ancient than they are. Moreover, if it proceeded from the same source [as they did], it must be similar in nature to Him who produced it, as well as to those along with whom it was produced. There will therefore be an absolute necessity, both that the Bythus of whom they speak, along with Sige, be similar in nature to a vacuum, that is, that He really is a vacuum; and that the rest of the Aeons, since they are the brothers of vacuity, should also be devoid of substance. If, on the other hand, it has not been thus produced, it must have sprang from and been generated by itself, and in that case it will be equal in point of age to that Bythus who is, according to them, the Father of oil; and thus vacuity will be of the same nature and of the same honour with Him who is, according to them, the universal Father. For it must of necessity have been either produced by some one, or generated by itself, and sprung from itself. But if, in truth, vacuity was produced, then its producer Valentinus is also a vacuum, as are likewise his followers.“ (Saint Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, II, 4,1). (And, by the way, I register how the saints used to use irony as a weapon against the heretics). And Saint Irenaeus goes on against the gnostics: “Their talk also about shadow and vacuity, in which they maintain that the creation with which we are concerned was formed, will be brought to nothing, if the things referred to were created within the territory which is contained by the Father. For if they hold that the light of their Father is such that it fills all things which are inside of Him, and illuminates them all, how can any vacuum or shadow possibly exist within that territory which is contained by the Pleroma, and by the light of the Father? For, in that case, it behoves them to point out some place within the Propator, or within the Pleroma, which is not illuminated, nor kept possession of by any one, and in which either the angels or the Demiurge formed whatever they pleased. Nor will it be a small amount of space in which such and so great a creation can be conceived of as having been formed. There will therefore be an absolute necessity that, within the Pleroma, or within the Father of whom they speak, they should conceive of some place, void, formless, and full of darkness, in which those things were formed which have been formed. By such a supposition, however, the light of their Father would incur a reproach, as if He could not illuminate and fill those things which are within Himself. Thus, then, when they maintain that these things were the fruit of defect and the work of error, they do moreover introduce defect and error within the Pleroma, and into the bosom of the Father.“ (Saint Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, II, 4,3). The cabalistic and gnostic doctrine of Luria about the Tzim Tzum was transmitted to Jacob Boheme's works, who through his books, inspired the pietist movement and the philosophical doctrines of the German Idealism, especially Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, that have adopted the kenotic doctrine of the literal emptying of God in order to create the world and to redeem the man, in the crucifixion. Afterwards, this kenotic doctrine influenced the Romanticism. The Protestant theology of the 19th and 20th centuries have elaborated a whole gnostic doctrine which – as if by osmosis, as unsuspicious Piero Coda says – was disgracefully welcomed by certain modernist theologians, nominally Catholics, and, later, a little more disguised, in the New Theology, mainly that one of Urs Von Balthasar and Rahner, theologies that are repetitions of the old Gnosis. The gnostic doctrine of Basilides and of the Book of Great Logos is, evidently, the same that will be elaborated by Hegel, and repeated by modernist theologians, whether Catholics, such as Urs Von Balthasar and Rahner, or Schismatics, like Bulgakov, or Protestants, like Bultmann. All the doctrine of the Kenosis of God is based on the text of Saint Paul to the Philippians, that the Modernist gnostics, with their Protestant masters, interpret literally. Kenosis should not mean an analogous humiliation of God, but it should be interpreted as annihilation, ontological emptying. To these gnostics and Modernists, eknosen, in Philippians II, 6 just means annihilation. A literal annihilation, a substantial and ontological emptying, by means of which God would have created the world, and Christ would deify us. How curious is it to notice that when one mentions that hell’s fire must be understood literally as fire, these theologians cry against the “fundamentalism” of the literal interpretation of the term “fire”, but for the term “eknosen” the literal interpretation would be absolutely necessary and very accurate. And who is to decide what would be the true interpretation of the Scripture? Is it the theologian or the Pope? Who has received the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven? The teaching of the Church is totally diverse from the kenosis doctrine, for Pious XII called it a wicked doctrine: “There is another enemy of the faith of [the Council of] Chalcedon, widely diffused outside the fold of the Catholic religion. This is an opinion for which a rashly and falsely understood sentence of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (ii, 7), supplies a basis and a shape. This is called the kenotic doctrine, and according to it, they imagine that the divinity was taken away from the Word in Christ. It is a wicked invention, equally to be condemned with the Docetism opposed to it. It reduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption to empty the bloodless imaginations.” (Pious XII, Sempiternus Rex, about the Council of Calcedonia, n. 31). Pious XII, with this encyclical, aimed to condemn the Protestant and Schismatic kenotic doctrine, which started to penetrate in the modernist New Theology... And Neo Modernist theologians, such as von Balthasar, they quote Bulgakov when speaking of kenosis, but they never quote Pious XII. From this we can see how elusively the Modernist theological movement has taken a sit on Saint Peter's Cathedra. And these theologians quote one another as if they were the Doctors and Fathers of the Modernist and Gnostic Church, which has infiltrated in the Catholic Church. And these doctors of doubts and denies are not ashamed of quoting heretics, gnostics, Cabala books, and pantheist and gnostic philosophers as doctrinaire authorities, as if they were sources of revelation. They do not admit the teaching of the dogmatic Councils or the pontifical teaching. To them, the only Council that would be source of the absolute faith is the pastoral Vatican II, which did not want to teach dogmatically, and not even wanted to condemn anything nor anybody. And in the name of this doctrinaire tolerance of the Vatican II, and in the name of its faith in religious freedom, they want to shut up the mouth of anybody who defends the everlasting doctrine of the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church.
XIII - Kenosis in Hegel, Bulgakov and von Balthasara) Kenosis in Hegel The roots of kenotic, and, therefore, Gnostic thought of Hegel were the Gnostic heretics Meister Eckhart and Luther, besides the cabalist, Jacob Boehme. It is not me who state these roots. They are also acknowledged by an author fond of this kenotic thought, Piero Coda, professor of Lateranense. "We restricted to Hegel, because he will, indeed, exercise a deeper and broader influence on later thought, and because he will attempt programmatically to put the Trinitarian speech in the core of his thought, with a novelty on the emphasis, which comes from his original Lutheran formation, with decisive influences of Eckhart and the gnosticating mystic of J. Boehme” (Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani, Ed. San Paolo, 2.000, p. 227). And still: "Hegel, obviously, also has at hand the Trinitarian doctrine, but he obtains it in his phenomenological “come to be”, in the death on cross, of the Verb made flesh. The opportunity (or the “promise” as K. Barth would call it) is formidable; in between there is the Eckhart's speculative mystic, the Luther's Kreuzetheologie and Jacob Boehme's theosophy” (Piero Coda, Questio de Alteritate in Divinis, Agostino, Tomaso, Hegel). And all this, in Hegel, linked to the doctrine of Kenosis: "Exactly as E. Jungel stated, the true novelty of Hegel was matching in a deep way, Luther's crucis theology with the Trinitarian theology; or, at least, - it seems to me essential to precise it - with what he understood by each of the two. It is properly in this, also, what Karl Barth defined precisely as the great Hegelian “promise”: to understand the dynamism of the tri-personal being of God from the Incarnation's kenosis, from the cross and from the death of Jesus Christ, exactly that “leap of quality” and perspective that the traditional dogmatic needed. (...) These categories reduce themselves, after all, to the “Subject” or “Spirit” (Geist) and to the “negativity”. With the first one [Subject], Hegel wants to rethink – still under the light of modern “discovery” of the subject as an auto-conscience (of Descartes and Kant) – the identity of the Absolute as a movement of the “becoming” towards the full and conscious realization of itself. With the second one [Spirit or Geist] – inspiring itself in which he will define as “speculative Friday” - the “need” that the Absolute, to reach itself, has to pass through a movement of “alienation” of the extrinsication; in a word, death. It is quite evident the Christian inspiration of these concepts, recognized by Hegel himself, who defines Christianity as “the religion of modern times”. But it is also a lot evident the rationalism which denies this thought: faith is completely absorbed in reason, God in the auto conscience, that has of him (or that is) the humanity” (Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani, Ed. San Paolo, terza edizione, 2.000, p.227-228). Hegel repeats the typical dialectic notion of Gnosis, that repels the principle of no contradiction: "The speculative that is removed from the religious representation in its culminant “come to be”, is actually, according to Hegel, dialectic, that is, the Fassen des Entgegensetzen in seiner Einheit, oder des Positiven im Negativen [the taking of the opposites in their unity, i.e., the positive in the negative] (Hegel, Wissenschaftder Logik, 52, apud Piero Coda, art. Questio de Alteritate in Divinis, Agostino, Tomaso, Hegel). For Hegel, as well as to Gnosis and Kabala, the Divinity, the Absolute, the Fundament [Ungrund] on which everything starts, from which everything develops: 'The beginning contains one and the other, being and nothingness, it is the unicity of being with nothingness; it is a no-being which is at the same time being, and a being, which is, at the same time, not being” (P. Coda, art. cit.). In these sentences, the Gnostic conception of primordial Divinity is distinct. As in Gnosis, the contradiction between nothingness and being would be the cause of the dialectic movement of Divinity itself. “Hegel illustrates 'the truth of being and nothingness' as this movement consisted in the immediate disappearance of one of them into the other one: the becoming, a movement in which being and nothingness are different, but a difference that immediately solved itself”, at the same time, in the first of his Anmerkungen [Hegel] turns to the Christian metaphysics which, rejecting the proposition that from nothingness nothing would come, “stated a passage from nothingness to being” (P. Coda, art. cit. p.8-9) Kabala also states this very doctrine: from nothingness comes the being; from shadows comes the light (Cfr. Gerschom Scholem, Les Origines de la Kabballe, Aubier, Paris, 1966, p. 288). This dialectic doctrine, clearly Gnostic, allows Hegel to state that the World is identical and opposite to the Divinity, just as the finite and the infinite solve themselves in the identity of contradiction, and that, similarly, Creation and Divinity are identical in the contradiction, and that, then, man and God are and are not, the same thing. "But the finite is simply that, become infinite by its own nature, infinitude is its affirmative destination, that which it is truly in itself. Then, the finite disappeared in the infinite, and that which is, is only the infinite” (Piero Coda, art. cit.) Hegel applies this dialectic doctrine, together with the kenotic doctrine, to explain his conception of divine Trinity. To Hegel, the relations of the divine Persons must be considered according to the pascal event, that means a total and real giving oneself to the Other, and then shelter him in Itself, that is, the kenosis, the self-emptying or the annihilation of God. "By means of the deep idea according to which the being of the person is the existence in the dedication of oneself towards another person, Hegel considered the unity in the Trinity as a unity that realizes itself only by the process of reciprocal giveaway. He conceived then the unity of God with an intensity and an energy that has never been achieved before, not by the means of, let us say, a reduction of the triplex personality, but exactly through the most intense emphasis of the idea of personality” (W. Pannenberg, Lineamenti di Cristologia, apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani, Ed. San Paolo, terza edizione, 2.000, p.229). Hegel, following Luther, sees the abandon of God in crucified Jesus as a form of Kenosis and the relation with the Trinity and the processions of the divine Persons. According to Hegel, in God, the Persons are because they are not. The Father is Father only because he generates the Son, but in order to generate Him he must communicate him kenotically all his being, emptying himself absolutely of being. The Son, on his turn, reverts himself also kenotically in the Father, and in this mutual kenotic emptying of the Father on the Son, and of the Son on the Father, constitutes the Holy Spirit. In this way, the Trinity is a perfect kenotic becoming and not properly a being. In the divinity, there would be only the becoming, and not as much the being, only the becoming as Spirit. Hegel attempted to interpret the being not as a substance – “ousia” – but as a Subject, or Spirit (Geist) in an endless becoming. And the theologian considered as the soul of Vatican II, Karl Rahner, considers that the being must not be seen as “ousia?” – substance – but as a spirit-conscience. Rahner called this change in concept of being as spirit and not substance, as the “anthropocentric overturn of modern thought” (Cfr. Piero Coda, L'Altro di Dio, Città Nuova, Roma, 1997, p. 90). The denial of God as a substantial being was also admitted by the theologians of Liberation. Brazilian Ex-Friar Boff also wrote: "Therefore Mary Daly suggests we understand God less as a substance, and more as a process, God more like an active verb than a passive noun, God would mean the living, the eternal becoming oneself including the becoming of the entire creation, creation which, despite being submitted to the Supreme Being, would participate of the divine living. This God could be expressed by the symbols of the Father and of the Mother, or by the combination of the properties of each one of them; God as a motherly Father, and God as a fatherly Mother” (Leonardo Boff, A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Libertação, Ed. Vozes, Petrópolis, pp.154-155). How not to classify this doctrine as Gnostic? Gnosis was defined precisely as an anti-metaphysics rebellion, as a refusal of the being. Read Cioran to confirm him. And this conception of Hegel, Rahner and also of Urs von Balthasar, as we will see further on – I omit Boff for his less noteworthy influence at this point; his is considered more of a repeater than a father of heresies – will have terrible consequences in the field of truth, because if the being is not substance, all doctrine about truth crumbles apart. Then, it is not surprising if the Vatican II, inspired by Rahner's Theology, ends up being ecumenical, relativizing the truth about Faith. In this kenotic process in the sphere of Divinity the Creation would develop, exactly as the Gnostics have said, by a sort of decadence or expoliation of the infinite Divinity in the finite being. Just as in God, the divine Persons proceeded kenotically this way, on His turn, God would have created the world kenotically, emptying himself in it. The creation, on its turn, would pass by an evolution towards life, towards cognoscitive rationality, with the appearance of man, to return to the divine nothingness, through a dialectic evolution. As Teilhard de Chardin has written, it has passed from the unanimated sphere to life, and this one to noosphere, to arrive, finally, to omega Christ, in which all would be God, in a definitive panchristification. Moreover, such Teilhard's system is Gnostic as well. And let us not forget, I beg you, the esoteric doctrine of Blondel. b) Kenosis in Sergej Bulgakov Such Gnostic theory imbibed the protestant theology which, by “osmosis”, infused it into the Catholic theologians from whom Modernism was born, an, afterwards, the so-called New Theology, as well as the slavofy and Russian Modernist theology, like Sergej Bulgakof, so dear to Father Bouyer and Urs von Balthasar. The Gnostic Sergej N. Bulgakov, condemned for heresy by the Schismatic Church, when coming to the Western world was warmly welcome in the colloquies of the modernists theologians who, by that time, would already have ecumenical love affairs with heretics from all sects. Father Louis Bouyer talks about the Gnostic Bulgakov as being "this extraordinary visionary that could be Father Serge Boulgakoff" (L. Bouyer, Gnosis – La Connaissance de Dieu dans l'Écriture, Cerf, Parigi, 1988, p. 100). In 1927, Bulgakov took part in the First Congress of the World-Wide Council of Churches, in Lausanne, as well as of the Second Congress, in Oxford, 1937. He also took part of Congresses organized by Berdiaeff, among Catholic, Protestants and Schismatic theologians, where there were the modernist Lucien Laberthonnière, and the modernists’ friends Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson (Cfr. Piero Coda, L'Altro di Dio. Rivelazione e Kenosi in Sergej N. Bulgakov, Città Nuova, Rome, 1997, p.47, note 64). And what made the figure of Bulgakov so dear to the ecumenical modernists? Perhaps his fundamental principle of religion: "In the basis of religion is the personal experience of an encounter with divinity. This is the unique source of its autonomy [...] Religion is born from a sentiment of God (whatever the form of this revelation be)” (Sergej N. Bulgakov, Lumière sans Déclin, p. 26, apud Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.34. The bold is mine). And this personal and religious experience is the revelation of the noumenon in itself, that is, of the divine res such as it is, what is not done by intellectual means, but by a mystic experience. Bulgakov's statement is most current and absolutely in accordance with Vatican II spirit. All current ecumenism sets its basis on the respect of all religions, whatever their way of revelation. These words would do about the personal religious experience, to turn Bulgakov into a Modernist or a Vatican II expert. As one may see in the quotation by Bulgakov, the osmosis, acknowledged by Piero Coda between Catholic and Protestant theologies should be stretched out to the Russian Eastern Schismatic Church. It looks as if there is an Ecumenical and International Sect of Modernists Theologians... And what were Bulgakov's doctrinal roots? The same Gnostic roots of Western Modernists: "Russian Sofiologic Tradition does not nourish solely, as we will show, from Christian sources, but also from Gnostic doctrines, above all from the valentinian trend, the Jewish Cabala, Boehme’s and Pordage’s philosophy and some spiritual reflections from German Romanticism, from von Baader to Schelling" (Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 9). Such theologians from the New Theology – from Karl Rahner to Hans Urs von Balthasar, made Cardinal by John Paul II – accepted, more clearly than the others, the Gnostic doctrine of kenosis, whether to explain the life of Divinity in a theosophical way, whether to explain Creation and Redemption. I will restrain myself by providing just a few quotations about the kenotic doctrine in Bulgakov, in order to make one understand the deepness of what he called kenosis, and what von Balthasar will encourage among the Catholics. Graziano Lingua comments: "While describing the inter-trinity dynamics as love, Bulgakov introduces the category of kenosis, that will play a fundamental role in all his system. Referring to the famous paulie hymn (Phil II, 6-8) where is said: “[Jesus] being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied (eknosen) himself, taking the form of a servant", he conceives the love of God as an emptying, a ‘weakening’ through which the Absolute Subject gets closer to the other of Himself” (Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 66-67). Bulgakov says: "This active self-affirmation of one's self is the love: the flames of the triple divine hypostasis flare up in each one of the three hypostatic centers only to join them, identifying themselves in each other in the exit of themselves towards the Other, in the afired renounce of personal love. In a static way, the personality mono-hypostatic is the center of the self-affirmation and of repulse, it is self-centered; dynamically, although, the personality realizes itself as source of love abnegation, as an exit towards the other me’" (S. N. Bulgakov, Il Paraclito, 141, apud Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, pp. 