Transcript

The topic that I've been given for this evening's presentation is entitled, Forerunners of the Reformation.

Forerunners of the Reformation.

That title was given to me, usually I get to come up with a title and it's a wordplay or a pun of sorts.

I kind of felt funny driving up here from Steubenville in a Toyota Forerunner.

So I hope I don't in any way contribute to the errors of the Reformation.

But tonight we're going to be looking at how Many, many Christians who meant well got lost on their way.

And it's something that is not hard to do.

You know, Marcus has already referred to the driving habits of certain humans, the male in particular, and how easy it is to get lost and how hard it is to get directions.

And I think it's a reminder that it's harder to get it right than it is to get it wrong.

Because to get it wrong, all you've got to do is make one mistake But to get it right, you've got to really not have any.

And in the spiritual life, it reminds us of how much we need help and assistance, not just from the Holy Spirit, that's so hard to distinguish from other spirits, and not just from sacred scripture, which is hard to interpret, especially when you lack the expertise of those scripture scholars who surround us and try to create a kind of monopoly, but just because we are Now, when it came down to outlining this particular talk on the forerunners of the Reformation, I decided to look at three key figures, three forerunners.

And all of them have been mentioned by Marcus in the opening talk.

I kind of felt grateful and relieved so that none of you could say to me, I never heard of any of those guys.

The first one is Marsilius of Padua.

The second one is William of Ockham.

And the third one is the famous writer Machiavelli, the author of The Prince.

But before we look at those three forerunners of the Reformation, I would like to take note of three forerunners of the forerunners.

I would like to back up a millennium and take a look at where we got lost by looking at how in the first thousand years, in spite of our weakness and sin, we seem to get it right.

I would like to look at three forerunners of medieval Catholicism in St. Athanasius, in St. Augustine, and in St. Thomas Aquinas.

So Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas, you can think of the triple A and how they get you out of trouble whenever you're pulled over to the side of the road.

Because what we really have in losing our way is a historical framework that is divided up into two parts.

The first one is known as the ancient way.

In fact, in the 14th and 15th centuries, they spoke of the via antiqua, the ancient or antique way.

And it was embodied by thinkers such as Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas.

But in the 14th and 15th centuries, a whole new way of thinking, known as the Via Moderna, was born and celebrated, and it spread like wildfire.

And so I want to look at the modern way, the Via Moderna, that was really pioneered by Marsilius, by William of Ockham.

And also by Machiavelli.

But first, I want to show what it is they departed from, how it is we lost the way.

We've got to remind ourselves of that original way, the via antiqua, the ancient way.

I can't do any of this justice.

All we can do is a kind of panoramic survey.

But I think we need to do that, even if it risks overgeneralization.

because we find ourselves in a very difficult situation today, as Marcus described in the talk this past hour.

He used the example of the balloon once you let go.

I used the example of squeezing toothpaste back into the tube.

It's really hard for us today to figure out where we went wrong and how we got to where we are today.

As G.K. Chesterton once said of moderns, we don't know what we're doing because we don't know what we're undoing.

And it's that ancient way that began to unravel, and it was the undoing of the via antiqua that was advanced by these forerunners of the Reformation, these proponents of the via moderna, the modern way.

But what was the via antiqua?

What was the ancient way?

What was the Catholic way?

Well, of course, we could look in the New Testament, we could look in the Apostolic Fathers, but the finest expression of it is found in the writings and the teachings of St. Athanasius As it comes to us in such a nicely distilled form in what we recite every Sunday in the Nicene Creed.

Because the Nicene Creed is what really crystallized the proper way of reading the Gospels.

Because the heart of the Gospel message is that God the Father sent His Son to give us the Holy Spirit to make us one.

To make us one family.

Sons and daughters.

To redeem us.

And so, the question that was really on the minds of many intellectuals in the third and fourth centuries leading up to the Nicene Council, which was held, as you know, in 325, was, is the language of the Gospels figurative or real?

Is it metaphorical or is it metaphysical?

When Jesus refers to himself as the Son of God, we know that in many world religions you have the language of Son of God, Sons of God, Divine Sonship.

And it's always used figuratively, whether it's speaking of the Pharaoh or the Caesar or any other figure in world religion.

But in the Gospels, Jesus seemed to take it beyond the figurative to the real.

He seemed to speak of God as His Father and Himself as the Son in a way that was more than metaphorical.

It almost seemed to be metaphysical.

I and the Father are one in such language as this.

And so understandably, a lot of intellectuals were wrestling with this, especially a leading figure by the name of Arius, the father of the Arian heresy.

And that's what Marcus referred to in Jerome's famous comment, that the church awoke and groaned to find itself Arian.

And why?

Because it's a natural conclusion that's easy to draw.

Because when we think of God, we can think of Him as a creator, an architect, a physician, a father, a shepherd, and all of those things are only figurative, except for one, and that is Father.

God is not an eternal creator because the creation isn't eternal.

Only God is.

But God is an eternal Father because He's eternally fathering the Son.

And that is why Jesus Christ is true God from true God, because He's eternally begotten of the Father.

God from God, light from light, true God from true God, because He is eternally begotten.

That's why the Son isn't younger than the Father.

The Son isn't smaller than the Father.

He is co-eternal with the Father.

In which case, the one eternal principle that applies to God is He's an eternal Father who's eternally fathering, It's more than a name.

It's more than a noun.

It's a verb.

And the result of eternally fathering is the eternal Son.

And that Son images the Father from all eternity by returning that gift of love.

And that gift of love from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Father is the Holy Spirit, the bond of their interpersonal love.

That's Athanasius' teaching in a nutshell.

You can see why it wasn't easy to overcome the Arian heresy.

