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You wrote article a few years ago called “Why Mysticism is not an ‘Option.’”There dwells the answer.

1A binds the State

Dignitatis Humanae binds the Church

Conscience binds the individual

I am protected by conscience

Conscience is protected by Church

Church is protected by State

*Placeless and unprotected*

(Stateless, legally?)

Union with God. Divinization. Logos.

Time to die (ego) and be born of the Spirit.

L'état, c'est moi

I am the State (of grace)

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It's refreshing to see a fellow Catholic who hasn't pulled the wool over his eyes. There should be so many more it seems!!

One of the harder things for me to deal with has been the Church hierarchy almost to a man succumb to the pressure to accept the lies. Consequently many have been scandalized, both Catholics and seekers; the former going sedevacantist or another form of despair (e.g., https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/2021/12/fake-christianity/), and the latter cooling off in their search for truth within the Church (e.g., https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/).

I don't know what to say to these folks...come to (or stay in) the Church but ignore the Pope (putative, but that's another matter) bishops and almost all priests? Here we come very close to what is essential to the Church if we are not squarely upon it. If we don't have the Pope, episcopacy, and presbytery, we have no Church. It seems limpwristed to consider them only figureheads, like disembodied formalities, it seems a cop out.

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Berdyaev in 1932: Everything in the contemporary world is situated under the sign of crisis, not only the social and the economic, but likewise also a cultural, but likewise also a spiritual, everything has become problematic. This is more acutely obvious in Germany, and about this much gets written. How ought a Christian to relate to the agony of the world, how ought one to regard it? Is this only a crisis of a world external for the Christian and anti-Christian, having betrayed the Christian faith, or is this likewise a crisis of Christianity? Christians also share in the fate of the world. They cannot purport the view, that within Christianity, within the Christian world everything is just dandy and that nothing in the world irritates it. And upon the Christian world, upon the Christian movement there falls heavy a responsibility. Upon the world is being wrought a judgement, and it is likewise a judgement upon historical Christianity. The ills of the modern world are connected not only with the falling away from Christianity, with a chilling down of faith, but also with the age-old ills of Christianity on its human side. Christianity is universal in its significance, and everything is situated within its orbit, nothing for it can be fully on the outside. Christians ought rather to perceive the spiritual condition of the contemporary world from within Christianity itself, to define, what the crisis of the world signifies as an event within Christianity, within the Christian universality. The world has come into a frightful condition, no longer within it are there firm institutions, it is living through a revolutionary epoch both outward and inward, an epoch of spiritual anarchy. Man lives in anguish (Angst) more than ever before, under an eternal threat, he hangs suspended over an abyss (the Grenzsituation of Tillich). Modern European man has lost the faith, which he tried in the last century to substitute for the Christian faith. He believes no longer in progress, in humanism, in the saving power of science, in the saving power of democracy, he is conscious of the injustice of the capitalist order and he has lost confidence in the utopia of the contemporary socialist order. Modern France is afflicted by cultural scepticism, and in modern Germany the crisis dispels all values. The whole of Europe is shaken by the unbelievable events happening in Soviet Russia, under the grip of a new faith, a new religion, hostile to the Christian religion. http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1932_377.html

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