69-70). According to Bulgakov, there are three levels in which the kenosis acts: the first is in inter-Trinitarian life; the second in Creation; and the third would be in Crucifixion. "Sergej Bulgakov, in his theory of Redemption, tries to comprehend the kenosis of the cross as the last of the self-giveaways of God, which begin with the intra-Trinitarian self-disappropriation of God in benefit of the Son, and that keeps on happening with the kenosis of Creation" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. IV, L 'Azione, Jaca Book, 1986, p. 291). In inter-trinity life, as we saw it, the divine processions would be generated by kenotic means, the Father emptying into the Son in order to give him existence, and, by his turn, the Son would empty himself, kenotically, into the Father, for love. And this kenotic relation between the Father and the Son would be the Holy Ghost, kenotic love of Father and Son. Obviously, as Modernists used to do, saying something and right after denying what they had said, Bulgakov would sometimes make believe that this emptying is a literal kenosis, that is, reducing one's self to nothing to allow the existence of the other, and sometimes he makes believe it is possible to affirm that at last something remains in the being, by the end of the emptying. In Creation, there would be another kenotic act: God would empty himself to create the world, that would be a true emanation of God, which Bulgakov calls – exactly as said by Cabalists – the “exodus of God”. According to Graziano Lingua's explanation about Bulgakov's kenotic doctrine in Creation, "the kenotic love induces God not to become used up in the divine pericoresis, but to get away from the circle of three towards the possibility of fourth hypostases. God is capable of loving the nothing up to the extreme of choosing it as the other to whom He would give the personality, which is the core of his essence. The kenotic love, this time, is not limited to let go part of the divine ousia, but it means a much deeper alienation: it is the real ecstasy of God, that leaves himself, making himself "another hypostasis". Bulgakov speaks about it as a true an proper Trinity’s "exodus" in the field of hypostatic creatural being, "the act of blowing life symbolizes the fact, which is inexpressible in human language, of God’s ecstatic love, which goes beyond its very bounds in order to call the created being to the personal being"(Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.149). Therefore, Creation would have been an exit from the ousia – an emanation – of the divine substance. And this doctrine is exactly Gnosis. In creation, according to Bulgakov, God allows that His ousia exits Himself aiming the "another of Himself", that means, towards nothing, renouncing to be the only to hypostatize it. There is no difference, then, from the Gnostic emanation of Divinity. "To this corresponds that self-determination of the hypostatic God, with which, as he has always had since eternity as his own nature (the plenitude of the being), He lets it leave the midst of His hypostatic being towards the self being, doing such thing authentic cosmos, creates the world from the nothing, that is to say, from Himself, from his own divine content" (Sergej Bulgakov, La Sposa dell'Agnello, Ymca Press, 1945, Bologna, 1991, apud Graziano Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, pp. 97-98). One can clearly see that, for Bulgakov, the created world is an emanation of Divinity, as preached by Gnosis. And how could theologians like von Balthasar accept this doctrine? A proclaimed heretic like Bulgakov who was excommunicated, – and with justice – even from the Schismatic church, how can he be so dear to Western Catholic theologians? That can only be explained if one considers that such Modernist theologians are even worse than those who are out of God’s Church. The receptivity to Bulgakov may only be explained because Modernism and New Theology Neo Modernist were also sorts of Gnosis. "The act of divine love, which makes the Divinity to expand outside Itself, means for Divinity an "condescending" with creature, and a "self-limiting in order to give room to the Other Self". In one word, it is a kenotic gesture: God, incited by the love He has for the world, chooses to "diminish" His nature, to let his nature depart from Himself towards the nothing; putting the absolute being side-by-side to the relative being, with whom he gets in contact, that is why he is God and the Creator, the Creator Fiat, which is the imperative of the divine omnipotence, that expresses, at the same time, altogether, the immolation of God’s love, of God’s love to the world, of the Absolute to the relative, due to which the same Absolute becomes the “Absolute-Relative” (Sergej N. Bulgakov, L'Agnello di Dio. Il Mistero del Verbo Incarnato Ymca Press, Bologna, 1991, apud G Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Matteria – La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane Napoli, 2.000, p. 105. The bold is mine). And still: "That Creation produces the kenosis of God, it not only means that God allows the world to depart from Himself and that it would be ahead of his independency of creation, but also means that he adapts patiently to impotence, related to world's insufficiency and hence limits his absoluteness, in order not to make it burn the relative towards it. The Trine God looses his absoluteness and makes himself relative to the world, makes Himself other out of himself, risking direction of a relation with the nothing. Kenosis is, thus, strictly related to the antinomy of God’s face as acknowledged by man in the religious experience: the kenotic movement cannot be read as an emptying that deprives God from his Divinity – [How cautious!] – but as a paradox through which God remains in the immutable plenitude of his own being in itself, and, at the same time, inhabits "in" and "with" the creature" (G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, pp. 105-106. The bold is mine). Therefore, the world would be made from the divine ousia, from the proper content of the divine being. And, in order to get this doctrine rid of condemnation as Pantheistic or Gnostic, one would need acrobatic skills and misty veils of New Theology. Maybe one might say that, because I am not a theologian, I am making wrong simplifications and generalizations, and, due to this deficiency, I see Gnosis and Cabala everywhere. But it is not only me who sees in the doctrine of creation by means of kenosis – by emptying – from Bulgakov, von Balthasar, and others, the influence of the Gnostic heresy and of Cabala. Graziano Lingua says the same thing when he admires when Bulgakov repeats almost the same words of the cabalistic doctrine of Tzim Tzum by Isaac Luria de Safed. "The words of Bulgakov here are surprisingly close to the Cabalistic tradition that sees the possibility of Creation in the ‘self-contraction’ (Tzim Tzum) of God'. The eternal Father, by His will, limits Himself to give space and freedom to his creature. Only by this his Absoluteness becomes relative, He is truth God, respecting, forever, the alterity of what comes from Him to the light" (G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.106). And von Balthasar said that he accepted the core of Bulgakov's kenotic doctrine. Is there, thus, what to baffled about, if there are consequences of this doctrine in the New Theology? One would be amazed if such consequences would not exist. For example, for Bulgakov, the world is a true self-manifestation of God. And it could not be otherwise, if the world is considered as an “exit” of the divine ousia in what was created. "God created the world not only to self-reveals in it, to manifest the divine Sophie in the created Sophie, but also to unite Himself to it by means of the men and the angels, spiritually and personally, sending His only Son" (Sergej Bulgakov, L 'Agnello di Dio. Il Mistero del Verbo Incarnato, ed. cit., p. 219, apud G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, pp. 177-178). And, if the world is made of the same divine ousia, how come the distinction between the natural order and the natural world remain? The supernatural is equal to the natural, exactly as tends to say the New Theology of Henri de Lubac. Take a look at this excerpt by Graziano Lingua, commenting Bulgakov's theology: "Man is, since his origin, divine-human: the first Adam created as image of the second Adam hides in himself the figure of Christ, who is divine-human in his structure. It is not, therefore, acceptable the posture of the Catholic theology which does not give reason to the ontological meaning of the image of God in man, as it clearly tells apart the natural/creatural dimension from the supernatural" (G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 175). Last there is something else that must be told about Bulgakov's personalistic doctrine, which is, also, so dear and osmotic with the doctrine of so many Western theologians. To Bulgakov, as God is unique and trine through his Persons, the human person would also be capable of an intercommunication with all other human persons, tending to form, in History, a unity through which all men would become humanity. And Christ would unify in his Person all humanity. And, due to this, salvation would be of all humanity. Then one could say that there is a “historic-salvific” process that saves all humanity, with no exception. To Bulgakov, as to Boehme, as to Anna Katharina Emmerick, the romantic and fake clairvoyant, the individuation, fruit of the materiality, would be caused by original sin (G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 171). Before the original sin, Adam was man-humanity. "The individual me becomes itself in plenitude, when the disposition for itself is over, when it looses its own individuality. Only at that moment, this one that up till then, such as an individual qualified ray, shone alone with its own color, inflames with the light of the pleroma and is incorporated to that whole plenitude, in which God is everything in everyone”. "(...) each man is not a part of the wholeness of mankind, but the multiplication of the human ones- wholeness in his interior ". "(...) each man, as individual, only realizes himself by the co-hypostaticity with the other people, that is to say, by getting together with them by means of an interchangeable love". "Each creatural hypostasis, not as individuality, that is to say, as limitation, but as Hypostatic center of the wholeness, is ontologically enough to contain and realize in himself the plenitude of the being in nature itself" (Sergej N. Bulgakov, La Sposa dell'Agnello, EDB, Bologna, 1991, 162, apud G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.172). Such unitotal unity becomes real afterwards, in History, in such a way that the individual hypostases do not lose its original characteristics: each single man, as alluded before, is created as an individual, and as omni-man; his birth is not a fragmentation of the original omni-humanity, but a multiplication according to different themes. Humanity is plural-hypostatic, alive in the multiple human beings that furrow history, but also a "hypostatic-plurality", or better, it is contained and reproduced in each single living being. "Humanity, – says Bulgakov in Nevesta Agnca [The Wife of the Lamb] –- (...) is the omni-recapturing or integral Adam. Adam is not only a certain human person, he is also human plurality, the omni-person, made image of the unique but tri-hypostatic God". (G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.174). "This means that, as Adam is the head of all human gender, he carries within himself all humanity, attached to him, as so Adam's sons and daughters carry it all of it, within themselves, and are themselves, in this sense, as Adam, in his plurality. Consequently, both humanity as a whole and each single man, then, should be understood not as a series of distinct unities, that get close to one another due to a certain similarity (and this would be the heretic "similar substantiality", instead of the orthodox "consubstantiality"), but only in the composition of the wholeness: in each man live, completely, the natural Adam together with all members of the human gender" (Sergej N. Bulgakov, La Sposa dell'Agnello, EDB, Bologna, 1991, 167, apud G. Lingua, Kenosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, La Sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p.174). And that would allow all humanity to be saved collectively by Jesus Christ, becoming one single man-humanity with Him. That would explain how each singular man, by the fact of being conceived, and only by this fact, not taking into account his works, would be saved, only for being a man. And, with all these, way is open to the apokatastasis of von Balthasar, to whom, if Hell exists, it is empty. In the New Theology there was a great osmosis with Bulgakov's Gnostic doctrine. c) Kenosis and the Trinitarian Doctrine in Urs von Balthasar After all these quotations that prove the Gnostic heresy in Bulgakov, let us see what says Urs von Balthasar about the kenotic doctrine of this Russian heretic. "The recent Russian theology was right – yet it is not free, for example, of Gnostic and Hegel’s temptations – in giving a central place to this matter. Without doubt it would be possible to deprive Bulgakov's fundamental conception about his sophiologic pretexts and maintain – developing it in many ways – this intuition that we now consider in the center of our reflections: the last presupposition of kenosis is the "indifference" of the [divine] Persons (while they are pure relations) in the inter-Trinitarian life of love; next, there is a fundamental kenosis that interferes on Creation as such, because God, since all eternity, has assumed the responsibility of the success of Creation (taking into account human freedom as well) and of forecasting sin, He also takes the cross into account as foundation of Creation: "The cross of Christ is inscribed in the world of Creation " (Urs von Balthasar, Pâques, le Mystère, Cerf, Paris, 1996, pp.43-44). We can see through this quotation full of insinuating serpentine contortions, that the doctrinaire osmosis is not only between the Catholic and the Protestant theologies, but also with the very little… orthodox theology of Bulgakov. Von Balthasar – as an ecumenist who wants to destroy the bastions of the Church and of truth – does not have so many scruples of making allusions, without condemning them clearly (at the very utmost, he makes feeble restrictions), to sources so unclear from the orthodoxy point of view. One can see how he admits that there are truths – the famous "logos spermatikós", the Verb’s seeds – even in... Valentin, in Goethe, in Luther and, obviously, in Hegel...(Cfr. Urs von Balthasar, Pâques, le Mystère Cerf, Paris, 1996, pp.64, 68, 69, 70). As usually among Modernists, von Balthasar proceeds with care, stating in a misty – blondelian – way, insinuating, using studied and ambiguous words until the contradiction, saying in a page the opposite of what was said in the other. And, following his master, Father de Lubac, von Balthasar dares to say with him that: "It is to this speculation that the Easter Homily of Pseudo Hoplite is attached to orthodoxy lies no doubt, when it attributes to the cross a meaning that extends to the cosmos, and uses, to express that, images that refer to Plato, but also to the Buddhism" (Urs von Balthasar, Pâques, le Mystère Cerf, Paris, 1996,p. 65. The bold is mine). At this point, von Balthasar places, within a footnote, a quotation from Father de Lubac: "H. de Lubac, Aspects du Boudhisme, Paris, 1950, chapter II: "Two cosmic trees" pp. 55-79. There one can find, either notes about the figure of the giant that emerges frequently from Christ as from Buddha, and other texts about the cosmic function of the cross" (Urs von Balthasar, Pâques, le Mystère Cerf, Paris, 1996,p. 65, footnote 13). It would not be absurd to state that these ecumenical theologians would meet the "logos spermatikós" even in Satanism, even in Lucifer. They have a hard time, only, in finding the Verb – the divine and integral truth – in the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church. In that one, they see, usually, “sins”. In this answer, it is just possible to give a brief summary of the kenotic doctrine exposed like a river, and with strong flavor of gnosis, of Urs von Balthasar, by the way, so little known by the humble faithful. Von Balthasar, as other Modernist theologians, admitted the influence of Hegel’s and Bulgakov’s doctrine about the kenosis in the Trine God, the kenosis of God creating the world, and, finally, the kenosis of Christ, at cross, as a means of redemption, kenotic doctrine accepted in the Protestant and liberal theology of the 19th century, which inspired the Modernism. "The Kenotics of the 19th century in Germany wrote under the influence of Hegel, to whom the absolute subject, to turn itself concrete to itself, becomes finite in nature and in history of the world. Thus, to these theologians, the perspective is opposite: it is subject of the kenosis not that one that became man, but that who becomes man; it is a "self limitation of the divine" as says Thomasius" (Urs von Balthasar, Pâques, le Mystère Cerf, Paris, 1996, pp. 39-40). Even if, at this very text, he does not use the term kenosis, von Balthasar explains the eternal generation of the Son as an absolute dedication or emptying of the Father, that is, by kenosis: "The Father who generates the Son does not "lose" himself with this act, in the other, to, finally, "gain" himself, but [The Father] is always himself by giving himself. The Son, too, is always himself by allowing himself to be generated and by allowing the Father to do with him as he pleases. The Spirit is always himself by understanding his "I" as the "We" of Father and Son, by being "expropriated" for the sake of what is most proper to them. (Without grasping this, there is no escape from the machinery of the Hegelian dialectic)” (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Jaca Book, Milano, 1992, vol II, Le Persone del Dramma. l'Uomo in Dio, p. 243). The eternal Father would be an eternal emptying in the Son, to whom the Father gives Filiation annihilating Himself. By his turn, the Son would be Son as feminine receptivity, but eternally thankful to the Father that gave him existence, and all that He has, returning to the Father all that he has received from Him. Thus, the Son is also an eternal emptying. From this mutual giveaway unclasps the Holy Spirit, mutual giveaway, mutual annihilation of the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Father. This way, one could ask whether in God there would not be, at heart, any ousia. God would have no substance. God would be pure relation, in an endless becoming, and the Persons in God would be pure change, pure relationship. In other words, one could ask whether von Balthasar thinks that God would exist as a being, or whether God is an eternal becoming. We can see the ambiguity till the contradiction of von Balthasar at this quotation: "The Christian theology remained by an irremovable way, firm at the idea that the God revealed in Jesus Christ subsists in himself as an eternal being or essence, thing that is, at the same time, an eternal becoming (not temporal, indeed), and at the idea that is not possible to dispense ever, only for an instant, from the ontological consideration of this eternal becoming. Before, seeing this from the point of view of the New Alliance, we should say that the revelation of God acted in Jesus Christ is a firstly Trinitarian revelation – Jesus does not speak about a general God, but shows us the Father and gives us the Holy Spirit – and that we should make an image about the "being" and the "essence" of God by a Trinitarian relation from Jesus with God. This relation manifests itself in the becoming of Jesus as an eternal becoming" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol V, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p. 50. The bold is mine). Could there be a more contradictory text? After all, to von Balthasar, is God being or becoming? He answers that God is being and becoming! And a few pages ahead, von Balthasar writes: "The eternal life, which is God, and that remains “indescribable”, cannot be absolutely defined as a becoming, because it does not know that 'poverty that is the reason of our tendency’, of our ‘unquietness’”. "The eternal life, exactly because it is plenitude of life, is complete peace". However, this peace is not rigid, but it is eternal mobility" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol V, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p. 66. Bolded text is mine). How can he write that the eternal life cannot be defined as a becoming and immediately dares to affirm that it is " eternal mobility"? Saint Pius X was so right in adverting that the Modernists, in order to dissimulate their heresy, do not hesitate to contradict themselves, saying in a page something, and, in the other, the opposite! By the way, von Balthasar refused the principle of non-contradiction, and affirmed that the contradiction has always existed in this world, even in the proper words of Christ, in the Gospel: "Similarly, Balthasar believed that contradiction is a part of truth. As he explained in Word and Revelation, he believed that expressions of' ‘worldly truth’, in the same manner of ‘worldly Being’ can be ‘contradictory’ and even expressions of scriptural truths can be opposites or ‘contrary’ [to one another]. Balthasar agreed with Hegel that ‘only God is “absolute truth”’ and "'all truth is not, the very negation is in God' " (italics added). Thus, statements in the Bible are not absolutely true but each is relative and in some way negative or false, and these statements will find their synthesis only when we come to the Father who is absolute truth. But, for now, one cannot have complete confidence even in the words of Christ. Balthasar stated: "The word of Christ, who spoke as no other had spoken, who alone spoke as one having power, is nonetheless an insecure bridge between the wordlessness of the world and the super-word of the father" (italics added). (…) Balthasar's philosophy of truth violates the first self-evident principle of the speculative reason (the natural law), which states that the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time (principle of non-contradiction)”. (Fr. Regis Scanlon OFM Cap, "The Inflated Reputation of Hans Urs von Balthasar", New Oxford Review, pp. 17-24, March 2000, http://www.petersnet.net/browse/3344.htm The bold is mine). How can a theologian being thought as Catholic, if he adopts Hegel’s principle that yes and no coexist, when Christ said: “But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil" (Mt V, 37). And, despite that Urs von Balthasar was raised to cardinal... "At the core of von Balthasar's Theo-drama is the recognition of the dramatic aspect of the immanent Trinity, a "primordial drama" which begins and is sustained by the Father's total self-giving in the begetting of the Son, and the Son's eternal thanksgiving (Eucharist) to the Father, united in the "WE" that is the "I" of the Holy Spirit. (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol II, p. 256, apud (John C. Médaille, "The Trinity as the Pattern of the World in the Theo-Drama", http://www.medaille.com/freedom.htm) "God possesses himself through donating himself, and only though donating himself. But, this way, donating himself, He possesses himself. And so it is. His self-possession is the event, is the history of a giveaway, and, at this sense, is the goal of all simple possession of oneself. With this history, He is God, or better, this history of love is the "proper God". (E. Jungel, Dio, mistero del mondo, Queriniana, Brescia, 1982, p. 427. