Posted by ‘The Council’s anti-realist subjectivism is directed uniquely towards the dethronement of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the enthronement of man in His place.’
RORATE CÆLI: ‘The Council and the Eclipse of God’ by Don Pietro Leone: Chapter 10 (part 5 b – the Devil’s Agency continued: vi) Anti-Realist Subjectivism: more on the universal and systematic scope of the Council’s anti-realist subjectivism.
Christ the King Statue in Świebodzin (POLAND)
‘The Council’s anti-realist subjectivism is directed uniquely towards the dethronement of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the enthronement of man in His place.’
vi) Antirealist Subjectivism
The created, rational being possesses the faculties of intelligence and will. The freedom of the will enables the creature to direct its will either to its proper object which is God, the infinite Good, or towards itself, the finite good, in God’s place. Such was Lucifer’s act at the beginning of creation, an act of aversion from God and conversion to the self, an act of pride which is nothing other than the principle of Antirealist Subjectivism in the moral domain. This principle thereby became the very formal principle, or cause, of the devil’s Fallen Nature, that which makes him what he is: the very principle of his nature and action [1].
It was this same principle which he was to propose to the first human pair as the temptation for them to commit the act of Original Sin. Their commission of this act was to establish that same principle as the principle of the triple concupiscence of their own Fallen Nature. It did so when their will, in the violence of its aversion from God and of its conversion to themselves, drew the inferior faculties of their soul away from God to themselves, directing it away from the infinite, to the subjective, finite, good. And so it was to remain for all their descendants [2] on whose behalf they had acted.
The principle is antirealist in its aversion from Objective Reality (in the ultimate sense of the term) and subjectivist in its conversion to the self. The principle, which in itself is the essence of all error and sin, was, as we have seen above, subsequently to be developed by the devil into the self-deifying, anti-religion of Gnosis, which was to inform all the esoteric sects and, to a lesser degree, all the false religions [3]; into the anti-philosophy that is Modern Philosophy; and into the anti-theology that is Modern Theology. The principle entered the Council through all these channels: through the triple concupiscence, through Gnosis, through Modern Philosophy and Theology.
This principle, as antirealist, stands in opposition to Being and to Objective Reality, and as such has a destructive effect on all it encounters. So, once it has entered the Church as we have seen above, it destroys the doctrines of Faith in their very inner logic and coherence, and reduces the Faith to an amorphous heap of intellectual rubble.
So much for the work of destruction wrought by Antirealism. It corresponds inversely to a work of construction on the rubble left behind, by the principle of Subjectivism. The construction is that of self-deification, than which no more vain or perverse labor has ever been undertaken by philosophers, nor more shameful or hybristic enterprise undertaken by idolaters. In combination with the Faith, these evils constitute what we have termed ‘Neo-Gnosticism’: a new amalgam of Faith and Gnosis, the like of which the Church had not seen for nigh on 2,000 years.
Antirealist Subjectivism is, then, in synthesis:
1) The formal principle of the devil’s rebellion against God;
2) The formal principle of Fallen Angelic Nature;
3) The formal principle of the temptation which the devil proposed to humanity in the form of their representatives, Adam and Eve, in order to destroy that same humanity;
4) The formal principle of their act of rebellion against God [4];
5) The formal principle of the triple concupiscence of Fallen Human Nature;
6) The formal principle of Gnosis;
7) The formal principle of the corrupted Cabala;
8) The formal principle of all the false religions;
9) The formal principle of all the non-Catholic Christian confessions [5];
10) The formal principle of that anti-philosophy which is Modern Philosophy, inaugurating it with the Cartesian ‘evil demon’, and elaborating and consolidating it over the three ensuing centuries;
11) The formal principle of that anti-theology which is Modernism;
12) The formal principle of the Council’s heterodoxy.
vii) Universal and Systematic Scope
Now the devil’s agency is manifest in the systematic and universal nature of a given evil: two qualities which clearly characterize the evil of the Council. Its evil is systematic and universal both in regard to the heterodoxy of the Council texts, as we have shown above, and also in regard to the expansion of this heterodoxy and the consequent damage that it did to souls throughout the world.
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An ambitious project of the devil indeed, one might say, to have the highest authority of the Church dethrone Christ and enthrone man in his place. In the rest of this chapter we shall sketch out the way in which he was to achieve this end.
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FOR YOUR INTEREST: A VIDEO OF THE CHRIST THE KING STATUE IMAGE SHOWN ABOVE
[1] if God is Being, Absolute and Infinite, then the devil is the Negator of Being, in the sense of the Negator of the Infinite Being, the True and the Good that is God, in preference to the finite being which is himself
[2] apart, as we have already said, from Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ and Our Blessed Lady
[3] Igor Shafarevich (op.cit.) gives evidence that the Gnostic sects of Mitteleuropa prepared it for the acceptance of Protestantism. He also makes a connection between the sect of the Free Spirits and the person of Martin Luther himself.
[4] The will’s act of rebellion against God was so violent, that to a certain degree it detached all the faculties of the soul from the True and the Good, weakening the higher faculties of intellect and will and inciting the lower faculties to join in its revolt
[5] see our reflections on Protestantism in the Conclusion to chapter 2