The Quest for Universal Truth and The Inherent Perfectibility of Man

"The truth, what is that?" This famous line from Pontius Pilate is the reason we say, "suffered under Pontius Pilate" in the Creed even today.

We, as individuals, long to be able to define the truth as we see fit, but since Jesus declared that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we have a problem.

As a scientist, I know that scientific truth changes from moment to moment, and from scientist to scientist. Neither science or scientists can be relied upon to give faithful witness to the truth.

The Church is the only faithful witness to the truth, which is eternal.

written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael

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One of the things about Christ, about the Catholic Church particularly, is that Christ brought to us truth, pure unabashed Truth. And the depository of the Truth is within the Catholic Church. And we have historically, even back, and like I said, even back in the times of St. Paul, you can read some of his letters where he is dealing with heresies, Gnosticism particularly.

And it goes through heresies, all through many forms, and everything else, and it all comes back to, "Who do you say I am?", wholly human, wholly divine. Which is intended, includes that within the divine, there is no error. So you are dealing with the Truth.

So you get a situation where you say, Jeff says to himself, "I believe in Christ, but His divinity really appeals to me, and if I am more like Christ in His divinity, I become more knowledgeable, I become more spiritual, I become more divine. Gnosticism. It is also in many, many of the other heresies. What is the one? Albigensians have the same issue.

So you basically have a situation where someone can say, "I am going to be more like Christ. I am going to become better."

And one of the things that you do is, that if Jeff is better than everybody else, then the commandments of Christ, of loving God and loving neighbor become different.

You love God, but you kind of love Him more on an equality basis. You go, "Hey, you and me God, I'm special. I'm really spiritual. I'm really smart."

And the commandment of loving thy neighbor? "Well… oh yes, you may kiss my finger. I deign to love you because I am special and you will get the wonderful grace. I’ve touched you."

Incredible heresies.

But underneath that heresy is a tendency of humanity, just like Jeff, to believe in the inherent perfectibility of humanity. We have within us the belief that we, each of us, can become perfectible. Jeff can become divine because he is so smart, because he is so handsome, whatever. And he can become better and better.

This is a thought that carries through, you know, there is a lot of this thought that carries through with Martin Luther, John Calvin, that whole group of people, the Wesleys, and everybody else.

But you come into a period of time in France particularly... well, let's go back a little bit further... it comes down... a lot of what is said in the early American Fathers basically are a tendency toward that very thing.

"In order to form a more perfect union..." That there are things that we on earth can do that is perfect. We see that coming again in some radical writings that were Voltaire and Rousseau in the French Revolution period of time. And you see the tremendous reaction to the Catholic Church at that period of time. There are martyrs coming out of the French Revolution. A lot of them Catholic martyrs having their heads chopped off on the guillotine.

So you get that period of time... and believe it or not, I'm not just wandering... then you get into the 19th century. In the 19th century you get the Industrial Revolution is really going fast and there are all sorts of things because of different intellectual structures and different abilities. For example, to measure things that are seen with microscopes, or telescopes, with temperatures and everything else. The scope of human knowledge is expanding in the physical world.

There is a tendency at that point to first believe, you see this in some of the Jules Verne novels, he kind of makes fun of it, where we see that we are now, and it even is today, but to a lesser degree because they keep on discovering new things. "Wow! We are so smart as human beings. We can come to understand the universe. We can understand how it all works."

Now this is an area where I am excluding the engineers. Because the engineers are saying, "I am measuring it. How do I react with the world, measuring it to make it work better, as opposed to someone who is a fuzzy headed scientist that says "Oh! Now I understand the universe and the quest for universal truth!”

So you have this happening in the 19th century, particularly in Germany, where it is flowering. And then you get people like Robert. Robert is a very bright man. He knows Jeff. He is learning all of these things about what Jeff is learning in the physical world. He really thinks Jeff is special. And he listens to Jeff and he goes, "That's pretty good! Why cannot we apply that to the philosophical and religious world? How come that doesn't apply to theology?" And Robert, being a very bright person, says, "It does apply to theology!" And therefore using the human mind in the way you use science and apply it to things such as philosophy, theology, those various things, you can come closer to the truth. The reality of what it is to be human and the relationship with the divine. Again, the inherent perfectibility of humanity. That's where you get Marx and Hegel and Nietzsche. All these philosophers who just drove me crazy reading them in college.