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, esperienza e teologia del Dio dei cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, 2000, pg. 238). By his turn, Urs von Balthasar says: "So, the divine plenitude, already in its first source, is a plenitude that seems to be an inter space, that makes itself poor, that by means of its poverty turn rich the Son with the proper divinity of the Father" (Urs von Balthasar, Cattolico – Aspetto del Mistero, ed. Encuentro, Madrid, 1988, p. 34). "The self dedication of the Father, that gives not only something He has, but everything he is (in God, there is only being and not having), he passes, entirely to the begotten Son (without reflection about the fact that He, the Father, becomes Himself by means of his dedication as it would be legal to interpret the thoughts of Hemmerle) (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. V, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p.72). Generating the Son, the Father delivers all He is, but he should not be thought as if He were existent before this self-deliverance. He is the total self-deliverance. Emptying Him in the Son, the Father gives, not everything He has, but everything he is, because, in God, there is no possessor, but only being. At this sense, the kenosis is a super death: "The Son's answer to the gift of Godhead (of equal substance with the Father) can only be eternal thanksgiving (eucharista) to the Father, the Source - a thanksgiving as selfless and unreserved as the Father's original self-surrender. Proceeding from them both, as their subsistent "We", there breathe the "Spirit" who is common to both: as the essence of love, he maintains the infinite difference between them, seals it and, since he is the one Spirit of them both, bridges it" (Von Balthasar, Theo-Dramma, Vol. IV, p. 324, apud (John C. Médaille, "The Trinity as the Pattern of the World in the Theo-Drama", http://www.medaille.com/freedom.htm) "This total giveaway of himself, to what the Son and the Holy Spirit answers, they will repeat, means something like a “death”, a first and radical "kenosis", if you want: a "super-death", that is as aspect of all love and that is the foundation in the interior of the creature everything that could be, in it, a good death: forgetting itself to the beloved creature till that supreme love that "gives the life for his friends" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. V, L'Ultimo Atto, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p. 72). The divine life, thus, would be an eternal giveaway, annihilating – literally comprehended as turning into nothing, no being – so that the Other be. And this total self-giveaway, to the point of not being anymore, would allow us to say that God is love. It is impressing that one can find almost those same words to define God in the philosophy of Jacob Boehm, as exposed by Alexander Koyré: "Iniquity, so much as the love, are, by essence, free; a being that would not be free would not be capable either of loving, nor of donating itself. Well, it is in the love that lies the moral perfection of the being, and God, himself, is God because He loves and generates love" (Alexander Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Vrin, Paris, 1971, p. 433. The bold is mine). "We deal about (...) the turn up side down of the world, decisive aspect of the vision about God that is not, at first place, “absolute potency", but absolute "love", and whose sovereignty does not manifest itself in having that which belongs to him, but in its helplessness (...) God’s annihilation has its ontological possibility in the eternal self-renounce of God, his tri personal giveaway, from what, also, the created person should not be described as the-being-in-itself, anymore, but, more deeply (as created as image and likeness of God) as a "return-to-itself" (complete reflectio) of the being each time "out of itself", and as "being out of itself", as a “center that gives itself and unfolds itself". The concepts of "poverty" and "wealthy" turn dialectics, which does not mean that the essence of God would be in itself (univocally) "kenotic", and that, thus, the divine fundament of the possibility of kenosis could be, by means of this, elevated to omni comprehensive concept (at this direction lie some mistakes of modern Kenotics), well, (...) the "potential" divine is constituted this way that it could prepare, in itself, the space to a self annihilation, as is that one of the Incarnation and of the cross, and sustain this annihilation till the end. Between the form of God and the form of a slave run in the identity of the person, an analogy of the natures as the greater unlikeness in so much likeness" (DS 806) (Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Salutis, Vol. VI, Queriniana, Brescia, 1971, pp. 189-190. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani, ed. San Paolo, 2.000, pp. 240-241). Clearly, this comprehension of Love as a renounce of the being is not true, because Saint Augustine had already observed: "And what more monstrous than to assert that those things which have lost all their goodness are made better?"(Saint Augustine, Confessions, VII, 12). That shows why people talk so much about love nowadays... Love, as the kenotic doctrine, is like that one preached by the Buddhism: searching the emptiness, a metaphysical suicide, that prepares all renounces, all self-demolitions. Being truly poor would claim the annihilation of the being itself. The one who is, by the simple fact of being, would be rich. The Theology of Liberation, deep inside, looks for an ontological liberation. As the Gnosis, it is an anti-metaphysical revolution. "The midst of the Father, after the Son was generated by him, is it not "empty"? And the Son, not being able to take the divinity to himself, but only to receive it, is not he, in all his wealthy, "Poor"? And the Holy Spirit, as pure "breathing of love between Father and Son, is not he, some way, "unessential"? (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. II, Jaca Book, 1992, p.248) With this explanation one can understand better what the modernists theologians mean when talking about the 'poor’ Church. ‘Poor’ means, in their jargon, ‘totally empty’, ‘unexistable’. This strange doctrine of the Trinity – that has nothing to do with Catholic’s, but which is totally Gnostic, and “nefand“, as Pius XII qualified it – leads von Balthasar to consider God as an "eternal super abundance", as something that would be always bigger, always more perfect, and not as the absolute perfection of pure Act of Saint Thomas. God would be, to von Balthasar, a "source of life". To von Balthasar, Kenosis is the key to comprehend Divinity. According to him, God can only be God by means of kenosis. From his side, the Son can only be Son due to his capacity, his potency of receiving the Father’s giveaway. "If that one that possesses would not exist anymore, even for a moment, a gift constantly received, but a goodness from which he would have, exactly at the root, the autonomous disposition, he would cease immediately being the Son of the Father, he would lose all the titles to be believed, and he would be obligated, in this case, to invite all man not to believe in him anymore. The form of existence of the Son, that constitutes him as Son since all eternity, is this incessant receiving of all that he is, and, as a consequence of himself, as a gift which comes from the Father " (Urs von Balthasar, Théologie de l 'Histoire, Fayard, Paris, 1970, pp. 40-41). Von Balthasar says that this receptivity of the Son would be a necessary condition to the Fathar’s self-giveaway. And this receptivity would be like the feminine in God. The Son would give his cooperation in his eternal generation from the Father, letting the Father generate him. This would be like a passive potentiality in God, while the self-giveaway of the Father would be an active and masculine element in Divinity. "Finally, the divine unity of the making and the let make (from which one demonstrates the equivalence in love) is worldly translated in the duplicity of the genders. Trinitarianly, the Father, certainly, appears as the non-originated generator, primarily (super)-masculine; the Son, as the one who let himself happen, since the beginning as (super)-feminine, but afterwards, as actively expiring with the Father, again as (super)-masculine, the Spirit as (super)-feminine. And while the Father, as previously indicated, let himself be, in his generating and expiring, co-determinating since always by his precedents, there is also in him something of (super)-feminine, which does not interfere with his primacy in the order, but properly the Trinitarian element in God vetoes a projection of the sexual world in divinity (as it occurs in so many religions and in the Gnostic syzygias) we should be content seeing the always new reciprocity of the making and the let make (that is, by its side, a form of activity and of fecundity), as the immeasurable origin of how much the world of the created life will see translated as a form and possibility of love and of its fecundity in the sexual plan" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol V, L'Ultimo Atto, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p.78). It is unbelievable how he dares to state all these ideas about the masculinity and femininity in the divine persons, and yet, daring to make reference to fairy tales from false religions and from the Gnostic syzygias, for so scandalous are these statements. And, to von Balthasar, this condition of receptivity gives a feminine character to the Son. "Such as the Son behaves, in a certain receptive and feminine way, towards the Father’s will, so the Church and the Christian towards the Son’s life. The effusion of this "God’s seed" (I Jo III, 9) in the midst of the world is the most intimate event in History" (Urs von Balthasar, Théologie de l 'Histoire, Fayard, Paris, 1970, p. 144). And here, by the way, one can see how the term “God’s seed”, which Saint John uses to refer, analogically, to the sanctifying grace, is literally interpreted as a "God’s seed in the world”, something emanated from God, and not as the sanctifying grace in the soul of the righteous. And this way, carefully, one insinuates the Gnostic doctrine that proposes that there is something of the proper substance of the Divinity buried in the world. Just like the Cabala, because von Balthasar admits a masculine–feminine duality in God. And, when the Son accepts the self-giveaway of the Father, He says the first "Fiat", that would be repeated, afterwards, by the Virgin, and by the Church, and by every man who accepts God’s grace. And the Church would only be saint and divine when it accepted its kenosis, in a truthful self-giveaway. Perhaps it is that one that Paul VI called the mysterious self-demolition of the Church. This kenotic doctrine of the New Theology from von Balthasar proposes an explanation of the process of divine life absolutely similar – and, sometimes, identical – to the pretension of the Gnostics who, as Saint Irenaeus states, proudly believed to possess the secret – the Gnosis– of divine life: "The Prophet, speaking of the Verb, interpolated them asking: ‘Who could tell his generation? Thou, [Gnostics, or theologians of the New Theology] – however, describe the generation of the Verb from the Father’" (Saint Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, II, 28, ss.). Another part that resembles the Gnostic doctrine of the New Theology of von Balthasar, inherited from the Cabala, is the admission that the evil has its roots in the very Divinity. To von Balthasar, the Kenotic doctrine applied to the Trinity imposes that there could be in God an infinite 'longitude" that would include all the possible distances, including that of sin. "It is possible, with Bulgakov, to define the self expression of the Father in the generation of the Son as a first interdivine "kenosis" which embraces of all sides the others, since the moment that the Father there expropriates Himself radically from his divinity and transpropriates itself to the Son, he does not divide it with the Son, but He participates it to the Son, giving him all that is his: "All my things are thine, and thine are mine” (Jo XVII, 10). The Father, that could not be thought exactly (arianistically) as existent "before" this self-giveaway, is this movement of giveaway, without any reserves. This divine act that generates the Son as a second possibility of having part in the identical divinity and being itself, is the placement of an infinite absolute distance, within which all remaining distances could be included and comprehended, the distances that can be added in the interior of the finite world, even not excluding sin. Within the Father’s love one can find an absolute renounce from being God alone by Himself, a let-be from the divine being, and, in this sense, a (divine) a-theistness (naturally of love), that cannot be mistaken, by any means, to the inter-worldly a-theism, but that nevertheless gives foundation (superating) such possibility. The Son's answer to the equiessential possession of divinity can only be eternal thanksgiving (eucharista) to the Father, the Source---a thanksgiving as selfless and unreserved as the Father's original self-surrender. Proceeding from them both, as their subsistent "We", there breathe the "Spirit" who is common to both: as the essence of love, he maintains the infinite difference between them, seals it and, since he is the one Spirit of them both, bridges it" (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol IV, L'Azione, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, pp. 301- 302 The bold is mine). "It should also be pointed out that this infinite distance, large enough to contain even man's sins, is also a requirement of love, because the most intimate interpenetration between the persons requires the maximum separation [Von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. II p. 258]; there could be no love if there were not also distinction between the persons, and infinite love will require infinite distance" (John C. Médaille, "The Trinity as the Pattern of the World in the Theo-Drama", http://www.medaille.com/freedom.htm). "On the other hand, man was created to be integrated in Christ, and, therefore, in Saint Trinity’s life. Whatever be the retirement of the sinful man, in the care of God, it is always less deep than the distance of the Son in relation to the Father, in his kenotic emptying (Phil II, 7) and from the misery of his "abandon" (Mt XXVII, 46). This is the proper aspect in the economy of redemption in the distinction of the Persons in the Saint Trinity, that, on the other hand, are perfectly united in the identity of a same nature and of an infinite love" (Urs von Balthasar, Alcune Questioni Riguardanti la Cristologia, IV, D, 8, in La Civiltà Cattolica, n0 3129 - 1 - Nov. - 1980. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani, Ed. San Paolo, p. 242). In other words, the infinite love would have, as a condition, an infinite retirement – an infinite separation – between Father and Son, so large retirement which could contain even sin within it. d) Kenosis, Creation and Redemption in Urs von Balthasar Since God is Love, and a Love that wants to empty itself thoroughly in the Other, to literally annihilate itself, the existence of persons in the Divinity – understood as a kenotic becoming – would be a necessary demand. Even more. It would be necessary the existence of the absolute alterity, which would contain the totality of the world, including sins, so that there can be the absolute retirement between goodness and sin, between Divinity and the Other. It is the love of God and his absolute liberty that would demand the world of creation. The world not only is creation ex-nihilo – from the nothingness – but also created for the nothingness, outside the divine love. “Scoto Erígena speaks in radical terms, above all, under influence of Areopagita, Scoto Erígena, for whom the nothingness from which God created the world is its own super-nothingness (or over being).” (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. II, Jaca Book, 1992, p.251) “We spoke of a first “kenosis” of the Father in his self-disappropriation in the “generation” of the equiessential Son, this first kenosis gets amplified as if by itself to all Trinity, from the moment in which the Son could not be equiessential to the Father but in the self-disappropriation of himself, and since the moment in which their “WE”, the Spirit, likewise, could only be God if He personally sealed this self-disappropriation, identical in the Father and in the Son, with the will that nothing would be “for oneself” as well as (according to what shows his revelation to the world) pure communication and gift of love between Father and Son (Jo XIV, 26; XVI, 13-15). With this primordial kenosis, the other kenoses of God in he world became radically possible, which are then pure consequences of this [first kenosis]: the first kenosis as a “self-delimitation” of the Trine God, because of the liberty given to the creatures, and the second, as a deeper “self-delimitation” of the very Trine God by means of his pact, which from the part of God is, in principle, not cancelable, do then Israel whatever it wills, and the third, not only Christologic but entirely Trinitarian, because of the incarnation not only of the Son, who manifests his radical eucharistic behavior in the pro nobis of the cross and of resurrection” (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. II, Le Persone del Dramma, L' Uomo in Dio, Jaca Book, 1992 , p.308). Piero Coda, studying the subject of creation, and basing himself evidently and osmotically on von Balthasar and on Bulgakov, says that Creation is explained by the kenosis of God. [You certainly noticed, dr. Papetti, how all these modernist theologians “kenotize” themselves mutually, emptying their heresies into one another]. “Creation, indeed, under the light of the event of the Crucified/Resurrected, may be seen and deepen as kenosis, and therefore, the not-being of God’s love. Analogously to what happens among the divine Persons in the midst of the Trinity. With the only difference that, in creation, this occurs by means of God towards that which is not God, or even better, towards that which, by itself, simply is not. In the optics of agape we can think in reformulating the traditional principle of creatio ex nihilo, speaking of an ex nihilo amoris in the sense that the “nothingness” from which God creates is the kenosis of agape which God freely lives at the moment in which he gives the being to the Other-of-himself, that which by itself is not” "(Piero Coda, Questio de Alteritate in divinis, Agostino, Tomaso, Hegel, http://mondodomani.org p. 11) And Piero Coda also says that this kenotic doctrine of Trinity allows the existence of the possibility of a space, before, “the reality of the negative as rupture and as sin”. “Thus, the possibility and the very reality of the negative as rupture and as sin finds space of reality and of redemption within the Trinitarian distinction which over-embrace” "(Piero Coda., Questio de Alteritate in divinis, Agostino, Tomaso, Hegel, http://mondodomani.org p. 11) Von Balthasar writes, answering to Hegel in the interlineations: “That God (as Father) may give another his divinity and that God (as Son) does not have it solely as if borrowed, but possesses it in “equality of essence”, denotes such an unthinkable and unsurpassable “separation” of God from Himself, that all other separations in such a way were made possible (through