Pascendi (8)

 The Modernist as Historian and Critic

29. After having studied the Modernist as philosopher, believer and theologian, it now remains for us to consider him as historian, critic, apologist, reformer.

30. Some Modernists, devoted to historical studies, seem to be greatly afraid of being taken for philosophers. About philosophy, they tell you, they know nothing whatever - and in this they display remarkable astuteness, for they are particularly anxious not to be suspected of being prejudiced in favour of philosophical theories which would lay them open to the charge of not being objective, to use the word in vogue. And yet the truth is that their history and their criticism are saturated with their philosophy, and that their historico-critical conclusions are the natural fruit of their philosophical principles. This will be patent to anybody who reflects. Their three first laws are contained in those three principles of their philosophy already dealt with: the principle of agnosticism, the principle of the transfiguration of things by faith, and the principle which We have called of disfiguration. Let us see what consequences flow from each of them. Agnosticism tells us that history, like ever other science, deals entirely with phenomena, and the consequence is that God, and every intervention of God in human affairs, is to be relegated to the domain of faith as belonging to it alone. In things where a double element, the divine and the human, mingles, in Christ, for example, or the Church, or the sacraments, or the many other objects of the same kind, a division must be made and the human element assigned to history while the divine will go to faith. Hence we have that distinction, so current among the Modernists, between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith, between the sacraments of history and the sacraments of faith, and so on. Next we find that the human element itself, which the historian has to work on, as it appears in the documents, has been by faith transfigured, that is to say raised above its historical conditions. It becomes necessary, therefore, to eliminate also the accretions which faith has added, to assign them to faith itself and to the history of faith: thus, when treating of Christ, the historian must set aside all that surpasses man in his natural condition, either according to the psychological conception of him, or according to the place and period of his existence. Finally, by virtue of the third principle, even those things which are not outside the sphere of history they pass through the crucible, excluding from history and relegating to faith everything which, in their judgment, is not in harmony with what they call the logic of facts and in character with the persons of whom they are predicated. Thus, they will not allow that Christ ever uttered those things which do not seem to be within the capacity of the multitudes that listened to Him. 

R. Sungenis: Book Review of Pope Benedict's Trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth;

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MATTHEW 27:25: “HIS BLOOD BE UPON US AND OUR CHILDREN” 

 Now we will turn to other issues in Jesus of Nazareth. This next one also deals with the Jews, and it is quite serious. In his interpretation of Mt 27:25 (“And the whole people said in reply, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’”) JON seems to go out of its way to make this passage say the exact opposite of what it says. The passage is very clear. It says the “whole people” (which is literally and correctly translated from the Greek πᾶς ὁ λαὸς). But, of course, if Cephas can be persuaded that what he is seeing is not really what he is seeing, we then have the means by which “the whole” can be made into a part. In other words, if one’s theology about the Jews has been shaped by fifty years of brow-beating “dialogue” from which JON succumbs to saying that there are now “two ways of rereading the biblical texts – the Christian way and the Jewish way – into dialogue with one another” (p. 33);[xi] in addition to receiving visits from Abe Foxman at the Vatican to help create Judaized doctrine for Catholics; along with regular chastisements from Rabbi Rosen; accompanied by annual visits to synagogues and prayers at the Wailing Wall; along with twisted interpretations of Nostra Aetate and the “Old Covenant is not revoked” from liberal Catholics, well, it is almost inevitable that passages such as Mt 27:25 will somehow be neutralized of their first century impact. So it should come as no surprise that JON concludes: “Matthew is certainly not recounting historical fact here.” Note well: JON knows precisely what Matthew is saying, but he rejects it as incredible. JON’s excuse: “how could the whole people have been present at this moment to clamor for Jesus’ death? …. The real group of accusers are the current Temple authorities…” (p. 186). So Matthew, who we previously understood from tradition was inspired by the Holy Spirit, somehow got it wrong. No apologies. Yet the Gospel of John, which seems to be in agreement with Matthew by his incessant repetition of the phrase “the Jews” in negative contexts, somehow got it right, because, as JON insists, John didn’t actually mean all the Jews but only “the Temple aristocracy.” We can easily see what JON is trying desperately to do. He is willing to put the veracity of Matthew on the chopping block and force John into a defined mold in order to arrive at a position (which will inevitably placate today’s Jews) that the New Testament never once implicates a single Jewish citizen for hating Jesus and wanting him crucified, except for the Sanhedrin, the “Temple aristocracy.”

