kolbe MI

Fred,

You asked me about the theology of St. Maximillian Kolbe and the MI. What is written below I would like not to be printed. I do not engage in arguments and polemics anymore, and with this subject, I’m sure there would be a very large contingent ready and willing to engage in much vehement controversy. I am old, and have much more important things to do at this time.

First, I hope you understand that, as should be evidenced from my writings, that I would never wish to be considered “backwards” in asserting anything contrary to all the glory that truly belongs to Mary and her Immaculate Conception. I do, however, find myself in disagreement with Franciscan theology, including that of St. Maximillian.

It is most fascinating that St. Francis, while explicitly stating his great respect for theologians, also forbade such “book-learning” to his Friars Minor. He named his Friars “minor” precisely because he completely believed that the extraordinary graces of both his Order and the individual vocations of individual friars was dependent upon them being and doing something uniquely different – living completely the grace of Lady Poverty not only in respect to physical things, but also in relation to such things as formal learning, positions of authority in the Church, etc. He in fact predicted that there would be a great falling away from this ideal, and that after time, and through chastisement by the Devil and the world, they would come back.

It makes sense therefore that Franciscan theologians, in their departure from this true charism and grace of Francis’ ideal, are so often “off-base” in their theology. I explored this in regard to St. Bonaventure in my long article on the history of Gnosticism titled Teilhardian Evolution and the Amazonian Synod: The Nest of the Antichrist. I have copied and pasted the relevant portion at the end of this email. This does not at all mean that he cannot be considered a Saint. The perfection of love of God can, and often does, exist in the midst of intellectual confusion and error. We see now “through a darkened glass”, but at the same time are instructed to “be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect”. So, in what follows, I in no way intend to detract from the sainthood or martyrdom of St. Maximillian. There have been many saints whose theologies were in error. I have several times in my writings mentioned St. Maximus the Confessor who, for instance, taught that original sin consisted in man turning to sexual reproduction and away from God’s original method of creating the first man. Similarly, eastern Fathers such as Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Basil taught that God only created the division of sexes in “prevision of sin”.

Much of the “off-base” theology I sense in Franciscan theology is centered upon convincing us that their theology surpasses St. Thomas in insight and profundity. And in so doing, they directly or indirectly violate the metaphysics of St. Thomas, which as Pope Pius X said, “places them in grave danger”.

Much of this attempt to in some way denigrate and surpass Thomas in the realm of theology is centered upon Mariology. It of course requires the invention of new terminology. Thus, in St. Maximillian’s writings, Mary is a “quasi-Incarnation of the Holy Spirit”, and of course the Holy Spirit must be the “uncreated Immaculate Conception”. Both of these terms I find inadequately explained or justified in his writings. What possible intellectual clarification can come, for instance, through the term quasi-Incarnation? By its very definition, the word “Incarnation” as applied to God applies only to the complete union of the divine Nature of the Second Person of the Trinity with a human nature in the One Divine Person of Jesus Christ. Is there any sense, after the Immaculate Conception, in which we can validly consider that Mary is only One Divine Person (the Holy Spirit) possessing two natures?

This of course has led to even further excesses which are the logical end points of such theology. Articles have recently appeared in MI, for instance, telling us that Mary was transubstantiated into the Holy Spirit. Here, of course, we have a very thinly disguised attack upon Thomistic metaphysics, and its absolute necessity for the Catholic Dogma of Transubstantiation. Transubstantiation absolutely requires the complete change of the entire substance of one substance into another, the accidens alone remaining. Are we supposed to believe that after the Immaculate Conception, all that remains of Mary was her accidens? The soul of Mary would thus be “lost”. Interestingly, Duns Scotus, in his writings, rejected the true meaning of Transubstantiation, and only submitted nominally to the teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council on this matter. It is also interesting that Pope Pius IX in his defining of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, never credits Duns Scotus, despite the fact that he is popularly given sole credit for making possible on a theological grounds the Definition of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX.

It is also true that St. Maximillian claims a vast superiority for his claim of Mary being a Quasi-Incarnation of the Holy Spirit over her title as “Spouse of the Holy Spirit”. He states: “He [the Holy Spirit] penetrated her being to such depths that to call her the spouse of the Holy Spirit is to use a pale, distant, most inadequate (even though correct) comparison to express their union.” He in fact states that this concept of “Spouse of the Holy Spirit” was merely a “moral union”, vastly inferior to what he was proposing, and he of course also thus denigrates the teaching of St. Louis de Montfort, for whom this concept of “Spouse of the Holy Spirit” was at the very core of Mary’s glory. He might have considered otherwise if he had truly meditated on the following:

“Let us be glad and rejoice, and give glory to him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath prepared herself.” (Apoc. 19: 7).

There is no higher expression possible in human language than the concept of a spousal love and union between God and man.