this one!), be it even the bitterest and most obscure one, can only be verified inside this one. And despite the very communication is an event of absolute love, whose happiness consists on the giveaway not only of something of Himself, but simply of Himself. If both things latch on with a single look, all that was said does not allow one to see Trinity unilaterally as a “game” of an absolute “beatitude”, which abstracts from the real pain, therefore not provided of the “seriousness” of division and death” (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. IV, L'Azione Jaca Book, 1995, pp. 302-303, apud Piero Coda, apud P. Coda, Questio de Alteritate in divinis, Agostino, Tomaso, Hegel, http://mondodomani.org p. 11-12). If one cannot conceive God as absolute beatitude without “division and death”, would there be then evil and sin in God? It seems impossible not to get to this absurd conclusion. Creation has, according to von Balthasar, an intimate relationship with the kenotic process in Divinity. “The infinite distance between God and the world is originated in that between God and God”. (Von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. II, Le Persone del Dramma. L'Uomo in Dio, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p 252). Therefore, to Von Balthasar, one has a God who is not simply “absolutely other”, but also homely colligated to his creation. That which was created is not absolutely foreign in relation to that which was generated. “If in the eternal life of God there is no becoming – [Now there is no becoming in God anymore?] – but nevertheless there is the always more, the continuous surprise of love, the being always every time single of many “points of view”, then the creatural becoming is the approximation that is maximally possible to such an unattainable vitality” (Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrammatica, Vol. V, L'Ultimo Atto, Jaca Book, Milano, 1995, p. 77). Besides, a theologian of much diverse trend than Piero Coda’s, such as the ex-friar Leonardo Boff, inspired in Moltmann’s theology – the osmosis between pantheism and Catholicism, unfortunately fulfilled now, after Vatican II – asserted that Creation would be something necessary to Divinity. “God is the community [Sic!?] of People, and not only the One. Its unity exists in the form of communion (commom – union) of the divine Three with themselves and with the history. There is a Trinitarian history. The Son’s and the Spirit’s missions introduce creation in the Trinitarian process. Trinity constitutes then an open mystery. The unity, fruit pf the communion, includes humanity and creation, thus, all will be eschatologically unified in the Trinity” (Leonardo Boff, A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Libertação, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1986, pp. 152-153). By means of creation, as a kenotic giveaway of Divinity, there would be a revelation of God himself through his “Presence” in creation. Revelation through creation would not consist in the rational discovery of the invisible qualities of God made visible in creation, as one finds out the qualities of a cause by its effects. The cosmic revelation would be the very God, who gives Himself to the creatures, through of his exodus, and which, by evolution, buds in history with the appearance of man. In the cosmic revelation, such as in history, there would be an “Alliance” and a way of liberation of the very Divinity expelled in the material world. “We glimpse with increasing clearness that God and the World are not realities that simply oppose themselves as immanence and transcendence, time and eternity, creature and Creator. A static view of the being propitiated this kind of metaphysics of representation. If we introduce, though, the categories of history, process, liberty, etc. then pops up the dynamism, the play of relations, the dialectics of mutual inclusion. The world emerges not as a mere exteriorization of God, but as a receptacle of his self-communication. The world begins to belong to Trine God’s history” (L Boff, A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Liberdade, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1986, pp. 143-144). From osmosis to osmosis, one reaches Tritheism, Pantheism and Gnosis. The fall of Divinity in the world of creation would allow that there would be first a cosmic revelation, and afterwards a revelation in history and by history, because history is the stage that follows the cosmic stage. Thence said Daniélou and Dupuis: “It is about a “cosmic alliance”, but the permanence that it promises is not due to natural laws, but to the loyalty (‘emet’) of the living God. Such alliance is not part of natural history, but of a history of salvation. God’s loyalty in the cosmic order is, to Israel, the guarantee of a loyalty in the historical order. This is how Paul will conceive the cosmic order, when he speaks of a permanent revelation of God through the cosmos addressed to all people. J. Daniélou comments: “The cosmic religion is not natural religion, in the sense that it is outside of the effective and concrete supernatural order. […] It is natural simply because it is by means of its action in the cosmos and of its appeal to conscience, that the one God is known. The cosmic alliance is an alliance of grace. But this alliance is still imperfect, because God only reveals himself through the cosmos […]”. “And [Daniélou] adds: “The cosmic alliance is already a supernatural alliance, and it is not of diverse order from Mosaic’s or Christian’s alliance” (Father Jacques Dupuis, Rumo a uma Teologia Cristã do Pluralismo Religioso Paulinas, São Paulo,1999, p. 56). In history, the same process of personal kenosis of the Trinity would repeat, but now between the divine Persons and the human persons. As the Persons in God, the human person would not be a being, but a movement, a becoming. God would give himself kenotically in every human person, divinizing man. Maurice Zundel adopts this doctrine as well; he who was so friend of Paul VI to the point of being invited to preach spiritual exercises to the Pope and the Cardinals in the Vatican, in 1972: “It is then sure that the meeting with oneself concurs with the meeting with God, because, for Saint Augustine, as for us, He is “the Beauty so antique and so new”. Thereby, it does not matter how one names him – be Truth, Beauty, silent Music, the Ineffable, the “X”, the Omega – it does not matter, since one finds him as the “Presence” – [would it be the cabalistic Schechinah?] – which sets us free from ourselves and allows us to became, for the others, a space – [a kenotic nothingness?] – with no boundaries, where they can be housed” (M Zundel, Je est un Autre, ed.Anne Sigier, Québec, 1997, p. 23). And Zundel often repeats in his books that a transcendent God, Lord of the man and of the universe is an idol, a pharaoh. For him, God is absolutely immanent. God is the man. And Zundel was a master a lot admired by Paul VI… Also the Theology of Liberation, through the speech of the ex-Friar Leonardo Boff, accepts that the World is God in becoming, and that all Cosmos, along with all humanity, heads towards christification or to the universal divinization. We will all become God: “All cosmos is called to a total christification and divinization. The Cosmos is part of the very history of God” (Leonardo Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total Cristificação e Divinização", Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p. 58). Boff believed, as Teilhard de Chardin, that “The matter is then carrier of a divine reality, it is sacramental” (L. Boff, O Pai Nosso, Vozes, Petrópolis, p, 93). To Boff, as to Teilhard de Chardin, evolution comes from cosmogenesis to biogenesis, to anthropogenesis, to finally reach christogenesis: “In man, matter gets to self-conscience. And self-conscience awakens to the conscience of the Absolute. In one man, self-conscience reached the point of identifying itself with the Absolute, and his name was Jesus Christ” (L. Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total cristificação e divinização", Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p.59). And ex-Friar Boff also said: “Man is called to be something greater, that is to say, to be assumed by God in such a way that, similarly to Jesus Christ, God-man, God be all in all things, and must become with man an unmistakable, immutable, indivisible and inseparable unity. The Cosmos is consecrated to participate of this divinization and sanctification” (L Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total Cristificação e Divinização, Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p. 59). “... God and creature are not before one another, but one inside the other” (L. Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total Cristificação e Divinização, Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p. 59). “The future of the world consists that it may become God’s body” (L. Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total Cristificação e Divinização, Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p. 60). “The universe’s fate is to participate of God’s very inmost history” (L. Boff, O Futuro do Mundo: Total Cristificação e Divinização, Revista de Cultura, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1972, p. 67). And one may not intend to interpret this “participate” in an analogous sense, for Boff makes clear, in other books and excepts, that he understands that the world will become God. In the book “O Destino do Homem e do Mundo” [Man’s and World’s Fate], Boff wrote: “Christian faith makes clear the latent sense perceived into life. Having faith consists on saying a Yes and an Amen to world’s goodness. It is to choose for a full and radical sense which wins over the absurd. So, Christian faith asserts that the world heads not towards a cosmic catastrophe, but towards its plenitude. The end of the world (the goal of the world) consists on a indivisible interpenetration with God. The fate of creation is to be in such a way penetrated by God that He [God] will constitute his most inmost essence “(Leonardo Boff, O Destino do Homem e do Mundo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1973, p. 23). And even clearer than that: “the vocation to which the world is called is sublime: the very God” (L Boff, O Destino do Homem e do Mundo, Vozes , Petrópolis, 1973, p. 23). There could be given numberless quotations of the Gnosis in Leonardo Boff, for which he was never condemned, not even censured, for he only repeated what he has learnt with the theologians of the modernist New Theology that triumphed in Vatican II. Let us see this excerpt as well: “Man is fated to be one with God and by means of that being totally divinized. He will burst forth in plenitude, achiever of all dynamisms of his existence. He would not state so if he would not have seen it accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth, dead and resurrected. He [Jesus] was that human being that performed man’s latent possibility of becoming one with Divinity. Man’s total hominization assumes his divinization. That means: man, in order to become truly himself, must be able to accomplish the maxim capacity inscribed in his nature of being one with God, with no division, no mutation, and no confusion. Now, in Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity saw this possibility accomplished. That is why it was by the community of faith of once, and today, loved as being the incarnated God, the God with us, l'Ecce Homo" (L. Boff, O Destino do Homem e do Mundo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1973, p. 28). “The future of Jesus Christ is the future of every single man. If he is our brother, hence it means that we possess the same possibility as him to be assumed by God and become one-with-him. One day, to the term hominization, this possibility of ours will be updated. Then, each one in his own way will be like Jesus Christ: remaining man but inserted in the mystery of the very God” (L Boff, O Destino do Homem e do Mundo, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1973, p. 29). These statements of L. Boff make clear certain texts from Vatican II such as, for example, that from Gaudium et Spes which we mentioned previously, which asserts that God has sown a Godlike seed in man (Cfr. Gaudium et Spes, n.3). Or that mysterious statement which says that the revelation of Christ consists on the revelation of the mystery of man to man. Is it necessary to stress that Gnose and Cabala teach just like von Balthasar, Teilhard, or Boff express themselves? This fusion of creation within the very Trinitarian divinity is clearly heretical and which penetrates, sometimes disguisedly and sometimes openly, inside modern Theology and the so-called New Theology. And Vatican II not only refused to condemn this heresy, but, unfortunately, suffered from its influence, to the point of Paul VI proclaims: “Humanists of the 20th century, recognize that We also have the cult of man”. Creation would be the result of the absolute kenosis of Trine God who empties himself in the world. And that would be the created God, or the God in becoming. The created universe would absolutely be the Other of God, but the Other in God, in Trinitarian God, who annihilates himself to give his life away for love. Finally, kenosis would explain crucifixion. “The economy of salvation manifests that the eternal Son assumes in his own way the “kenotic” event of birth, human life and death on the cross.” (Urs Von Balthasar, Teologia - Cristologia - Antropologia, I, C. 3, in La Civiltà Cattolica, n. 3181 (10 gen. 1983), pg. 50-65. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 241) Urs Von Balthasar speaks of the abandon of God suffered by Christ, on the cross, as a kenotic act necessary to divinize man. On Christ’s death, a christic man-divinizer kenosis would have taken place. This kenosis would be complete by resurrection, which closes the kenotic circle, by Christ’s return to Divinity and to Trinity. This would be the mysterious “paschal mystery”, man’s passage from the current state to the divine state. “This happening, which is verified between Father and Son, would bud the very giveaway, the Spirit that houses those who are abandoned, who justifies the impious and vivificates the death. The God who abandons and the God who is abandoned are one only thing in the Spirit of dedication. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son because he derives from the derelictio Jesus” (Jürgen Moltmann, Prospettive dell'odierna teologia della Croce, in Aa. vv., Sulla teologica della croce, Queriniana, Brescia 1974, pg. 42-46. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, Milano, 2000, pg. 237). According to the same unsuspicious Leonardo Boff, the kenosis of von Balthasar opposes itself to the Aristotelic image of God as immutable being. “Since its beginning, says Balthasar, incarnation itself has a “passional” character, that is, it is directed to passion. Incarnation means that God assumes the totality of the human experience, the experience of sin and hell. Christ assumed all that throughout his life until his death, experience that we all must have of God’s abandon that reaches the descent to hell, which is equivalent to fell absolutely condemned. Due to this, the passion of this world would turn into Christ’s passion. This kenosis implies in a change on God’s image, which was disfigured by the Greek static conception of the “Deus inmovens”. “(LEONARDO BOFF, "La cruz no es algo a entender, sino a assumir como escándalo", http://www.mercaba.org/FICHAS/JESUS/pasion_de_cristo_05.htm , the boldface is mine). [And how these ideas recall Sabbatai Tzevi ‘s antinomist doctrine! (Cfr. Gerschom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah Princeton University Press, 1975] “On the other hand, man was created to be integrated into Christ, and, therefore, in the way of the holy Trinity. Whatever may be the distance of the sinner man from the care of God, it is always less deep than the detachment of the Son in relation to the Father in his kenotic emptying (Phil 2,7) and in the misery of the “abandon” (Mt 27, 46). This is the very aspect of redemptions’ economy in the distinction of the Persons in the holy Trinity, that, on the other hand, are perfectly united in the identity of a same nature and an endless love” (Urs Von Balthasar, Alcune questioni riguardanti la cristologia, IV, D.8, in La Civiltà Cattolica, n. 3129 (1 nov. 1980), pg 50-65. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 242). “God’s life, which is expressed in the relation of the three divine hypostases – as if it reveals us the incarnation and death on the cross of the Verb made man – is thus pierced by this kenosis which is the emptying of oneself for love and that, logically, is continuous and perfectly overridden by infinite beatitude: so much that, properly, one cannot speak of God’s sacrifice and suffering, but of perfect love” (Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 246). "Hans Urs von Balthasar in Mysterium Paschale, used the kenotic theme to create his beautiful spiritual theology of the paschal mystery of Christ's death and resurrection. For Balthasar, the divine drama is enacted on the stage of earth; even the stroke of the spear into Christ's side that poured out blood and water is a kenosis of the divine compassion from the heart, the rachamim, the source of the deepest affections."[And Rachamin is the name of the sixth sephirotic emanation in Jewish Cabala, the cabalistic name for mercy] (John B. Lounibos, Self-emptying in Christian and Buddhist Spirituality, http://www.iona.edu/academic/arts_sci/orgs/pastoral/SELF_EMPTYING.html. The bold is mine). “Under this perspective, revelation is nothing but the movement of the self-communication of the only divine Subject (evident Hegelian influence) by means of his “three distinct ways of being” (drei Seinsweisen): Barth prefers this designation to that classic “persons”, because this term – given the semantic evolution that took place in the modern age, coming to name the self-conscious and autonomous subject – would lead to tritheism. That is a position that also the catholic K. Rahner shares with Barth. Therefore, the Christian God is the only Lord while He is Revelator, Revelation and Revealed” (Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 233 - 234). Observe that, in this way, one accepts, with no restrictions, the modernist thesis that revelation does not consist on truths, but on the very divine reality in itself. What Vatican II did not repel, but accepted. In history, the transcendent God would remain immanent, in order to turn creation divine. “Contemporaneous theology, with effect from Karl Rahner above all, speaks of a fundamental axiom of God’s knowledge (Grundaxiom): “The Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity”. That is to say that Trinity, which reveals itself in the history of salvation, is the same immanent Trinity, such as it is in itself” (Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 13). “God possesses himself by giving himself away and only by this means. But thus, by giving himself away, he possesses himself. So it is. His self-possession is the event, is the history of a self-giving and, in this sense, it is the goal of all mere self-possession. As this history He is God, or better, this history of love is the “very God” (E. Jüngel, Dio, mistero del mondo, Queriniana, Brescia, 1982, p. 427. Apud Piero Coda, Dio Uno e Trino - Rivelazione, Esperienza e Teologia del Dio dei Cristiani. Edizioni San Paolo, terza edizione, 2000, pg. 238). In other words, God would be so immanent to man that God would be history, and history would be God in ways of kenotization for returning to the Father. That being so, revelation would then be the knowledge of God as history. From that follows the importance given to “signs of the times”, that is, to the manifestation of God in historical events, through which man’s divine experience is accomplished, in which God is revealed as reality to man, making him get to know God, and, knowing God, realize that man is God in an “exodus” stage, “heading towards” the Father. By knowing God in history, God immanent to the world and to oneself, man knows the mystery of man. Christ reveals to man the mystery of man, that is, that man is God in transition. For this reason, one could say that revelation is “historical-salvific”. Note that we have not misinterpreted that which says the famous modernist theologians in this quotation. “There is a Trinitarian history. The missions from the Son and the Holy Spirit introduce creation into the Trinitarian process. Trinity is then constituted in an open mystery. The unity, fruit of communion, includes humanity and creation; therefore, eschatologically, all will be unified in the Trinity” (L. Boff, A Trindade, a Sociedade e a Libertação, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1986, p. 153). That is to say that divine kenosis had as goal, since its beginning, man’s and world’s creation so that God, in an act of kenotic love, would die, annihilate Himself, in order to divinize man. And that is exactly what would be in the core of the mystery of revelation: “God makes man know, through his kénosis, that man, since its beginning, was kenotically conceived, and that exactly at this exteriorization and this poverty, he will be rich and glorious, and that it is already like this” (Piero Coda, id., p. 105). From all this quotations, it gets crystal clear that divine revelation would not consist on word which communicate truths, but revelation would be the kenotic communication of the very God to man. Christ’s death – the literal annihilation of divinity – would have allowed