 

Will it stick? Let’s see. First, JON doesn’t consider the possibility that Matthew’s “whole people” refers to all of the Jews in the crowd at that particular time, not the whole of Jerusalem. Second, he ignores other passages that implicate the Jewish populace in addition to the Temple aristocracy. For example, Acts 3:14-17 says: “But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you [see Jn 19:15] and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses…. And now, brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance,[xii] as did also your rulers.” We see that the crowd gathered at Pentecost, who were mostly Jews, are said to be guilty of murdering Jesus just as are their “rulers” (the “Temple aristocracy”). Third, JON provides no evidence from the Gospel of John that “the Jews” refers only to the Temple aristocracy. He does no etiological study on the phrase (and this is especially egregious since “the Jews” occurs 70 times in John); and he gives no contextual study of the Jewish crowds that left Jesus in unbelief at various times in John’s Gospel. The irony of JON’s dealing with Mt 27:25 is that later in his book he reacts strongly to one of Adolf Harnack’s faulty interpretations by complaining: “But an exegesis that turns a text into its opposite is no exegesis” (p. 165). But JON turned “whole people” into its opposite – a very small part called the Temple aristocracy, which appears to be an interpretation forced by his Jewish ecumenism. To be sure, the issue here is not so much whether the Jewish people of today are somehow responsible for the death of Christ, but more on how JON twists the Scripture to arrive at his favored position. 

 

But this arbitrary treatment of Holy Scripture is only the symptom of an even larger problem in the hermeneutics of JON. On what basis can an exegete declare that one of the Gospel writers simply got his historical facts wrong? Isn’t Matthew supposed to be writing by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit who cannot lie? Didn’t the Council of Trent, later confirmed by Leo XIII and Vatican I, teach that “the Holy Scriptures … at the dictation of the Holy Spirit, have come down even to us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand” and thus “it is absolutely wrong and forbidden … to admit that the sacred writer has erred”?[xiii] The 1964 Pontifical Biblical Commission, when it was an authoritative arm of the Church, said the same: “the Gospels were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who preserved their authors from every error.” Even Joseph Ratzinger’s CDF said the same in 1998: “the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts” (Professio Fidei). The role of the Holy Spirit becomes an interesting question throughout the whole of JON’s book, especially when we notice that not one time in its 300 pages does JON state that what we have in the Gospels today was inspired by the Holy Spirit. There is only one place where JON mentions the “guidance of God’s Spirit,” but that is downplayed as merely a process of the evangelists gradually “remembering” in their own mind what occurred in the life of Jesus (p. 137). Conversely, there are numerous times that JON speaks about “strains of tradition” that were the sources for the Gospel narratives, but never does JON specify a supreme power that weaves all the strains together into a unified and inerrant whole. There is a good reason for that: JON doesn’t believe the New Testament is without error. Welcome to the world of Historical Criticism. But, you say, it can’t be! How can a Catholic claim that the actual Gospel writer, Matthew, made an error? Doesn’t JON believe in at least some kind of divine inspiration of the biblical writers? He may, but the way around that is to claim, as Historical Criticism does, that the Gospel we know as Matthew is actually a redacted (i.e., edited) text created by those who lived a generation or so after Matthew (JON, pp. 27, 127), and that we can only guess as to what was original and what was redacted. And since that generation had neither eyewitnesses to the words and acts of Jesus nor were inspired by the Holy Spirit, then the history they redacted is often in error.