They go, "Here we are!" But because thought processes have corollaries, if, in fact, you can analyze from a scientific perspective the theology, you go to Jeff and Jeff says, "I can measure the physical world and tell you what the truths are. Robert says, "Yeah, I can do exactly the same thing."

Robert goes to Jeff and says, "Is there such a thing as a miracle? Jeff says, "Of course not. They don't exist!" Robert says, "Good. Now I know I have proof because Jeff is so smart. There are no miracles."

Robert sits in his office. He starts thinking, "If there are not miracles, all we have is a story about Jesus. And if we really want to know who Jesus was, the first thing you do is you remove all the miracles from the Gospel. And then you can come to an understanding of Jesus. He isn't wholly human and He isn't wholly divine at the same time. He is wholly human." Ah! Heresy.

You start writing about the consequences of what does that mean? And in our situation that brings us to Pius X. Pius X is looking at it because they are now having people like Robert saying we need to do scientific exploration of theology. And look at how we are coming out when we are approaching the Bible, particularly the New Testament, from a scientific approach.

This is coming up with some incredibly goofy ideas. Where are, again, all heresies.

And what Pius X did, he said, "Whoa, whoa! Wait a minute guys. I'm in favor of Bible study. I want Bible study. I want to encourage it. But there are certain fundamental things that exist that you can't go to. Those things by their very nature are wrong. And if you believe them and take them into your consideration of Jesus Christ, the Holy Catholic Church, the Bible, you're going to come, again, to error. You're going to get it wrong."

And he issued the decree against Modernism which deals with exactly what I was talking about. He would take a premise where so many people would go, "Well, I... that sounds, really... that sounds really good!"

The premise, and I didn't read it last night and this morning it was too early, it didn't stick in my head, but to the premise that through scientific research, man can come to the truth of the physical world, he would respond, "No." Because man is not divine in himself, and the physical world is part of what God created and you cannot consider and come to an understanding without the consideration of the involvement of God.

He simply went down these thing and said, "If you think about it in the context of faith, you can understand that these things are wrong and they are leading us totally astray.” That's what the decree on Modernism was.

And he did, as the Church did later in the 1950s, well, 1960s primarily, they came in and went into Catholic institutions.

Because Robert is a great Catholic theologian who believes what Jeff is talking about and has gotten a lot of the ideas that Jeff has and put them in theological terms.

What Pius X did, he said, "Robert, to be a Catholic, to call yourself a Catholic theologian, you have to take an oath in which you disavow the following matters in Modernism." That was a big deal. It was a big deal back then. It was a big deal in the 60s where the Church was coming in and saying, "We are the depository of the faith and if you believe all these things, you cannot call yourself a Catholic theologian. Robert we know you. We know you have tenure at the school. We are going to take away the right for yourself to call yourself a Catholic theologian. But, in recognition of your great ability we have a day care that the university runs for the students and the faculty, and we will allow you to teach at the day care, but you are not to teach anything Catholic because you are to longer a Catholic theologian.

You can imagine even now the reaction to people of the Church saying, "You can't call yourself what you want to call yourself."

And that is a great reason why the decree on Modernism is so reacted to. Because the Church is taking it upon itself to say, "We are the depository of the Faith and you cannot believe these things and call yourself Catholic, especially in the role of being a teacher of Catholicism."

And that has been a controversy that still exists. Richard McBrian, up at Notre Dame, he has been on the edge of that for years, he may even be dead now, I don't know. But it is a significant issue and it all comes down to the issues of "Who do you say I am." and "Does Jesus and does the Holy Catholic Church have the Truth?” That is all that this decree on Modernism is about. And the answer from the perspective of a devout Catholic is, "Yes, He has the truth and yes, the Catholic Church has the truth.”

August 14, 2019