man’s divinization. Revelation would be the communication of divinity to man, by means of the Son, on the Cross, and through the paschal mystery, passage from the human state to the divine one. If creation was a kenotic act from the Trinity, through the missions of the Son and of the Holy Spirit aiming to divinize man and the universe, the revelation of the mystery of God by Christ is also the revelation of the mystery of man, a God in potency. Wherefore revelation would not be reserved to the prophets or the elected apostles, but would be granted to every man: “The paternity of God that Jesus revels is, thus, universal and, at the very same time, personalizer in the sense that it touches every single human person in its concrete condition” (Piero Coda, La Paternità di Dio, il Grido di Giobbe e l'incontro tra le Religioni, http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthal/pc01.htm p. 4). This act of kenotic love from God, which God’s self-giving reveals, should be repeated by the Church and by other men in an “opening” that would empty the Church and men into the “other”. All churches should be kenotically open, to be accomplished in its self-annihilation. The great sin, according to the Vatican II, would be not being “open”, not practicing the mysterious kenotic self-annihilation. The Catholic Church, by kenotic love, should, also herself, be self-annihilated in a “mysterious process of self-demolition”… to use the expression employed by Paul VI when analyzing Vatican II post-conciliar achievements. And one cannot deny that this kenotic doctrine has inspired certain texts from the Vatican II: “In Christ, the relationship between God and humankind, and intersubjective relationships among people, have been taken into, revealed and redeemed in the realm of trinitarian reciprocity. In other words, they participate in the divine life which subsists between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As Vatican II’s document on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes 24, teaches, this reciprocity is realised "through the sincere gift of self" (cf. Lk 17:33) that Christ Jesus revealed and realised in fullness in the kenosis of abandonment and death on the cross”. (Piero Coda, "The Ecclesial Movements - gift of the Spirit for our times", Theological-Pastoral Congress, 26-28 June 2001 - Castel Gandolfo, http://www.focolare.org/en/sif/2001/20010707e_f.html). Ecumenism is the natural and logic outcome from this doctrine of universal revelation, such as the modernists professed it. However, Coda explains under the light – Light? – of the kenotic doctrine, how the Church of the future will be: “(…) divine revelation consists on the calling of all men to adore, in the liberty of adhesion to the truth, the only true God and to live in peace, accomplishments of universal fraternity. But throughout the centuries, the monotheist traditions gave a biased interpretation to the unicity of God and the universality of salvation in an exclusivist fashion: in the sense that each one of them has self-judged and self-configured as holder of the Word of revelation (and of its fulfillment) excluding the others. From that follows the impossibility in comprehending the other / the diverse on its alterity/diversity and ,at the same time, in the communion and in the company of the only source and only goal in history: which is exactly God One and Only, who has created us and who self-reveals housing us within himself, in eternal life” (Piero Coda, La Paternità di Dio, il Grido di Giobbe e l Íncontro tar le Religioni, http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthal/pc01.htm p. 9.). From this absolutely modernist notion of revelation, Piero Coda draws the conclusion that Vatican II opened the path for a change of the times, in which the Religion of Tomorrow will spring, along with its Spiritual Church, such as all Gnostics in history had proclaimed: “The times – under the action of the Spirit of God who act over the hearts of men and in the history of populations and cultures – are today getting mature and propitiating a change of character of epoch. As Christians and Catholics, we cannot help thinking about what the II Vatican Council has stood for, and stands for Catholic Church’s self-knowledge. On the other hand, the planetization of human family – from the social, economic, political, cultural and spiritual points of view – is an unstoppable event: even if brings along with itself – if bad comprehended and conducted – the jeopardy of destruction of the many identities. In such situation, the “signs of the times” and the Spirit of God drive the monotheist religions – since its interior, and in the valorization of its own specific identities – to re-understand the unicity/unity of God not as a foundation of exclusivism anymore, but – according to the true and original meaning from the very God – as a warranty for a relational pluralism which calls all human creatures to the unity of peace in the liberty of diverse identities, under the regard of the only God” (Piero Coda, La Paternità di Dio, il Grido di Giobbe e l' Incontro tar le Religioni, http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthal/pc01.htm p. 9). This ecumenical “Church” of elastic and chameleonic faith, is not the Church of Jesus Christ. These Modernist theologians are members of a Sect which aims to destroy the Catholic Church. And they intend to accomplish this destruction in the name of the II Vatican Council which, according to them, has turned History and Religion upside down. Exactly as the Modernists desired. And finally, Piero Coda speaks of “a new advent of the very God according to the specificity of each religion” (P. Coda , La Paternità di Dio, il Grido di Giobbe e l' Incontro tar le Religioni, http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthal/pc01.htm p. 12). If this “advent” is to happen, which the Scriptures do not talk about, one might inquire whether it would not be the advent of the Antichrist. From all this kenotic doctrine, one necessarily deduces that revelation does not consist on truths, to which human intellect should accept, but, as matter of fact, on the communication of the very divine res [divinizer of man]. Exactly like the modernists used to say. And exactly like the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia vouches.
XIV - The Revelation according to Vatican II
"Poi fummo dentro al soglio della porta
["When we had crossed the
threshold of the door We finally got to the point where we should analyze the five notes with which Istituto Paolo VI characterizes revelation according to Vatican II. These five notes were presented by the erudite theological report elaborated by Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia, to prove that the new concept of Revelation, according to Vatican II Dei Verbum document, would not be modernist. Firstly it is necessary to remember that one of the writers of this conciliar document – as it is said - was Father Henri de Lubac, one of the leaders of the so-called New Theology (Cfr. Jean Pierre Wagner, Henri de Lubac, Cerf, Paris, 2001, p. 26). In such case, we would be surprised if the document Dei Verbum would not reflect, in some way, the thought of the New Theology, which was a sort of “combed” modernism, “to make the crooked way look right”... Let's see, then, these five notes presented by the erudite theological report elaborated by Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia. The aforesaid theological report states in its first note: “As for the doctrinal profile, one can summarize the conciliate thinking concerning the concept of Revelation in the following items:” “a) The way that the notion tagged along in the conscience of the Church is usually measured and concisely expressed by saying that there has been a passage from an intellectualistic conception to a personalistic historic-salvific conception of Revelation.” “The intellectualistic conception understands Revelation as the communication of truths from God to the human intellect, supported by freedom and lightened up by grace.” “The historical-salvific conception sees Revelation as a self-manifestation of God Himself in history and in man’s history, through the mission of Jesus and of the Spirit.” “There is no opposition, evidently, between these two conceptions, since the second does not exclude, but integrates the first. The self-revelation of God, indeed, also implies in a communication of truths at the intellectual level, recognizable from the poetic point of view.” “Nevertheless, there is also diversity between these two perspectives. The second overcomes the first, for the terms of the event of Revelation are not anymore the truths on one side and the human intellect on the other, but are, on one side, God freely present in Jesus’ history and in the history of the Spirit given by Jesus, and on the other side, the man who is called to live his history freely as Spirit’s history, which “makes memory” of the history and the eschatological event of Christ.” [Here finishes the first note of the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia]. Reply - Analysis Istituto Paolo VI acknowledges, therefore, that Vatican II admitted a renewed concept of revelation that, in the conclusion of the erudite theological report, however, is qualified as new. Therefore, this new concept of revelation from Vatican II does not follow the concept of revelation that the Church has always taught: the revelation is composed of truths that God revealed us about Himself. On the contrary, Istituto Paolo VI confesses that revelation, according to Vatican II, is no longer “intellectualistic”, but it is, instead, “historical-salvific”. According to the erudite theological Report in focus, “The historical-salvific conception sees Revelation as a self-manifestation of God Himself in history and in man’s history, through the mission of Jesus and of the Spirit”. Therefore, Istituto Paolo VI's report admits that it has passed from the concept of revelation of truths to a “new” concept of revelation that would be exactly the one precognized by the Modernists and Neo Modernists: the revelation as a self-manifestation of God Himself in History and through History. What does it mean to say that Revelation is done through a self-manifestation of God Himself, if it does not mean that, in revelation, one would find, instead of truths, the very divine res that would manifest itself in creation and in history? This interpretation is confirmed by the text of the Lesson given to Ferrara's professors and published in the Carlo Caffarra’s Cultural Catholic Center, in which, after an acceptable exposition of revelation, it ends up saying that, according to the Vatican II, revelation should not be understood as a “mere divine instruction”, and that it is a redeemer revelation, by itself: "The term “Revelation” infers, thus, a fact: God allows man to know Him and His project towards him. This project is that man should take part in the divine nature itself. The “Revelation therefore is inseparably theological: it is the proper God that reveals Himself, and anthropological: it is the proper God that reveals man his destiny”. "The word “Revelation” – this is a central point – is not a pure speech of words in the sense that God reveals Himself and makes one acknowledge the mystery of His will by speaking to man only about Himself and about the mystery of His will. But “Revelation” infers also, beforehand, a complex of acts carried out by the very God; it infers a set of events to which the very God is responsible and performer. 'It is through such acts that God reveals Himself and makes known the mystery of His will. But always in order to have a concept of “Revelation” as precise as possible, and at this point it is necessary to reflect upon it”. (Centro Culturale Cattolico Carlo Caffarra http://www.caffarra.it LA RIVELAZIONE DIVINA, "Cristo e la divina Scrittura sono il rimedio d’ogni disgusto", lesson given to professors. Ferrara 19-02-03. The bold is mine and the underscore is from the original) And up to this point, there would be nothing to criticize in this text. But the explanation next brings up the modernist novelty about revelation, that it would be redeemer by itself: "Listening to what was said up to now, I would not wish you to think this way: God makes me know Himself and His project over man through facts and words. The accomplishment of the divine project over man, more precisely of His will of letting man take part of His divine nature, is put to them, as we say, after God has spoken to them through words and acts. It reduces “Revelation” to a mere “divine instruction”. Things are not like this. God reveals Himself and allows one to know... accomplishing this very project: God reveals by accomplishing what He reveals and accomplishes by revealing Himself. S. Thomas says stupendously: “dicere Dei est facere”. [in 1Cor 1, lect.2, n.1; and also in Ps 32,9]. "Revelation”, therefore, is not a pure fact of knowledge; it is an integral giving that God accomplishes by Himself to man. "Now we can understand the following Vatican II text: “This plan of Revelation is realized by deeds and words having in inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them”. (Centro Culturale Cattolico Carlo Caffarra http://www.caffarra.it LA RIVELAZIONE DIVINA, "Cristo e la divina Scrittura sono il rimedio d’ogni disgusto", lesson given to professors. Ferrara 19-02-03. The bold is mine and the underscore is from the original) Therefore, according to Carlo Caffarra's Cultural Catholic Center explanation, revelation according to Vatican II would be: 1) of the proper divine res and not as much of words or truths to be known; revelation would not be a “mere divine instruction” (And this statement completely agrees with what was expressed in the document from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia). 2) When God reveals Himself he accomplishes his goal in self-revealing, that is, the fate of man of “taking part of the divine nature” (And in this point Carlo Caffarra's Cultural Catholic Center is less radical than the modernists and neo modernists who say that the final goal is man’s deification). 3) By revealing himself in history, God accomplishes the salvation. The revelation, by itself, is salvation. The process of the revelation is historical salvific. But this was exactly, I repeat, the doctrine of the modernist gnostics, be them Catholics, Protestants or Schismatic: the revelation is a knowledge that is redeemer ,by itself. It is the Gnosis that states that the Divinity has fallen down into the material world, and that, through evolution, has generated man, who would be Divinity getting conscious about himself, and the man, through History, would become God’s deliverer. This is the gnostic sense of the expression that God reveals Himself in history and through history. The history of mankind would be the history of the revelation and deliverance of the divine “Presence” - the Schechinah – imprisoned in the cosmos and in the heart of man. History, for Gnosis, is only a stage of the process of deliverance of Divinity buried in the cosmos. The expression of “God reveals himself in history”, therefore, tastes Gnostic. When talking about Boehme's doctrine, Alexander Koyré wrote: "The revelation of God, which concurs in man with the revelation of the Universe in him, with his own revelation to himself, is linked to the revelation of the scriptures and cannot it be accomplished under the direct impulse, God’s inspiration, the Holy Spirit’s?” "(...) At heart, for him [Boheme], the Bible is not indispensable, and the positive religions do not have but a very restricted value, when they have some value, and when this value is not negative at all. Personal to each one, as long as it is profound and sincere, every law is good; every one of them can lead to salvation” (Alexandre Koyré, Vrin, Paris, 1971, p.498). Also the pietist and pre-romantic Herder, follower of Jacob Boheme's Gnosis, used to say that the history is the “way of God through nature” (Cfr. Ladislao Mittner, Dal Pietismo al Romanticismo, Einaudi, Milano1964, p. 311). And the gnostic Bulgakov, so praised by the modernists, thought that the world is “God created”, “God in becoming” (Cfr. Piero Coda, L'Altro di Dio, ed cit. p. 44, note 56). As we have already seen, to Bulgakov, as to the Kabala, creation is “God's exodus”. “This exit of God outwards himself is the creation as an eternal act of the creator God” (Sergej N. Bulgakov, L 'Agnello di Dio. Il Mistero del Verbo Incarnato.p. 164, 182-183, apud Graziano Lingua, Kénosis di Dio e Santità della Materia. la sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 61). Opening the Great Trilogy, Bulgakov makes a statement that could be used as a synthesis of his position: “The Absolute and the Transcendent are deeper, richer in content than the relative and the immanent. Wherefore, they are their source. They are the mystery of which the relative and the immanent constitute the revelation; and this is the self-revelation in relation to the Absolute” (Sergej N. Bulgakov, Il Paraclito, Ymca, Bologna, 1987, p. 594, apud Graziano Lingua, Kénosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, la sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 51). It is well known the Teilhardian conception of creation as a manifestation of God through cosmogenesis, noogenesis, and through christogenesis, when, in the end of history, everything and everyone would converge to the Christ Omega. That is, the esoteric Panchristism of Maurice Blondel. Bulgakov also defends a similar doctrine: "Bulgakov distinguishes, therefore, a scale that parts from the inorganical world, goes through the individuality of the animal world, to get to the human hypostasis; the degrees that form it are not springs, but they give life to a well connected pan-organism” (Graziano Lingua, Kénosis di Dio e Santità della Materia, la sofiologia di Sergej N. Bulgakov, Ed. Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2.000, p. 162). And not only creation would be a self-revelation of God, but History, the stage which follows creation, would be a self-manifestation, or the self-revelation of God through man's action. We also have already seen how, to certain theologians of the International Modernist Sect, who are juts like Bulgakov, in history, the human person would head towards an identification with all mankind through the Person of Christ, which will be, in the end of history, everything in everyone, revealing himself and redeeming everyone, because he would save the mankind-man. The self-revelation through God's self-manifestation in history, and through history, will deify all men, because all and each one of them will be mankind-men. It would be still necessary to remember that the “historical-salvific” conception of revelation was adopted by the liberal theologians of Protestantism, such as, for example, Oscal Culmann and by the “World Council of the Churches”. It is a concept of revelation completely in agreement with the concept expressed by the Modernists and by the New Theology. For all these Modernist systems, Gnostics or Philo-Gnostics, in creation and in history, it would be the divine res itself that self-reveals. How can the Vatican II – according to the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI – repeat this “new” notion of revelation as a self-manifestation of God in history, which is a reproduction, with new terms, of a feature of the oldest Gnostic doctrine? What difference would there be between this notion, that sees “revelation as a self-manifestation of God Himself to history and in man’s history”, and the Romantic Gnostic conception – which is at the modernism’s heart – which sees History as a self-manifestation of God? They seem to me to be exactly the same thing. Or, at least, the similitude is so great that it is hard to tell them apart. The only reservation is that, afterwards, it admits that besides the divine res, truths are also revealed, a restriction that has already been made by the New Theology. Now, thus, the II Vatican Council when expressing itself in not such a clear way, or even, sometimes, intentionally ambiguously, allowed certain theologians to interpret a new concept of revelation: that the revelation would happen through a self-revelation of God in creation and in history. And, if this is true, the Vatican II has either taught a Gnostic concept of revelation, or wanted to teach a weird doctrine in such an ambiguous way that it gives room to confusion. In both interpretations, this way of classifying the revelation is very criticizable, if not condemnable. Anyway, there is not doubt then that, according to the alleged from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia, as well as for Carlo Caffara’s Cultural Catholic Center, the new concept of revelation of Vatican II does not consist on truths that one must be known and believed about God's nature, but it is the very God who reveals Himself in history, and by revealing Himself, redeems man. At least this is the interpretation of these two Institutes about the new concept of revelation of the Vatican II. If this modernist interpretation was possible, it is because, at least, the II Vatican Council expressed itself ambiguously. Now, a Council has no right to express itself so ambiguously. And, even less, so modernistically. *** The erudite theologian report that you sir had the kindness of sending us admits frankly that revelation is mostly of God himself, that is to say, of the very divine res, and not much of truths about the Divinity, as it has been taught by Modernism and New Theology, It is true that the erudite Report points out that “The self-revelation of God, indeed, also implies in a communication of