Concerning Another Good Book:  Three Reformers...

 

      In the monastic life – and by extension into the whole Church’s life – there is the traditional practice during Lent of doing some special reading, reading that will help focus one on the meaning of Lent in preparation for the celebration of Easter.  Normally this would involve the biography of a saint or devotional books that are aids to prayer. 

Over the years I have read, and enjoyed, Thomas Aquinas:  Selected Writings, A Retreat with St. Therese, The Perfect Joy of St. Francis, and The Unchanging Heart of the Priesthood, all of which I recommend to you.  This year, though, I did something a bit different.  I have been reading the philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers, a study of the three minds, Maritain claims that are behind the formation of the modern mind:  Luther, Descartes and Rousseau.  The subtitles, for the three sections of the book, are “The Advent of the Self,” “The Incarnation of the Angel,” and “Nature’s Saint.” 

      The gist of Maritain’s argument is that each of these “reformers” has influenced the modern mind (or heart) to turn in on itself.  With Luther, this occurred due to his theologically innovative view of God’s grace:  that it does not reach to the heart, but only “covers” our sinfulness under the cloak of Christ’s righteousness.  The human heart is mired in sin, so much so that there can be no communion between sinner and God in a human being’s interior life, and there is therefore nothing to be done to save us except believe in Christ’s holiness that covers over and hides from Justice our sinfulness.  Grace acts only in the exterior realm, and so the heart, the mind, is left to itself in sin, trapped in the Self.

      Descartes, rebelling against the heritage of classical philosophy much as Luther rebelled against the authority of the Church, metaphysically turned things inside out:  to put it briefly, he reconstructed philosophy by refusing to begin with what is and launched the project of beginning instead with the human mind, which like an angel, he “discovered,” has innate ideas that are the sure path to true and certain knowledge.  Again, the human mind, the self, is locked in, imprisoned in itself.  His cogito – “I think therefore I am.” – is his foundation, and the first word of it is “I”.  Thus, in Cartesian thought the world around us has become flimsy in its reality… and eminently manipulable.  Reality has been relocated in the mind rather than in what is, “out there.”  And the pathway to knowledge became the mind exploring itself, rather than conforming itself to the bodily detected, sensed world around us. 

      Finally, Rousseau initiated the very modern project of Self-worship.  Here is where this centering in on the Self became so very explicit, with Rousseau, without embarrassment over his infidelity, abandonment of his children, disloyalty to friends, he sings in the most astoundingly bold fashion songs in praise of his own goodness. He, like the other two “reformers” rebels against authority, this time the traditional wisdom and moral authority of the virtues:  attaining to them is too laborious and difficult, causing Jean-Jacques Rousseau discomfort and unrest of soul.  Ergo, this must be the wrong path on which to travel.  Here parades that modern idea that if something causes me discomfort, challenges me morally, disturbs my absorption in myself – then, it cannot really be “true” for me. 

      Luther explicitly taught that faith in God is all that’s demanded of us in our relationship with Him, love of God being something impossible for us (in spite of Christ’s direct command and St. Paul’s declaration that love is the needful fulfillment of the Law of God), and so the human soul’s great “escape route” out of itself, love, is barred, the door closed.  And even Luther’s idea of faith is more of a trust in a certain construal of the Gospel rather than in God Himself.  Self locked in on itself.  It’s the same with Descartes – very busy rummaging around in his own mind looking for buried knowledge, instead of paying attention (with sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell) to the world around him and then abstracting from what is concepts of natures and the causes of things.  Meanwhile, Rousseau is busy adoring himself and presenting to the modern world himself as model and pattern.  “Truth” for him came to mean what consoled him, what made him happy in his splendid, unrivaled even, goodness of nature.  Who needs the hard-won virtues, Rousseau asks, when he has and is goodness itself? 

      Luther – trapped, beyond even grace, in a sinful heart; Descartes – buried in his own thoughts, searching in himself for the foundation of knowledge; and Rousseau preening in the morality mirror of self-adulation and self-canonization as “nature’s saint.”  There they are, the formatters, to a large degree, of the modern mind through the avenues of religion, philosophy and sociology.  One hears their voices echoing often in the banter around us. 

      The application of all this to Lent?  I think of those words of the Responsory from the Lenten Morning Office:  “God himself will set me free, from the hunter’s snare.”  Indeed, from myself too!  Lent, a season especially dedicated to prayer, that act moved by grace whereby the Christian raises his mind and heart to God… in faith, hope and love.  And thus into the freedom that one is seeking for in a graceful transformation of one’s heart, and that which is born out of a self-abandoning search for truth, and the brave decision to begin to be formed in the virtues. For all these, we have to “get out” of ourselves, to venture forth as well as let our hearts be “invaded” by grace and goodness, our inner household shaken up a bit – even if a lot – in order to be who and what we were created to be.  Saints.