It is at this point that we come down to the core of what is wrong with Franciscan spirituality. It is tainted with the Gnostic attempt to confuse and unite Divine and created being. We rightly speak of human divinization, including the divinization of human beings such as ourselves who are vastly inferior to Mary. But this divinization is accomplished, as St. Thomas so adamantly points out, not through union or confusion of Divine and created being, but through vision (“We shall be like to Him; because we shall see Him as He is” – 1 John 3:2) and love. The glory of Mary therefore lies not in any such confusion of divine and human through some sort of quasi-incarnation, but though that fully human, but singular, cooperation and submission to the extraordinary grace of God called the Grace of Glory, by which she was lifted up to union with God through Vision and Love of His Essence. And this, of course, also detracts nothing from the fact that the grace she received through her Immaculate Conception did indeed far surpass all the saints and angels. Interestingly, anything either more or less than this lessens Mary as either the glory of the human race or the created masterpiece of God. And I need add that nothing I have said here detracts either from the fact that Mary for all eternity has existed in the mind of God as the Mother of God and Mediatrix of all graces (Proverbs 8, and much elsewhere), or that we need to consecrate ourselves totally to Jesus through her.

Having said all this, it should be suspected that such Franciscan confusion in regard to the human and divine is rooted is some sort of derivation from Gnosticism, and especially that syncretization of Christianity with Gnosticism which is called Neo-Platonism. The very essence of Neo-Platonism’s “mixing” of the human and divine always come to nest in some sort of “emanation and return”. Such, for instance was completely true of St. Bonaventure (as examined below). But it is also a more-diluted theme in St. Maximillian’s writings. Thus, he writes:

“Everywhere in this world we notice action and the reaction which is equal but contrary to it; we find departure and return, going away and coming back, separation and reunion. The separation always looks forward to union, which is creative. All this is simply an image of the Blessed Trinity in the activity of creatures. Union means love, creative love. Divine activity, outside the Trinity itself, follows a like pattern. First God creates the universe: - that is something like a separation. Creatures, by following the natural law given to them by God, reach their perfection, become like him and go back to him. Intelligent creatures love him in a conscious matter; through this love they unite themselves more and more closely with him, and so find their way back to him.”

Creation is not a separation from God. Coming from the act of God which is creation ex nihilo, created thing are a totally gratuitous “coming into being” which is not a separation from God. The concept of “return” is certainly valid from a Christian standpoint because of man’s Fall, and turning away from God. But creation itself cannot be inherently considered a separation from and return to God without implicitly or explicitly inserting some sort of necessity upon God in this cyclic process. And this is precisely what St. Maximillian does when he says that this cycle of departure and return is “simply an image of the Blessed Trinity in the activity of creatures in the very act of creation itself. There was no necessity in God or in His image of Himself for man to return to Him in that completely exalted and gratuitous grace of the Beatific Vision. In other words, St. Maximillian’s words here can be seen as the haunting Ghost of Neo-Platonism.

Finally, we must note that all of St. Maximillian’s recurring thinking and writing on this subject grew out of his attempt to make sense of Mary’s definition of herself at Lourdes as “The Immaculate Conception”. I believe that he was right in considering that this was not same as saying “I was immaculately conceived”. But the answer to this dilemma lies not in using such confusing language such as “quasi-incarnate” – language which blurs the absolutely necessary distinction between divine and created being, but rather in seeing that for all eternity through the eternal design of God all of the elect are conceived, nurtured, and formed in her spiritual womb – Her Immaculate Heart – into the likeness of her Son Jesus. She is in other words the “place” of all rebirth and “immaculate conception” in God. As I have said elsewhere, just as Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and formed as the God-Man in the womb of Mary, so all of the faithful are conceived by the Holy Spirit in baptism and formed into the likeness of Jesus within Mary’s Immaculate Heart. This has been explored in our article The Fifth Glorious Mystery.

St. Bonaventure:

*St. Bonaventure, while not to be considered in the extreme camp of an Eriugena or Eckhardt, yet rejected Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (and therefore the only real foundation of the doctrine creation ex nihilo), and quite emphatically conceived of creation as emanation from God, Thus, from his writings, “This is our entire metaphysics: emanation, exemplarity, and consummation, that is, to be illumined by rays of spiritual light and to return to the Most High.” (Collationes in Hexaemeron) .

 

The overt pantheism of an Eriugena or Eckhardt is readily condemned by the Church. But the vast extent of Gnostic-type thinking is not usually expressed in such extremes, but rather comes in more “diffused” forms, penetrating deeply into the heart of the Church through men who have reputations of sanctity, and even sainthood, but whose theology is permeated with Gnostic sentiments. St. Bonaventure, in his rejection of Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysics, and his embrace of Platonic-inspired theology, is a premier example. This is such an important point for understanding the depths of penetration of Gnostic theology and spirituality into Western theology that we offer the following explication of Bonaventure’s view of creation as given by Zachary Hayes (The History of Franciscan Theology, Franciscan Institute, 2007), and confirmed by many other Franciscan scholars:

“In the first book of his Sentence Commentary Bonaventure expressed a vision of creation that remained with him until the end of his life. Drawing on and expanding the scriptural image (Eccles 1:7) of a river which flows from a spring, spreads throughout the land to purify and fructify it, and eventually flows back to its point of origin, Bonaventure presents the outline of his entire theological vision. In sum, the contours of the Christian faith are cast within the neo-Platonic circle of emanation, exemplarity, and return as this philosophical metaphor is reshaped by the Christian vision of faith.” (p. 61-62).

