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.