truths at the intellectual level, recognizable from the poetic point of view” (the bold is mine). Oppositely to the radical or integralist Modernism, Vatican II admits truths in the content of the revelation. But, what does it mean that these truths would be “at the intellectual level and recognizable from the poetic point of view”? How, from the poetic point of view? Is it the intellectual level that is recognizable from the poetic point of view, or is the report referring to the truths? The composition of the erudite report is not very clear and it generates confusion. But, anyway, the adjective poetic, be it applied to the “intellectual level”, or directly towards the revealed truths, it transforms them into fables, or metaphors and not “tout court” objective truths anymore. Are then the truths of revelation nothing but fables or poetic metaphores? But S. Pius X, in the Pascendi, wrote that: "Do we inquire concerning inspiration?” “Inspiration, they reply, is distinguished only by its vehemence from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him by words or writing. It is something like what happens in poetic inspiration, of which it has been said: There is God in us, and when he stirreth he sets us afire. And it is precisely in this sense that God is said to be the origin of the inspiration of the Sacred Books" (S. Pius X, Pascendi, n.22). The erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI, by saying that the truths of the revelation are “at the intellectual level and recognizable from the poetic point of view”, falls precisely under the condemnation that S. Pius X did to Modernism at this point. The erudite Report from Istituto Paolo VI, by saying that the inspiration of the truths of the revelation must be seen “at the intellectual level and recognizable from the poetic point of view”, lowers revelation of divine truths to the level of symbols, myths, fables or of “legendary stories”, as Father Lagrange would say. Therefore, that they would not be properly truths. And this lowering is unacceptable. The erudite report imputes this lowering of the revealed truths to the new concept of revelation of Vatican II. If so it is, the new concept of revelation of Vatican II is modernist, or, at least, semi-modernist. And, then, one must conclude that what Jean Guitton said was true, when he stated that Vatican II taught doctrines that were condemned by S. Pius X for Modernism. What’s more. The erudite Report from Istituto Paolo VI, after having admitted that the new concept of revelation of Vatican II stated that the revelation was also of truths – even if they are understood in a “poetic” way – says, later on, that these truths “are not anymore the truths on one side and the human intellect on the other, but are, on one side, God freely present in Jesus’ history and in the history of the Spirit given by Jesus, and on the other side, the man”. And thus, the erudite Report reduces revelation only to the divine res, disregarding the truths that should be understood “at the intellectual level and recognizable from the poetic point of view”... For example, would the Angel’s Annunciation to the Most Holy Virgin Mary also need to be “recognized on the intellectual level and recognizable only in a poetic point of view”, or is it simply true? To the modernists, the Angel’s Annunciation to Mary ever Virgin is pure “poetry”. And this also turns Modernism heretical. If Istituto Paolo VI states that according to Vatican II, the revealed truths in the Gospel should be understood – recognized – “from a poetic point of view”, the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI would be confirming that Vatican II proclaimed a modernist concept of revelation. How could it state, then, that this very same statement, expressed by Jean Guitton, reveals “evident ignorance and bad faith”? Therefore, the new concept of revelation of Vatican II is really new, seen that the old and catholic concept stated that the content of revelation was a set of truths that God has given to the human intellect. It was Modernism and New Theology which asserted that revelation was of the very divine res, and not of truths directed to the human intellect. Once again, Jean Guitton did not lie, nor had bad faith, and neither revealed ignorance by confessing that Vatican II taught modernist doctrines condemned by S. Pius X. The erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia, under skilful formulas, so affirms. And if revelation, according to the Vatican II, is not of truths that God Himself has taught us, then the Vatican II could not make dogmatic teachings, nor could it pronounce anathemas, because the revelation would not deal with intellectual truths. The Vatican II, for coherence, should be “pastoral”. And so did John XXIII and Paul VI define: pastoral, for revelation would never allow one to define dogmas, truths that must be believed with divine faith. This first note from Istituto Paolo VI would be enough to confirm that Jean Guitton would have said the truth: that Vatican II has defended and taught the doctrines of Modernism. Though placing them under the veil of odd texts. But there are other authors that state the same conclusion, that is, that Vatican II concept of revelation, in the document Dei Verbum, is actually new. Gregory Baum and Avery Dulles – today, a Cardinal – are among these: "A remarkably informative, clear, and enthusiastic appraisal of Dei Verbum has recently come from the pen of another Council expert, Gregory Baum, O.S.A.("Vatican II's Constitution on Revelation: History and Interpretation," Theological Studies, vol. 28/1 (March 1967), pp. 51-75.) He takes the position that the heart of the document is to be found in the new concept of revelation set forth in the first chapter, namely that revelation is to be identified with the person of Jesus Christ." (Avery Dulles, S.J., "Theological Table-Talk", Theology Today, Oct/1967, http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1967/v24-3-tabletalk1.htm. The bold is mine). Consequently, the object of revelation would no longer be of truths directed by God to the human intellect, but it would be the very reality of God. Avery Dulles makes a parallel between revelation according to Vatican I and revelation according to Vatican II: "In terms which are indicative but far too crude to do justice to the complexity of the matter, one may say that Vatican I looks on revelation in a light which is intellectualistic, abstract, scholastic, and, to some extent, propositional. By contrast, the outlook of Vatican II may be aptly characterized as vitalist, concrete, biblical, and historical." (Avery Dulles, S.J., "Theological Table-Talk", Theology Today, Oct/1967, http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/oct1967/v24-3-tabletalk1.htm ).
Which of these two positions repeats what Modernism has said? Jean Guitton gave his vote, answering that Vatican II is Modernist. And even after reading Istituto Paolo VI's study, I agree with Guitton, for the first time in my life: Vatican II has a Modernist concept of revelation. And Istituto Paolo VI's report confirms me in this judgement. And Xavier Zubiri, philosopher considered a master by the Neo-Catechumenal Movement (a movement born under the Vatican II spirit), confirms that the new concept of revelation of the Vatican II defends that it is of the very divine res more than of received and intellectually transmitted truths. His books are adopted in Neo-Catechumenal Redemptoris Mater seminaries. "Zubiri understands revelation from the experience of the reconnection, like the real presence of God, as person, in the bottom of the human reality. He who receives this singular and free palpitation converts himself, because of this, in “illuminant”, but it will always be a palpitation of God since the very midst of the human spirit. If we call revelation the set of truths and words, it is because it is directed toward the others and to them they are transmitted by words; however in the primary receiver it is an interior illumination. The Revelation, nevertheless, supposes that it has been understood that the base of the divinity is a personal and free God. In the prologue to the book of Olegario González Misterio trinitario y existencia humana, Zubiri says that the proper function of the revelation is to constitute man in God, and direct his life towards Him. The Revelation is not an incorporation of a doctrine, but an incorporation of God to the human reality, an incorporation that culminates (in Christianity) in the Incarnation.” (María Lucrecia Rovaletti, "La dimensión teologal del hombre - Apuntes en torno al tema de la religación en Xavier Zubiri", note 45, ftp://www.zubiri.org/zubiri/general/xzreview/1999/rovaletti1999.doc ). In this philosopher adopted by the Neo-Catechumenals, followers and sons of the Vatican II Spirit, the new concept of revelation is clearly and well-gnostically expressed: “The Revelation is not an incorporation of a doctrine, but an incorporation of God to the human reality”. Is it something to be astonished about, the fact that Zubiri is admired and praised by the gnostics and esoterics of the guenonian line, in Brazil at least? The new concept of revelation of the Vatican II, as it is understood and taught by the ones who fervently follow the Vatican II – [like, for example, the Neo Catechumenals] – is a concept clearly gnostic and modernist, because it would be the fruit of the manifestation of the pneuma – of the divine germ - existent in the most intimate of the human nature. This revelation would be done through an interior experience, and not by words containing truths that one should believe. *** Let us see, now, the second theological note about the new concept of revelation of Vatican II, according to the erudite theological report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia. “b) A second and fundamental theological note on the renewed – [renewed?] – concept of Revelation is the centrality granted to the mystery of Christ. Jesus Christ is the fullness and the fulfilling of God’s Revelation. Consequently, an indubitably personalistical perspective of Revelation is asserted”. Allow me to ask you: is the centrality of the revelation in Jesus Christ, or in the “mystery” of Jesus Christ? And if the revelation is of the “Mystery” – but not about the truth about this mystery – what should one figure out from this second note? If it is the very Christ who reveals Himself – that is, the “res” of the incarnated Verb, as it was previously asserted on note “a” – and not truths about the divine and human nature, what difference is there between the revelation and the Eucharist, in which we receive the same Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, with His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity? Also the teaching we quoted from Carlo Caffara’s Cultural Catholic Center admits that revelation is of the proper res of Jesus Christ: "Until now, in a certain sense, I had described the “shape” of the Revelation: a formal description. Now let us say what Revelation [We know what this word denotes] truly is: it is Jesus Christ. In the sense, explains the Council, that He is the mediator and the plenitude of the whole Revelation (...)” That is: it is Christ himself the whole Revelation of the Father and of His design over man. He is the messenger and the content of the message; the revealer and the revealed; the revealer in who one must believe, the revealed truth in which one must believe. The Gospel of Christ is the Gospel which is Christ. The Revelation is His Person, His life, His death and Resurrection. Now one can comprehend better why the Revelation “occurs with facts and words connected among themselves”. The Revelation is the gift that the Father makes of His Only-Begotten: it is therefore, in the first place a “res”, a fact [remind the example] to which the words are ordered. These are necessary for the event to be understood and assimilated, as the intellectual nature of the incarnated Logos and the intelligent nature of man demand”. (Centro Culturale Cattolico Carlo Caffarra http://www.caffarra.it LA RIVELAZIONE DIVINA, "Cristo e la divina Scrittura sono il rimedio d’ogni disgusto", lesson given to professors. Ferrara 19-02-03. The bold is mine and the underscore is from the original) Forgive me, but this second note is very diffuse, very dim...And very little exact. And, in this matter, there must be absolute clarity. And moreover: what one should understand with “a decisively personalistic perspective of revelation”? Why was it used the adjective “personalistic” and not the adjective “personal”? Evidently, there was an intention of adopting a concept dear of the modern philosophy that considers the person not as a being – [like an ousia] – but as “a presence more than of a being – [blessed and mysterious “Presence”, always present and never clarified!] – active and bottomless”, as Mounier defines person. (Emmanuel Mounier, Le Personalisme, PUF, Paris, 1967, p. 53). Gabriel Marcel also states that the person is not properly a being, for he says: “To show, in the bottomline, my thought, I will say, on one hand, that person is not, and cannot be, an essence, and, on the other hand, that a metaphysics, that would build itself in a certain way far off or under the shelter of the essences, would risk itself to crumble itself like a castle made out of cards. This is what I can say, although, in reality, the subject means to me a sort of scandal and even a sort of disappointment” (Gabriel Marcel, Refus à l Invocation, N.R. F, 1940, p. 152, apud Régis Jolivet, As Doutrinas Existencialistas [The Existencialist Doctrines], Livraria Tavares [Tavares Bookshop], Porto, 1961, p. 11, n. 10. The bold is mine). Therefore, also for Gabriel Marcel, person would have no essence. It would be a metaphysical emptiness. But this “personalistic” notion of person and of revelation leads us to the denial of the being of God, of the divine persons and of the human person, a denial typical of the Gnosis, of Modernism and of the New Theology. As we have seen, the theologians from the neo-Modernist New Theology considered the divine persons as pure relations, and not as substances. Consequently, the human person, as Mounier says, would be more a “presence”, a spirit, than an entity. The new concept of Revelation from Vatican II, in the “personalistic perspective”, allows one to catch a glimpse in the bottom of the referred perspective... the Modernism. And what could be this “personalistic perspective” but the communion of the divine persons in the emptying – in the kenotic sense – of the human person, and emptying the divine person itself to save the human person, itself considered as a void? And what would be the human person understood as a person of the mankind-man? And if the human person is uniplural, omni-universal, the person of each man blends itself with the person of Christ, God and Man. There are theologians that so understand this intercommunication between Divinity and man, between Jesus Christ and the human person – omni-universal person – by means of a mystic-kenotic experience. By this kenotic view of the personalistic revelation, there is no way of placing dogmatic truths in revelation, that would be only, as the modernists would say, a personalistic existential experience of God that self-manifests Himself to man, to each man, as Piero Coda has written, and that identifies Himself with the omni universal person. *** Let us see the third note of the erudite theological report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia: “c) Besides, the christcentrism of Revelation allows to better comprehend the unity and distinction between creation and Revelation. The unity is given by the fact that creation finds its truth in the Incarnated Verb. Christ is therefore the full sense of creation. The distinction is described by means of an overcoming or a qualitative surplus of the innovation of the event Christ regarding the horizon of the universal history [in this point there is a quotation from Dei Verbum 2 and 3]. The consequence of this formulation is that a theological reflection over the sense of history must start from the event-Christ, that becomes the hermeneutic principle of the universal history”. Considering that the erudite theological report has tried to express that which is new – or at least renewed – in this third note, about the concept of revelation in Vatican II, we have difficulty to find the new, or the renewed, because the Church has always taught that one may know the existence of God, and certain qualities of His, by rational means through creation. This is exactly what St. Paul asserts: the invisible qualities of God, from the creation, can be understood by the things that are made (Cfr. Rom I, 19-21). And since the same Creator revealed Himself in the Scripture and in the Apostolic Tradition, it is not possible to have contradictions between Creation and Revelation – be it scripturarian, be it traditional, the two sources of revelation – and what one may know about God through His creation. However, there would be something new in the concept of revelation, that one should find, looking for an interpretation that would be different from the traditional one, in the christcentrism expressed in this third note about the revelation, according to the Vatican II. What would this “new” christcentrism be? Under such conditions, the text gets really mysterious...”pastoral”...in other words, written in order to allow everyone to better understand religion and revelation... according to modern thinking. Were it not a lack of respect in such a serious theme, I would challenge – at least the Brazilian priests – to interpret this paragraph, because I fear that, for them, at a first glance, it would seem a real mess. A council in no “matter could speak close-mouthed to us” (Dante, Purgatory, XII, 87) How could christcentrism allow one to understand, in a different way from the traditional one, “the unity and the diversity between creation and revelation”? That all created things have some relation to the Verb of God, it has been known for ages, not to say since ever. All one needs is to read the Prologue to St. John's Gospel to know that all things were made through the Verb of God: "Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum sunt est nihil" (All things were made by Him – the Verb – and without Him nothing was made). In this sense it is possible to understand a certain unity between Creation and Revelation, as well as that there is also diversity between Creation and Christ’s Revelation. It is also possible to understand that Christ, the Incarnated Verb of God, gives full meaning to creation. And it allows one to understand History. There is nothing new in all this. But, what was intended to be easily grasped – and in a pastoral way – when the Report says: “The distinction is described by means of an overcoming or a qualitative surplus of the innovation of the event Christ regarding the horizon of the universal history. The consequence of this formulation is that a theological reflection over the sense of history must start from the event-Christ, that becomes the hermeneutic principle of the universal history”? Perhaps would the pastoral style want to insinuate – never stating it clearly, though – that, as Modernist Teilhard de Chardin thought, all history – the noosphere – moves towards a deification in Omega Christ? That man is potentially God? That in History, as Boff has written, the “divine seed” that, according to Gaudium et Spes, God would have placed in man, would reach its final goal, the Deification? That the world – and therefore, creation and History – are God in becoming? And that is why a new advent of Christ is awaited for our epochal (??) times, as Piero Coda says, contradicting the Gospel, in which Christ will only come at end of the world, to judge modernists and traditionalists, good and evil people, Jews and pagans, Catholics and Heretics? Out of such modernistic interpretation one cannot clearly see what there is of new about this third note of the erudite theological report from Istituto Paolo VI. But, if we know what have said the Theologians from New Theology – of that Theology osmotic with protestant and oriental schismatic theologies – then it would be possible to understand in a new way such christcentrism of creation and history. And there are theologians that interpret, in this sense, the enigmatic third note of the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI. For example, Karl Rahner – who was called the soul of the Vatican II – has written the following about the christcentrism of creation and of history: "The world is an unity where everything is connected to everything and, therefore, he who takes a part of the world to make his own history of it, takes the entire world over himself as embodier of his own life. This is why it is not extravagant (even if one still needs to proceed with prudence) to conceive an evolution of the world as if it was oriented towards Christ and see the degrees of his ascensional way find on Him their summit. It only matters to avoid the representation of this evolution as an ascension that the inferior would accomplish with its own forces. If it is true that St. Paul says to the Colossians 1:35 and not sweetening with a moralizing interpretation, if the world as a whole, and therefore also in its physical reality, reaches historically in Christ, and through Him, the state in which God is everything in everyone, then the reflection we have carried out cannot be rationally false (...). Christ arises then as the summit of history of which christology would be the last word...”