 

Yet, by the same token, we are also assured by these same “scholars” that even though all the Gospels were redacted, somehow the salvation message in those same Gospels was preserved from error! So says Fr. Raymond Brown (who is also cited in JON’s book) and his cadre of liberal theologians who twisted Vatican II’s Dei Verbum 11’s innocuous phrase “for the sake of our salvation”[xiv] to mean: “Scripture teaching is truth without error to the extent that it conforms to the salvific purpose of God” (New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 1169),[xv] against all of Catholic tradition prior. So not only is scriptural inerrancy limited to what Fr. Brown says is “salvific” (which is never defined by him or his colleagues, allowing them license to question even the spiritual concepts in the Gospels), they fail to explain how the salvific content can be preserved error free but the historical content could be riddled with errors. And you wonder why the Church is in such a mess? This kind of usurpation of Scripture is precisely the reason that when Pope Pius XII allowed an investigation into the merits of Historical Criticism in his 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, he did not do so without a resolute warning to its practitioners not to take the criticism further than the Tradition would allow. But the men of JON’s generation ignored that warning and went far beyond it, to the point that we hardly know what true Scripture is any longer. JON’s book is filled with instances in which the biblical writer’s account is called into question, and JON is often tempted to pick the account that is in accord with the ecumenical appeasement he wishes to promote – and we’ve already seen that his ecumenical purpose is to exonerate the Jews to a status where they don’t need to hear the Gospel and still retain an independent “mission from God.” This is not biblical exegesis; it is biblical tyranny. It is not what our tradition taught us. Tradition taught us that Scripture is inerrant in all that it says; that the Gospels, like the Epistles, were written by eye witnesses that were inspired [even “dictated” as Vatican I says] directly by the Holy Spirit so as not to make any errors; and that the days of the Jews are over and they no longer have a “mission from God” that is separate in any way from the Church. Ironically, JON himself admits to some of the excesses of Historical Criticism (e.g., pp. xiv, 82, 103-104) but it is too little too late and certainly not enough for JON to hold the mirror up to his own face.

 

Hence they delete from His real history and transfer to faith all the allegories found in His discourses. Do you inquire as to the criterion they adopt to enable them to make these divisions? The reply is that they argue from the character of the man, from his condition of life, from his education, from the circumstances under which the facts took place - in short, from criteria which, when one considers them well, are purely subjective. Their method is to put themselves into the position and person of Christ, and then to attribute to Him what they would have done under like circumstances. In this way, absolutely a priori and acting on philosophical principles which they admit they hold but which they affect to ignore, they proclaim that Christ, according to what they call His real history, was not God and never did anything divine, and that as man He did and said only what they, judging from the time in which he lived, can admit Him to have said or done.

Criticism and its Principles

31. And as history receives its conclusions, ready-made, from philosophy, so too criticism takes its own from history. The critic, on the data furnished him by the historian, makes two parts of all his documents. Those that remain after the triple elimination above described go to form the real history; the rest is attributed to the history of the faith or as it is styled, to internal history. For the Modernists distinguish very carefully between these two kinds of history, and it is to be noted that they oppose the history of the faith to real history precisely as real. Thus we have a double Christ: a real Christ, and a Christ, the one of faith, who never really existed; a Christ who has lived at a given time and in a given place, and a Christ who has never lived outside the pious meditations of the believer - the Christ, for instance, whom we find in the Gospel of St. John, which is pure contemplation from beginning to end.

32. But the dominion of philosophy over history does not end here. Given that division, of which We have spoken, of the documents into two parts, the philosopher steps in again with his principle of vital immanence, and shows how everything in the history of the Church is to be explained by vital emanation. And since the cause or condition of every vital emanation whatsoever is to be found in some need, it follows that no fact can ante-date the need which produced it - historically the fact must be posterior to the need. See how the historian works on this principle. He goes over his documents again, whether they be found in the Sacred Books or elsewhere, draws up from them his list of the successive needs of the Church, whether relating to dogma or liturgy or other matters, and then he hands his list over to the critic. The critic takes in hand the documents dealing with the history of faith and distributes them, period by period, so that they correspond exactly with the lists of needs, always guided by the principle that the narration must follow the facts, as the facts follow the needs. It may at times happen that some parts of the Sacred Scriptures, such as the Epistles, themselves constitute the fact created by the need. Even so, the rule holds that the age of any document can only be determined by the age in which each need had manifested itself in the Church. Further, a distinction must be made between the beginning of a fact and its development, for what is born one day requires time for growth. Hence the critic must once more go over his documents, ranged as they are through the different ages, and divide them again into two parts, and divide them into two lots, separating those that regard the first stage of the facts from those that deal with their development, and these he must again arrange according to their periods.