There are at least two things very disturbing about all this, both of which are centered in the Gnostic, Neo-Platonic concept of the circle of emanation and return.

The word emanation, when used in any way to describe the essential relationship between created realities and God, necessarily carries overtones of Gnosticism and Pantheism, no matter what gyrations one passes through in order to “Christianize” it. The word itself connotes “to come forth from, or issue from something else as a source”. It is impossible to find a good definition of this word without encountering both these elements: “coming forth from” and “source.” Emanation is the classic word used to describe the pantheistic coming out of all finite realities from the Monad or Godhead. It may disingenuously be used in such a way as to try to identify it with creation ex nihilo, using the rationale that this is justifiable because the created thing did not exist before this time and was therefore “nothing.” But this simply doesn’t work. The act of creation is not a movement out from the ontological Being of God, but rather an act extrinsic to God’s Supreme Being by which He exercises His infinite power and intelligence to create truly from nothing. It is this which is denied in the concept of emanation.

The second element in St. Bonaventure’s disturbing theology and cosmology is the circular concept of emanation and return – also a concept profoundly integral to Gnosticism. It necessitates the concept of evolution – a word the etymology of which is very close to that of emanation. It literally means to “roll out.” What it entails in Bonaventure’s metaphysics and cosmology is an ascending growth in the status of human nature itself through an evolving process of emanation and return. In Bonaventure’s metaphysics, this demands a view of the soul which negates the unchangeable substantial form of the soul. He certainly taught that the soul was created in the image of God, but this image is set upon a path of historical development by the dynamics of historical, evolutionary ascent through multiple forms.

St. Thomas embraced the hylomorphic constitution of any and all created substances, such that any individual substance is the result of the Divine act of creating from nothing – this act involving the union of prime matter with one substantial form. From this substantial view of the human soul ensues, as I have already pointed out, his doctrine concerning the unity of the soul, and the non-evolutionary status of human nature at all points of human history.

Bonaventure, on the other hand, rejected this unicity of substantial form, and posited what is called “universal hylomorphism.”  Again, from Zachary Hayes:

“Instead of accepting the doctrine of the unity of form, Bonaventure drew from R. Grosseteste and the Oxford Franciscans a form of light-metaphysics. According to this view, creatures are, indeed, composed of matter and form, but not necessarily of a single form. According to Bonaventure, the first form of all corporal beings is the form of light. Light in this instance is designated by the Latin word lux and is distinguished from lumen (radiation) and color (the empirical form in which light is perceived).”

In other words, we are here dealing with a spiritual “light” which emanates from God (and specifically, in Bonaventure’s metaphysics, from Christ) which is the moving force in the cycle of emanation and return. Even physical matter, according to Bonaventure, possesses to some degree this lux.

Hayes continues his analysis:

“This theory of light implies a rejection of the Aristotelian theory of the unity of form which would be favored by Aquinas [not just “favored,” but absolutely integral to Thomistic metaphysics]. In fact, Bonaventure argued in favor of a plurality of forms in a position similar to that of Avicenna, Avicebron, and Albert the Great. If light is understood to be the first and most general form, then, besides light, each individual being has a special form. It follows that each being has at least these two forms [and human beings have at least three forms, since Bonaventure denies that the soul can be the substantial form of the body, a position which he labeled as “insane”]. The theory of the plurality of forms in Bonaventure involves a distinct understanding of the function of form. The function of form is not merely to give rise to one specific being [in other words, it does not serve to determine an essence which remains substantially unchanged through all “accidental” change]. But precisely in forming a specific being, it prepares or disposes matter for new possibilities. There is, indeed, such a thing as a final form. But this is arrived at only at the end of a process involving a multiplicity of forms along the way.”

Put simply, Bonaventure’s theology and metaphysics entails that the human soul itself is involved in an historical, evolutionary process. Bonaventure adopted Joachim of Fiore’s view of the seven stages of human development and history. This is why he compromised and betrayed St. Francis way of Poverty. It simply could not be lived by the Franciscan Order as a whole until the Seventh (Seraphic) Age.

St. Francis, on the other hand, possessed the simplicity and trueness of heart to understand that the full living of his way of Lady Poverty did not require an historical evolutionary process to come to fruition, but could and should be lived by all his friars right then and now. It simply required a return to his Rule. His implicit theology and metaphysics were therefore not that of Bonaventure, but rather that of St. Thomas.

Human nature does not evolve. The nature, the choice, and the possibilities are the same for any man or woman at any point on the historical timeline. Any application of an evolutionary dialectic to understanding either the Nature of God or the nature of man is totally false, and destructive to both the unchangeable Nature of God and the integrity and continuity of human nature.