. (Karl Rahner, S.J., Problémes Actuels de Christologie, trad. de Michel Rondet, Écrits théologiques, 1 - 1959, pp. 136 - 138, apud Blondel e Teilhard de Chardin - Correspondência comentada por Henry de Lubac, Moraes Editores, Lisboa, 1968, p. 119). This conception of Rahner’s is absolutely the same as Teilhard de Chardin’s, as well as what Blondel's “esoteric” panchristism and Bulgakov's doctrine allow us to glimpse. And one can suppose that Rahner's thinking would not be odd to this new notion of christcentric or panchristic revelation. And if the Vatican II wanted to say something different from what Rahner has said, then the Council had the obligation of making explicit in a clear way this statement, in order for it not to serve as a support to the heretical doctrines of Rahner, Teilhard, Blondel and Bulgakov about the christcentric evolution of the world. Therefore, this third note of Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia’s erudite report also does not allow one to deny that Jean Guitton was right when stating that Vatican II proclaimed the doctrines of modernism, condemned by St. Pius X. *** The forth note of the erudite theological report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia, about revelation according to Vatican II, so states: “d) Finally, the sacramental dimension of Revelation is asserted. God’s Revelation happens by means of facts and words (Facta et Verba). This, described as an initiative from God, which aims at His very person, came through some interventions of God Himself oriented to an only end, which is the gift of salvation. This order events and interventions is called “economy” (historic-salvific economy). The sacramental dimension gushes at this point, since the full meaning of the gestures ensues merely through words, that is, from Locutio Dei, which, by its turn, is in Christ Jesus a concrete historical happening”. [Until here goes the forth note of the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia]. Firstly, allow me to remind that the expression “historic-salvific economy” lead us, evidently, among others, to Urs von Balthasar's theology, of a strong gnostic flavor, to say but a little. In the Vatican II, the term “sacrament” was widely used, in the sense of mystery, not taking into account that this term has always been used, usually, to point out the seven means of transmission of the grace, instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the Council of Trent defined that they were only seven” (Cfr. Denzinger 996, Bento XIV, Denzinger 1470). The Sacraments, real and properly, are seven, defined by the Council of Trent. Vatican II refers to the Church as the sacrament of the unity of the human race (Cfr. Lumen Gentium, n. 1), and the erudite report in question talks about the revelation as sacramentally produced with Facta et Verba. “Facta et Verba” are absolutely necessary for the validity of the sacraments. But revelation was made through words that transmitted us truths. From the “Facta” one can rationally deduct truths. For example, from Jesus’ miracles one can deduct, truly and easily, his Divinity. But by themselves, the “Facta” do not reveal directly the Depositum Fidei: they only corroborate truths. The revelation was made by means of the Locutio Dei, which transmits truths. For the erudite theological report from the Institute of Brescia, the truths should be placed in a second plane. The revelation would be, before all, of the divine res itself, that occured specially by an event: the event Christ. Due to this, the lesson from Carlo Caffarra’s Catholic Cultural Center says: "Therefore, recapping: the revealing acts – performers of the divine plan – are explained by the words; on the other hand, the words are necessary but secondary in relation to the acts of which they explain the meaning, shedding light over the “mystery within them”. They are necessary, because “God's Revelation is His letting himself be seen that makes for that an appeal unequivocally to the believers' comprehension, to the vision of his reason” [H.U. von Balthasar, Gloria, 3 vol. 2, ed. Jaca Book, Milano 1078, pag. 194]. (Centro Culturale Cattolico Carlo Caffarra http://www.caffarra.it LA RIVELAZIONE DIVINA, "Cristo e la divina Scrittura sono il rimedio d’ogni disgusto", lesson given to professors. Ferrara 19-02-03. The bold is mine and the underscore is from the original) And the “Christ event” was interpreted by the modernists as the taken of conscience of a man – Jesus Christ – that, by the means of a personal experience, realized that man is God. This personal experience-event – probably in a kenotic and personalistic way – every man should be able to take advantage of, carrying out in one’s intimate the very same revealing experience. All that is not said in the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI. But there is no word to defend the people of God from this heresy. And there are, on the contrary, vague words that allow one to interpret in modernistic way this sacramental mystery of revelation. And to prove that the Report from Istituto Paolo VI places in a second plane the truths of revelation, there is a fifth note that follows: *** “e) After discoursing over the Revelation as an action of God, the object of Revelation is stressed. This is God’s Word, through which we are lightened about God’s truth and about man’s salvation. And, since God’s Word was made flesh, this truth is not exhausted in the intellectual order, but demands that in Christ the communion of life with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be fulfilled. The object of Revelation is, therefore, a true interpersonal communion between the man and the Most Holy Trinity”. Once again it is emphasized that revelation is not properly of truths of which one must believe intellectually. The object of revelation would be the “Word of God”, that is, the Verb in itself, and not properly truths about the One and Trine Divinity and about the Incarnation of the Son of God. It insists, therefore, on the non-intellectual character of revelation, which is downgraded to a second plane. Hence, the correspondence of man towards revelation would not be as much of an acceptance of revealed truths, but of an acceptance of Jesus, the communion with Him, that would be made by the means of a religious experience. And this is Modernism. The communion with Jesus would produce the communion with the whole Trinity, and, therefore, man's salvation. One gets, then, to a conception of salvation that reminds the protestant's notion of salvation: a personal and intimate experience with Jesus that would accomplish itself more through a mystic experience rather than through intellectual faith or through the practice of the commandments. Nor faith, as a supernatural virtue that is properly intellectual, and nor even the obedience to the Ten Commandments would be needed. All that would be needed is the mystical experience with Jesus that leads necessarily towards a union with the divine Trinity. And this personalistic experience would occur in any religion, by the means of the Divinity's seed that God would have planted in the inner of each man. Hence, being part of the Catholic Church, at least by will, would not be absolutely necessary. All mankind will be saved, because in all men there would be the divine seed. Just as Gnosis used to say. Just how certain theologians of the New Theology, like for example Urs von Balthasar, who dared to put apokatastasis as a possibility for Catholic truth (Cfr. Urs Von Balthasar, TeoDrammatica, Vol. V, L'Ultimo Atto, Vol. V, L'Ultimo Atto, Milano, Jaca Book, 1992, pp. 229 and the following ones). Thus the Catholic concept of revelation emphasizes on the truth one should believe in, and from which moral is derived; and finally, one would be able to get to the mystic experience. The new concept of revelation puts, in first place, the mystic experience that would be enough for salvation. This is why, nowadays, the “pastoral” has practically abandoned the teaching of the Commandments of God’s Law and of the truths of faith. *** Allow me to still add an observation. The erudite theologian report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia does not even say a word about the revelation as an experience, which, as we have seen, characterizes the Modernist concept of revelation. Besides, it was careful enough not to use this expression, as it was enough careful to restrain the submitted issue – if Vatican II accepted the modernistic theses condemned by St. Pius X – only to the field of the revelation. The erudite Report has restrained itself in examining the new concept of revelation according to Dei Verbum. However, the theological report's author forgot to say that in the Dei Verbum the term experience is employed. Monsignor Maggiolini, current Bishop of Como (Italy), reproduced a text of Dei Verbum that says the following: "This tradition, which comes from the apostles, is developed in the Church with the aid of the Holy Spirit. This is why there is an increase in the understanding of the realities and of the words which have been handed. This happens through contemplation and study (contemplatione et studio) made by believers who treasure these things into their hearts, through the intimate understanding of spiritual things they experience (ex intima spiritualium rerum experientia quam experiuntur intelligentia), and through the preaching of those who have received through episcopal succession the sure gift of truth. Dei Verbum [n. 8] thus lists three factors in the progress of tradition: theology, experience and the Magisterium." (Mons. Alessandro Maggiolini, Magisterial Teaching on Experience in the Twentieth Century, from the Modernist Crisis to the II Vatican Council, pp. 7-8). Therefore, Dei Verbum, as Mons.Maggiolini reminds us, states that the comprehension of the things and of the words of the Tradition grow by three means: 1) by theology (through contemplation and study, evidently of the theologians); 2) by experience; 3) by Magisterium. Therefore, in the Dei Verbum it is mentioned a possibility of growth in the comprehension of the revealing Tradition, by the means of a personal (or personalistic?) experience. Besides that, Mons. Maggiolini says that, in the Dei Verbum, the experience is more valuable than the intelligence: “If, however, we wish to read [in the Dei Verbum] the two factors – which seems logical to do – as implicating the priority either of the intellectual dimension (theology) or of the experiential dimension (experience), then 'concrete experience has, in a certain sense, priority with respect to theological investigation. The lived realities precede their formulation into doctrine, rather than being a proportionate application of the statement.' (Betti, "La trasmissione della divine rivelazione," in La costituzione dogmatica sulla divina Rivelazione, 237. Analogously, Kothgasser, "Dogmenentwicklung," 443). Without forcing the text, this commentary reads it as an important vindication of the value of experience." (Allesandro Maggiolini, "Magisterial Teaching on Experience in the Twentieth Century, From the Modernist Crisis to the II Vatican Council", Communio magazine, 1996's summer, http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/MT20THCN.HTM). Therefore it is clear that in Dei Verbum dogmatic Constitution, the II Vatican Council has innovated something in the concept of revelation: it has admitted – as New Theology and the Modernists have said – that the personal experience is in the root of revelation, and that it overcomes the intellectual element revealed. And this is Modernism. Taking into account what Mons. Maggiolini states, Jean Guitton was right when he said that Vatican II proclaimed modernist theses that were condemned by St. Pius X. Dealing about this point of Dei Verbum document, Father Schoof reminds that “Until the last moment [in the Council] disturbing changes were proposed to this last paragraph [from Dei Verbum – the one we mentioned above], in which it is declared by the first time in a Council a truly historical determination of revelation” (Padre T. M. Schoof, La Nueva Teologia Catolica, Ediciones Lohlé, Buenos Aires , 1971, p. 307). And about this issue – about the personal experience of the things and words of the Tradition, of the revelation – the erudite theological Report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia simply does not say a word. However, it was absolutely necessary to examine this point in order to prove that Jean Guitton was wrong when he stated that Vatican II proclaimed Modernism theses, condemned by St. Pius X, as the intimate and personal experience of revelation was a fundamental thesis of Modernism. For all this, allow me to respectfully tell you, Most Eminent Doctor Papetti, that the erudite report from your Institute did not satisfy me in any way. On the contrary, it has let me with an even clearer and stronger assurance that Jean Guitton has said one true sentence: that the II Vatican Council taught Modernism doctrines that were condemned by the Pope St. Pius X, in the Pascendi encyclical. And I ask you to consider that I have based my thinking mainly through comparing what Vatican II has said with the testimonies and doctrines of the very same modernistic and neo-modernistic theologians, many of whom acted as experts or inspirers of the Vatican II Theology.
XV - Conclusions With the exposition of the different positions of revelation, it gets crystal clear that the doctrine of the New Theology is the same doctrine of the moderated modernists such as Father Lagrange, Blondel and alike who strive to avoid the Church condemnation by moderating their heretic expressions or hiding their thinking under an ambiguous terminology, disguised and obscure. It also gets clear that the doctrine of II Vatican Council about revelation is the same of the so-called New Theology, condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis encyclical. Therefore, the doctrine of II Vatican Council about revelation is the same as that of the modernists, with a new disguise, a little bit more masked under a new obscure, foggy and empty terminology. The Theological report from Istituto Paolo VI is right when stating that the Vatican II presented a “renewed concept of revelation”. And it is also right when saying that this is a “new concept of revelation”. It is a renewed concept, when compared to the old modernist concept. It is a new concept, when compared to the Catholic, which has always been professed by the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church. However, Jean Guitton was also right to say that the Vatican II taught the Modernist doctrines which had been condemned by St. Pius X. We can also say that the integral modernists used to admit only the critical-historic criterion, as they only admitted the insights from the heart, rejecting any other content of intellectual truth in revelation. Though Duchesne’s right wing disciples – the moderated modernists – considering that the core of the revelation doctrine was only an interior experience, not intellectual, also accepted that, together with the contents of revelation, were truths aiming at the human intellect. And this moderated opinion is exactly the one credited by Istituto Paolo VI to the Vatican II, affirming that in this Council there has been a passage from “an intellectualistic conception to a personalistic historic-salvific conception of Revelation”, not excluding some truths revealed by God. Nonetheless, it states this modernist thesis, aggravating it when saying that the revealed truths must be understood “at the intellectual level, recognizable from the poetic point of view”. Vatican II has supported the thesis about revelation of the moderated modernist heresy or the New Theology. But not only about revelation. Because accepting a new concept about revelation, all the rest in religion should be modified by the Vatican II. And all the rest has changed, to the point in which one can speak about the New Church of Vatican II. Therefore Jean Guitton did not have “evident ignorance and bad intention” when declaring that the II Vatican Council taught the doctrines condemned by St. Pius X for Modernism, or at least in the moderated Modernism. In the Vatican II, one tried to conciliate the historic-critical method with the Church authority. And this conciliation is impossible: either one accepts the infallible docent authority of the Church, or one admits the historic-critical method. And such incompatibility was announced by Cardinal Ratzinger, an ex-Council expert: “The Constitution about the Divine Revelation – [the Dei Verbum] – sought to establish a balance between this two aspects of the interpretation: the historic “analysis” and the “understanding” of it, at the same time…On the one side, it emphasized the legitimacy and also the need of the historic-method, leading to three essential elements: the attention to the literary genres; the study of its historic content (cultural, religious, etc.); the exam of what is usually called “Sitz im leben”. But the document from the Council wishes to keep, at the same time, the theological character of exegesis and showed the strong points of the theological method in the interpretation of texts; the main presupposition about which is based the theological understanding of the Bible is the unity of the Scripture. To this presupposition corresponds, as a methodological path, the “analogy of faith”, i.e. the understanding of specific texts from a given set of texts. The document adds up two other methodological indications: the Scripture is a sole thing, with effect from the only people of God, which has been its carrier throughout history. Consequently, read the scripture as a unity means read it with effect from the Church, as the real key of interpretation. From one side, it means that it is again duty of the Church, in its institutional organisms, the decisive word for interpretation of the Scripture. “But, this theological criterion of the method is incompatibly in contrast with the methodological guidance of modern exegesis; it is the very opposite, it is exactly what exegesis tries to eliminate at any cost. This modern idea can be described as follows: either it is a critical interpretation or it should be done by an authority; both things together are impossible. Performing a “critical” interpretation of the Bible stands for despising the appeal to an authority on the interpretation”. (…) “Starting from this point, the work proposed by the Council to exegesis – of being, at the same time, critical and dogmatic, – seems contradictory in itself; for these are two incompatible demandings for the modern theological thinking. Personally, I am particularly convinced that careful reading of the entire text of Dei Verbum would allow us to find the essential elements for a synthesis between the historic-method and the theological “hermeneutics”. However, such agreement is not evident at once.” “So, the post-conciliar reception of the Constitution all in all abandoned the theological part of the very Constitution, as something from the past, understanding the text solely as an official and unconditional approval of the historic-critical method. It may be ascribed to such unilateral reception of the Council the fact that, after the Council, all confessional differences between Catholic and Protestant exegesis have practically disappeared. But the negative feature of this process is that, also within Catholic bounds, the gap between exegesis and dogma is now total and that the Scripture has become for it a word from the past that each one, by his own means, works very hard to translate to the present, not being able to thrust very much on the boat he borded. Faith is then reduced to a life style in which each one does what he can in order to distil from the Bible. The dogma, not provided with the foundations of the Scricture, does not support itself anymore. The Bible, which broke up with the dogma, has become a document from the past, belonging to the past.” (Cardeal Joseph Ratzinger, L’Interpetazione bibbica in Conflitto - Problemi del fondamento ed orientamento dell'esegesi contemporanea" pp 3-4. The boldface is mine. http://wwwratzinger.it/miscellanea/interbiblconflitto.htm ) Such destructive criticism is not from an integrist, but from Cardinal Ratzinger. Therefore, Dei Verbum’s attempt of conciliation between historic-critical method and the dogmatic authority of the Church obtained nothing but the destruction of the Catholic faith, identifying it the Protestant faith, and producing an unbridgeable gap between exegesis and dogma. As a result, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, “the dogma does not support itself anymore”. It is due to this new concept of revelation that “the dogma does not support itself anymore”. It is exactly from this new concept of revelation that so many modernist novelties of Vatican II have arisen, such as the new concept of Church, along with its such famous woeful “subsistit", the collegiality, the freedom of creed, the ecumenism, etc… and so many others problems which I did not focus on this letter. I restrained myself in answering only the problem of revelation in the Vatican II; because it was the sole point about which the erudite report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia dealt in order to rebut Jean Guitton’s statement about the Modernism in the Vatican II, point that the erudite report could not make, on the contrary, confirmed it. And a proof that the dogma does not support itself anymore is in today’s newspapers: one of this neo-modernist theologians – Tamayo – dared to say and to write that Jesus Christ is not God. And he was not condemned at once. And barely censured, he was supported by the International Sect of Modernist Theologians, who neither believe in God, nor in Christ, nor even