33. Then the philosopher must come in again to impose on the historian the obligation of following in all his studies the precepts and laws of evolution. It is next for the historian to scrutinise his documents once more, to examine carefully the circumstances and conditions affecting the Church during the different periods, the conserving force she has put forth, the needs both internal and external that have stimulated her to progress, the obstacles she has had to encounter, in a word everything that helps to determine the manner in which the laws of evolution have been fulfilled in her. This done, he finishes his work by drawing up in its broad lines a history of the development of the facts. The critic follows and fits in the rest of the documents with this sketch; he takes up his pen, and soon the history is made complete. Now we ask here: Who is the author of this history? The historian? The critic? Assuredly, neither of these but the philosopher. From beginning to end everything in it is a priori, and a priori in a way that reeks of heresy. These men are certainly to be pitied, and of them the Apostle might well say: They became vain in their thoughts. . . professing themselves to be wise they became fools (Rom. i. 21, 22); but, at the same time, they excite just indignation when they accuse the Church of torturing the texts, arranging and confusing them after its own fashion, and for the needs of its cause. In this they are accusing the Church of something for which their own conscience plainly reproaches them.

How the Bible is Dealt With

34. The result of this dismembering of the Sacred Books and this partition of them throughout the centuries is naturally that the Scriptures can no longer be attributed to the authors whose names they bear. The Modernists have no hesitation in affirming commonly that these books, and especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, have been gradually formed by additions to a primitive brief narration - by interpolations of theological or allegorical interpretation, by transitions, by joining different passages together. This means, briefly, that in the Sacred Books we must admit a vital evolution, springing from and corresponding with evolution of faith. The traces of this evolution, they tell us, are so visible in the books that one might almost write a history of them. Indeed this history they do actually write, and with such an easy security that one might believe them to have with their own eyes seen the writers at work through the ages amplifying the Sacred Books. To aid them in this they call to their assistance that branch of criticism which they call textual, and labour to show that such a fact or such a phrase is not in its right place, and adducing other arguments of the same kind. They seem, in fact, to have constructed for themselves certain types of narration and discourses, upon which they base their decision as to whether a thing is out of place or not. Judge if you can how men with such a system are fitted for practising this kind of criticism. To hear them talk about their works on the Sacred Books, in which they have been able to discover so much that is defective, one would imagine that before them nobody ever even glanced through the pages of Scripture, whereas the truth is that a whole multitude of Doctors, infinitely superior to them in genius, in erudition, in sanctity, have sifted the Sacred Books in every way, and so far from finding imperfections in them, have thanked God more and more the deeper they have gone into them, for His divine bounty in having vouchsafed to speak thus to men. Unfortunately, these great Doctors did not enjoy the same aids to study that are possessed by the Modernists for their guide and rule, - a philosophy borrowed from the negation of God, and a criterion which consists of themselves.

We believe, then, that We have set forth with sufficient clearness the historical method of the Modernists. The philosopher leads the way, the historian follows, and then in due order come internal and textual criticism. And since it is characteristic of the first cause to communicate its virtue to secondary causes, it is quite clear that the criticism We are concerned with is an agnostic, immanentist, and evolutionist criticism. Hence anybody who embraces it and employs it, makes profession thereby of the errors contained in it, and places himself in opposition to Catholic faith. This being so, one cannot but be greatly surprised by the consideration which is attached to it by certain Catholics. Two causes may be assigned for this: first, the close alliance, independent of all differences of nationality or religion, which the historians and critics of this school have formed among themselves; second, the boundless effrontery of these men. Let one of them but open his mouth and the others applaud him in chorus, proclaiming that science has made another step forward; let an outsider but hint at a desire to inspect the new discovery with his own eyes, and they are on him in a body; deny it - and you are an ignoramus; embrace it and defend it - and there is no praise too warm for you. In this way they win over any who, did they but realise what they are doing, would shrink back with horror. The impudence and the domineering of some, and the thoughtlessness and imprudence of others, have combined to generate a pestilence in the air which penetrates everywhere and spreads the contagion. But let us pass to the apologist.