A
amarischuk
Guest
And the Orthodox ‘shipwreck’, who equally disagree with the Vatican I notion of infallibility?We already have an example of this option - the Episcopalian shipwreck.
Maria your search for absolute certainty in an absolute authority can only lead to disappointment. I would love it if God would just come down and tell us everything. But that isn’t the God who created the universe, that is the faery tale monstrocity created by man. As Voltaire quibbed, “In the beginning God created man in His image, and ever since then man has been creating God in his.”
Apologetics are good and fun, and the honeymoon of a conversion should be marked with (let’s call it) orthodoxy. However, as faith matures and develops; through the acquisition of new knowledge, many of the idols we previously held must be released.
I like the wide span of Catholicism I have come to love the diversity within the unity of the Church. I especially love the tolerance of the most Catholic of eras, the Middle Ages. Only then could Dante place so many popes in hell, Chaucer write simultaneously about one night stands and gluttonous friars, while William Langland criticize the monasteries for thier oppulance. An age when one could be a logician like Abelard, a Thomist, an Augustinian, a Bonaventurian, a follower of the anti-philosophy of St Bernard or a latin Averhoist or even Occhamism. This was a Catholic era because of this.
Remember, Giles of Rome was forced to renounce Thomism and left us a rather beautiful rebutal to the narrow minded clerics who condemn ideas they cannot understand (quoted in MD Chenu’s book “Thomas Aquinas and His Role in Theology”).
Interestingly, the Middle Ages had a similar debate about how to interpret scripture. The schools of Chartre and St. Victor repeatedly butted heads with all sorts and each other over the alagorization of scripture (a classical medieval method of exegesis) and the impact of the alagory on the historical reality (see Hugh of St. Victor’s didascalion).
But that hasn’t been the only era of reform and intellectual activity. Acton and Newman were liberals, especially Lord Acton. Poor H. Olivier Deschesne was silenced for his historical writings under the tyranny of Pius X. Franciscans were ALWAY given the liberty of being Scotists. The noted scholar Frederick Copleston is critical of much of Aquinas. And though Maritain is the most conservative Thomist of the last 100 years (other than the reactionary and dated R. Garrigou-Lagrange) even Maritain argued in favour of contraception from a natural law perspective. Never to forget that Etienne Gilson was good friends with Cardinal Henri deLubac (heavily influenced by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin).
Hilair Belloc wrote of the reformation as a shipwreck, but he forgot that the reaction to the shipwreck in many was was equally as disasterous. One only needs to think that Belloc’s own political philosophy (French revolution style liberalism mixed with Chestertonian style socialism) had previously been condemned in the harshest terms by the magisterium.
Even today the eastern Catholic Churches are not required to follow the pessimistic Augustinian notion of Original Sin.
Like Chesterton said concerning the home, the Church is much larger no the inside then on the outside.
And hello Isabus, I too like Teilhard. I only have the Phenomenon of man, the Future of Man and the Milieu Divine. However, I have a book by Ignatius Lepp SJ (Jewish psychologist/convert) on meditations inspired by Teilhard. It is a great book, I miss not having my books at hand (I have recently moved to Taiwan to teach for a year).
Adam
Yours is a truly human act, an exercise of choice I sense. Your vision “Erit in omnibus omnia Deus” (I Corinthians XV, 28) How beautiful ~