less in the Church. Besides him, also a well-known theologian in Italy, Piero Coda – totally unsuspected of being an Integrist or in disagreement with Modernism – wrote: “In contemporary theological reflection, the osmosis between the catholic and evangelical theology, concerning the core themes of Christian faith, (Christ, the Pascal event of the cross and of resurrection, the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, the Church, the man, History) is now something indeed acquired and irrenounceable in our culture”. (Piero Coda, L'Altro di Dio, Rivelazione e Kenosi in Serge Bulgakov, Città Nuova, Roma, 1997, p. 10). And this damned osmosis between the Catholic and the heretic theologies has only been made possible thanks to the Modernism, so to the modern theologians, be them Catholic, Protestant or Schismatic. All such modernists, glad with the osmosis between orthodoxy and heresy, some more than others, are in fact Gnostics. There is one point which I believe that should be stressed out: it is the application of the doctrine of Kenosis in the Church. As God would have a kenotic life, in a dialectic process of emptying and annihilation in order to generate the Son and the Holy Ghost; as God would have created the universe by kenotic means, literally annihilating himself in the world – falling in the world, as Gnosis used to say – so the Church should do: She should annihilate herself in order to give life to the other religions. In her death, annihilating herself, forsaken by God as Christ on the Cross, she would find her real life and resurrection. From here, one sees the mysterious process of self-annihilation of the Church, which Paul VI has verified – but not struggled against. In the very beginning of the Council, the famous Neo-Modernist Father Yves Congar declared: “There is nothing decisive to do in the Catholic Church, as long as it does not abandon its manorial and temporal pretensions. It is necessary to destroy it all. And it will be done”. “This words by Yves Congar, one of the most important theologians of the 20th Century, were pronounced on October 14th, 1962, three days after the beginning of the Council (Paulo Daniel Farah, A Igreja cogita convocar Concílio Vaticano III, article in the Brazilian newspaper “Folha de São Paulo”, December 25th, 2002, p. A-9). Prophetic words or a program? Paul VI renounced the tiara, he kenotically renounced to the all symbols of the papal power. Paul VI has made the Church to annihilate itself before men and the world. Paul VI humbled himself, and even worse, humiliated the Catholic Church by recognizing the United Nations as the only institution capable of bringing peace to the world. (One can see, today, in the case of the war in Iraq, how skillful the United Nations makes peace!...). The Church, after the Vatican II, annihilated itself asking for forgiveness for its sins, as if the Holy Church could sin. Kenotically, the Church gave in to the synagogue, in Jerusalem, in the wailing wall, that has become the capitulation wall, to the Buddhist temples, to the “synagogues” reformed by the protestants, to the ceremonies of “candomblé” (Afro-Brazilian religion that involves black magic, ceremonies to entities etc.). The Church has annihilated itself, emptying its eldest holy liturgy, capitulating before the modern world, and renouncing to the Gregorian chant to replace it by the Rock. The Church has annihilated itself when admitted being at the same level of all other creeds and religions in ceremonies like those in Assis. The Kenosis of the Church has even admitted to place Buddha’s image over the Sacrary, to take away the crucifixes from the rooms which would be prepared to the Jewish cult, as demanded the rabbis, in Assis. Because of this, the dogma does not support itself anymore. And this quotation from Cardinal Ratzinger is a confession of the destruction and total annihilation, because if the dogma does not support itself anymore, what stands still? And see, Dear Doctor Papetti, that the reforms that Modernism wanted to implement were performed after Vatican II, following its letter and its spirit. Compare, I beg you, the reforms proposed by the Modernists, quoted by St. Pius X in the Pascendi, with the changes put into practice after Vatican II, to conclude that the ecclesiastic celibacy is the only thing left in order to accomplish the kenosis. Is there any kenotic act not performed yet? Yes. There was one. The Pope calling up for a study about the doctrine of the infallibility and of the “munus petrino” aiming at facilitating the ‘union’ with the sects from the Reform and with the Schismatic religion of the Orient. And also that was done. And in the newspapers of today one read that the Pope has proposed the study of a new way of understanding the functions and powers of the papacy, so that it does not constitute an obstacle to the union of the religions. And there are even those who want to reduce Peter to the ordinary function of General Secretary of the URO – United Religions Organization. Usque quando Deus meus? Exsurge Domine, quare obdormis? And, certainly, God will not allow an absolute kenosis of the Church, because He himself promised: "portae inferi non praevalebunt"(Mt XVI, 18). One other point I would like to stress out in the conclusion of this long letter is that the II Vatican Council, weirdly, was proclaimed by John XXIII and by Paul VI, as a Pastoral Council. This qualification was absolutely new, and at that time, it was incomprehensible, as still today many cannot thoroughly understand what one intended to say with this adjective, so weird to a Council. Under the light of all that we have seen, we could say that a Council that admitted the concept of revelation of the New Theology – that is, a modernist concept of revelation – such Council could not proclaim any dogma, neither impose anathemas. In fact, if revelation does not admit truths directed to the intellect, it is not possible to teach any dogma, neither to excommunicate any heretic, for there would be no heretics. All revelations would be equally true and equally imperfect. The new concept of revelation – the expression comes from the theological report from Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia – does not admit dogmas and excommunications. Due to this, Vatican II was modernisticaly declared “pastoral”. Vatican II claimed to introduce the catholic doctrine with a language in tune with the modern thinking, that is to say, harmonic with the Gnostic philosophy of Kant, Hegel and other modern Gnostics. Curiously, a pastoral Council, that claimed to speak with the people in a more understandable way, uses a weird, obscure and hermetic language which is incomprehensible to those not initiated in the current pseudo theological – or, better, Gnostic – vocabulary. What can one understand from the expression which says that Christ has revealed to men the “mystery of Men”? What mystery of men could it be? And what does it mean to say, to a common layman, that “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race”? (Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, n. 1) And, who is the priest that having studied theology, including the Modernist, can really understand what said Vatican II? In the post-council Church, the debate about what the Council really meant to say is dramatic. They never get to an agreement about it. And the Vatican II, which intended to unite Christians and all religions, has split up the Catholics. The Church seems to have been turned into the Babel’s Tower. In the words of the Vatican II documents, one thing is what one understand as a first sense, another is what the “ experts”, the Vatican II theologians, meant to say. This so true that some have noted that the Vatican II was, actually, the Council of the “Experts” even more than of the Bishops. These Bishops acted as spokesmen of the experts more than the council Fathers, successors of the Apostles. And these “experts” were, almost all, members of the International and Ecumenical Modernist Sect. To name but a few, I think about Karl Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Chenu, Congar, de Lubac, etc. Theologian Juan Tamayo, recently punished by the Vatican, recognized it when he wrote: “The three moments of the process, pre-Reform, Reform and Counter-Reform can be considered in the attitude adopted by the Roman hierarchy towards the same theologians that made the Vatican II. “In the encyclical Humani Generis (1950) [continues Tamayo], comparable by its intolerance and anti-modernism to the Syllabus, Pius XII harshly condemns the theologians that tried to come up with a Christian reflection in the dialogue with modernity. He condemns evolutionism, the historic-critical movements, the return to the sources of Christianity, etc. Some of them were excluded from their cathedras and also exiled etc. (Chenu, Congar, de Lubac...). Well, the same theologians condemned by Pius XII and by the Humani Generis were called, ten years later by John XXIII, to head and build on the reform of the Church under the theological point of view. The II Vatican Council was a Council more of theologians than of Bishops, despite having a really important pastoral component. Part of the documents of the Vatican II and of their content were extracted and taken from the works of theologians like Rahner, Haering, Gonzalez Ruiz, Congar, Chenu, etc. However, the same theologians called by John XXIII as experts of the Council, fell under suspect in the pontificate of John Paul II and were condemned again, and they have not been rehabilitated up to now. The most emblematic case was Hans Kung’s, theologian of John XXIII, and, almost twenty years later, dismissed from the cathedra of Theology in Tubingen. A civil University! Forty years after the Vatican II (the fortieth anniversary will be celebrated on October 1st , 2002), it happens to be necessary a new Reform to retake the spirit of the Vatican II and which would go a step further, seeking to respond to the new problems” (Juan J. Tamayo, Las grandes líneas de la reforma de la Iglesia - http://perso.wanadoo.es/laicos/2002/854T-JuanjoTamayo.htm The bolded and underlined text are mine). This is where the pastoral language has led to. And the language of these modernist Gnostics was of a misty nature as the old Gnosis. The experts cannot speak clearly, only hermetically. We can read Blondel, Rahner, de Lubac, Balthasar and others. In all their works, we have the feeling of hugging a snake of smoke, for so diffuse they are. Blondel, yet, was accused of being absolutely hermetic. And he, himself, confessed being esoteric. Even Tyrrel did not understand what Blondel really meant to say, for so intentionally misty the modernist of Aix was. Besides him, the main disciple of Blondel, the modernist Father Auguste Valensin, master of de Lubac, has declared several times that he could not understand what Blondel had written. Loisy, himself, would mock of Blondel’s hermetic style, saying: “On the other hand, the system of Laberthonnière is Maurice Blondel translated to French, and without doctrinal pretensions, it is the renovation of Protestant Iluminism” .(Cfr. J. Rivière, Le Modernisme dans L' Église, Lib Létourney et Ané, Parigi, 1929, p. 237). It has always been the tactics of the Modernists, from that time and still from today, to use a hermetic, ambiguous, obscure language to hide their real doctrine. Modernism has adopted the “process of systematically transpose underneath the old received terms, some content different from its proper sense, which would allow one to keep the Christian Creed, adapting it to a totally different reality” (Houtin, apud J Rivière, op. cit.,p. 150). Father Grandmaison has also written: "The tactic of the old formulas preserved with a different meaning, the professions of faith maintained under the benefit of the implicit doctrinal corrections, the firm determination of keeping them where they were, thanks to mistakes, to promote new ideas with the prestige that a teaching cathedra brings, an ecclesiastic habit, an reputation of orthodoxy” (L. de Grandmaison, Études 1908. t. XCVII. p. 303 apud J Rivière, op. cit., p. 221). Because of that, Blondel, himself, confessed: “I know about the hateful obscurity with which my prose must be usually presented to my unfortunate readers” (M. Blondel Lettera a Auguste Valensin, nel 27 marzo 1903, in Correspondance Maurice Blondel - Auguste Valensin, Aubier, Paris, 2 vol., 1957, I vol. p. 86). "The necessity of being short and clear paralises myself”(Cfr. R. Marlé, Au Coeur de la Crise Moderniste, Aubier, Parigi, 1960, p.165). And yet: “Thou can imagine what I decide to create to say without saying” (Lettera di Maurice Blondel al Padre Brémond, 20 -III- 1901, apud R. Marlé, op, cit. p. 44 note 1). Even Loisy, so daring, wrote doctrinaire ambiguous expositions and with shades of meaning that would lead to the error (Cfr. J. Rivière, Le Modernisme dans l'Église, Lib Letouzey et Ané, Parigi, 1929, p. 166). This tactic is still alive in the expert modernist theologians who inspired the thesis of Vatican II. One can read any text from these theologians to verify how they can use a weird terminology, which meaning changes like a chameleon. From these books, presumed and highly intellectual, a layman could say what Dante said of darkness of hell: "Oscura
e profonda era, e nebulosa,
["Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, Do not theses verses, Ilmo. Doctor Papetti, perfectly match with the style of von Balthasar, Rahner, and of so many others who always praise one another, speaking of puzzling doctrines like the Kenosis, arisen from the Lurianic Kabala, or of that most mysterious “Presence”, about which Mons. Giussiani speak so much, however never defining it, doctrine that they learnt from Boehme, Hegel, Mohler, Moltman, Bultmann, Bulgakov and so many others heretics? And how tedious are the texts of these theologians! For example, von Balthasar. What a "literature"!... All this take the form of a hermetic system, known by some initiated people, and that, hidden behind the large backs of certain Bishops and Cardinals, and under weird words of ambiguous and undefined neologisms, want to let the old Gnosis be admitted as doctrine of the Holy Church. The weird and vacant texts from Vatican II, its new concept of revelation, among other themes, trigger the spread of the Modernism that destroys the faith. As recognized the Cardinal Ratzinger, the dogma does not support itself anymore. And if the dogma does not stand anymore, it is the whole doctrine which does not support itself anymore. In this work, I have restrained myself to answer Istituto Paolo VI di Brescia regarding only the new concept of revelation of Vatican II. And we have seen that this new concept of revelation is modernist. I did not examine so many other Modernist thesis of the Vatican II, as the new concept of Church (sacrament of the unity of human gender), the problem of the "subsistit", about the Catholic Church as Christ’s Church, the collegiality, the religious freedom, the ecumenism, a democratization of the Church, as so many other Modernist thesis, or at least, with modernist flavor, which caused the immense current crisis of Faith and in the Church, to the point of making Paul VI allude to the Satan’s smoke introduced into the Temple of God and speak, yet, of a self-demolition of the Church. The dogma does not stand anymore. This conclusion is so true that an absolutely unsuspected author about Modernism, and recognized as specialist in this delicate matter, Émile Poulat, after watching all the crisis originated in the Vatican II, and comparing the situation in the Modernism time, in the beginning of the 20th century with the actual situation, wrote in September of 1995: “The historical sciences not only revolutionize our conscience of the past, but also, in the “foulée”, the spirit of the Historiators and the conscience of the faithful. In that sense, we are all modernists. He who doubts or contests it, has to read again the pontifical documents, the Decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi (1907). The fact is that the long anti-modernist oath instituted by Pius X was abolished or abbreviated, and reduced to a few lines by Paul VI, just half a century after ” (Émile Poulat, Permanenza ed Atualità del Modernismo "Avant Propos" of the third edition of the book Histoire, Dogme et Critique dans la Crise Moderniste, Paris, Albin Michel, p. XVII, Septembre del 1995. Bolded text is mine). And yet: “In a century, we passed well from a restrict Modernism to a generalized one” (Émile Poulat, Permanenza ed Atualità del Modernismo "Avant Propos" of the third edition of the book Histoire, Dogme et Critique dans la Crise Moderniste, Paris, Albin Michel, p. VII, Septembre del 1995). And how could have happened this diffusion of Modernism, to the point that the theologians of the Modernist International Sect could dare to say, with Poulat: “We are all modernists”? And it is not only Poulat who recognizes the diffusion of Modernism. Xavier Tilliette, also, in a book clearly Modernism biased, wrote that all what the modernists taught in the beginning of the 20th century, and that was afterwards condemned; was admitted in the Vatican II: "Blondel intimidated, Rousselot censured, Laberthonnière gagged, Lagrange e Huby under suspect... They seeded in tears. But let us not doubt: in the uncertain spring of the post Council (Vatican II), it was their grain the one which has grown among the darnel” (Xavier Tilliette, Maurice Blondel et la controverse Christologique, in Le Modernisme, opera editata dall' Institut Catholique de Paris, ed. Beauchesne, Parigi, 1980. p. 160). Therefore, also for Xavier Tilliette the sow of Modernism was cultivated and harvested by the Vatican II. We would need to ask Tillette what would be the "darnel" that remains among the modernist "wheat" of the Vatican II and who can seed such "wheat"... And what understands he about what would be that which he calls "darnel"? Would it be, maybe, the rests of Catholicism that remain between the large messes of the Modernism diffused today in catholic land? Another one who admits the victory of Modernism and of the New Theology in the Vatican II is the Modernist theologian Father T. M. Schoof, O .P., who wrote in his book about the New Theology: "In the next three years there would be difficulties, however, in the end of the Council [Vatican II] the hopes sheltered before October 1962 were a lot surpassed. Not only was the scholastic terminology, considered during so long as obvious, substituted by expressions taken from the Bible, from the Fathers and from the modern thought, but also innumerable themes of the renewed theology seemed to be accepted, at the end, by the Catholic Church. In the Constitution about the Liturgy, one can notice the echo of the "theology of the mystery" of Dom Casel, centered in the Easter, and of the theology of the sacrament and of the word, inspired in him. In the Constitution about the Church, we found the people of God in a nonstop advance throughout History, guided by ministers united collegially, as a symbol of humanity in search for unity. In the Decree about the Ecumenism, there is the expressed confirmation of the ecclesiology of the churches not united to Rome, and an ecumenical search emphasized by the relativization of the religious experiences over the plenitude of the Church of Christ. The document, not so well-done, about the sacerdotal formation, has not prescribed a uniform program of studies, considers the biblical theology the basis and the modern thought as an important means to help education, and limits the reference to Scholastic to a simple: "under the magisterial of Saint Thomas". In the Declaration about the Religious Freedom, we can recognize the inviolate value of the vital personal convictions" (Padre T. M. Schoof, O. P., La Nueva Teologia Catolica, Ediciones Carlos Lohlé, Buenos Aires- Mexico, 1971, pp. 300-301. Bolded text is mine). It was so big the victory of the Modernist New Theology in the Vatican II that their leaders were astonished with its success: "The New Theology, later, asked itself, astonished how was it possible to run this distance in three years. Not only has it been given place to its interpretation; but its core has also been recognized and included as an authentically development” (Father T. M. Schoof, La Nueva Teologia Catolica, Ediciones Carlos Lohlé, Buenos Aires- Mexico, 1971, pp.314). A similar conclusion was admitted by different scholars in the recent studies of the history of the Church, as Pierre Colin registers: “Analogous positions can be found today in the oath of the Vatican II. It is considered that, far from ending the Modernist crisis, the Council [Vatican II] has made Modernism return by the shortcut of the baffling movement of liturgical, catechism, and theological reforms that it triggered" (P. Colin, L'áudace et le Soupçon, Desclée de Brouwer, Parigi, 1997, p. 29). According to Jean Guitton, it was the II Vatican Council the responsible for the triumph of the Modernist heresy in the Catholic world in the 20th century. And the report that you, mister, had the kindness of mailing me, could not prove anything but that Guitton was right: Vatican II taught – sometimes in a veiled way – the doctrines of Modernism, condemned by S. Pius X in Pascendi and in Decree Lamentabili. Believe me, Dear Doctor Papetti that, despite how hard it was to say all this, "amor mi mosse che fé parlare" [Love moved me, which compelled me to speak] (Dante, Inferno, II, 72) God gives us all the graces to be loyal to His revelation and to the Saint Roman Apostolic Catholic Church, it is what I beg, in Corde Jesu, semper,
Orlando Fedeli.
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