Because if you've got nicer things to do with your time, better things to do with your leisure, than study scripture and try to submit your reason, the natural light of reason, to the greater supernatural light of faith, then it's going to be easy to conclude that Jesus' sonship is just figurative, it's not real.

God's fatherhood is metaphorical, like architect, lawgiver, physician, shepherd.

As opposed to it being a metaphysical truth and a reality that is eternally real.

So Athanasius showed us that fatherhood, sonship, interpersonal love, these are eternally applicable of God.

These are not merely figurative descriptions we project onto the deity.

Suddenly, divine power is not just some unbridled force, As we recite in the Creed, I believe in God the Father Almighty.

He's not just an almighty God.

All that power, all that might, all that knowledge is expressed always in a fatherly way.

That's why we always feel safe with God's power, with His wisdom, because it's always expressed in a way that's involved in fathering us as His family, and each and every one of us as beloved sons and daughters.

This is the teaching of the New Testament, But it's the theological legacy left by Saint Athanasius, and it represents the cornerstone of the Via Antiqua.

Because it's a whole new way back then of looking at power, at looking at law, at looking at judgment and authority.

Why?

Because as Athanasius taught us, God knows us better than we know ourselves, but he also loves us more than we love ourselves.

So when he gives us the law, it isn't a threat to our freedom, It is a prescription for our health.

It's a description of our need.

It is a path to our happiness and fulfillment, for God the Father knows what His children need better than they do.

It was a whole new way of thinking of power, of law, of freedom, and fulfillment.

But it soon became the ancient way, because it became the living legacy of the church handed down through the ages.

By the time you get to St. Augustine, He advances this.

He shows how it works in everyday life, not just in eternity.

Most especially, he does so by teaching us about the sacraments.

Augustine is the second proponent of the via antiqua, and he had more than one heresy of the Arians to fight.

He had three heresies that he had to overcome.

That's why his writings take up so much shelf space in my library.

You see, The Manichaeans argued that anything that is matter is inferior to spirit.

That which is spiritual is good, that which is material is evil, and so sacraments aren't even possible.

So he had to overcome the Manichaean heresy to show that the incarnation of Christ is when God became man.

When the eternal, pure spirit of God has assumed human flesh.

This is what makes it possible for the sacraments to convey divine life by human means.

Invisible power through visible signs.

And the Manichaeans were defeated.

And then he faced the powerful heresy of the Donatists, who argued that, okay, yes, sacraments are possible, but they're only effective when they're administered by holy priests.

And so if you've got corrupt ones, Or if you find out later that you were baptized by one who was secretly corrupt, that baptism didn't work.

You've got to find another one, and you've got to get it again.

And so Augustine had to overcome not only the Manichaeans in showing the sacraments are possible, but the Donatists in showing that they're intrinsically powerful.

Because the sacraments are not primarily what we do for God, but what God primarily does for us.

And so the priest is not speaking in his own name, on his own behalf, and he doesn't say, this is your body looking up, or this is his body looking out.

He says, this is my body because he has loaned his lungs, his whole life is consecrated to our Lord.

And so over against the Donatists, Augustine showed, let God be true and every man a liar, even the priests, he quoted Paul in Romans.

The sacraments of the Catholic faith are intrinsically powerful.

and not only possible.

And then along came the Pelagians, and they agreed that sacraments are possible, sacraments are powerful, but they're not absolutely necessary, except for the weaklings.

But if you're really serious, you ought to be able to kind of pick yourself up by your own spiritual bootstraps, and for the wayward and the weak and the wounded, okay, sacraments.

supernatural divine grace.

But ordinarily, natural effort is all that we need in order to become saints.

And he aimed and fired, Augustine did, and uprooted.

He exposed, he overturned, he refuted the Pelagian heresy.

Because the sacraments aren't just useful for some, they're absolutely necessary for all.

Because of the incarnation of the Father's Son that Athanasius taught us all about, Augustine was able to say that that same incarnate Lord comes to us through the Eucharist and gives us life through the other sacraments.

And those sacraments are possible against the Manichaeans, they are powerful against the Donatists, no matter who administers them, and they're absolutely necessary against the Pelagians because we can't make ourselves partakers of divine nature.

We can't climb to We can't reach God, but we can accept the gift that has come to us since God condescended and stooped down to our level in His mercy and through His power raises us up to His own.

This was Augustine's theological legacy, and it advanced to the Antiqua.

And through writings such as the City of God, he really took the cornerstone of Athanasius and built a foundation on which Christian culture, Catholic civilization could be built.

We might call it Christendom.

Whatever name you give it, you have many men and women in many parts of Europe advancing a Christ-centered vision of what it means to live everyday life, natural existence by supernatural grace.

And by the time you get to St. Thomas Aquinas, you reach the height of the great medieval synthesis.

And in the 13th century, up until about the year 1274, when St. Thomas Aquinas died, the same year St. Bonaventure did, they both taught at the University of Paris.

The Dominican angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscan seraphic doctor, St. Bonaventure, both expressed and embodied this great medieval synthesis.

It's a kind of intellectual marriage.

Through the intellect, we discover That God is united to man.

That heaven and earth are united.

That through the sacraments, invisible, divine life comes to us through visible human signs.

The marriage metaphor is the most frequently used image to express the via antiqua.

That through Christ and the Virgin Mary, God and man are united in a new covenant.

It is a marital bond.

And this marital covenant is what makes it possible for humans to experience divine life, for God to become man, for heaven and earth, for eternity and time, for church and state to be united.

Marriage is the principal model.

It is the image.

And remember, marriage It doesn't make it easy, it only makes it possible to be united to someone very different in a fruitful way.

It doesn't make it easy, it makes it possible, and really only because it too is a sacrament.

But this was the image used to describe the Via Antiqua, that if God is a Father from all eternity, then What it means to express divine power is to make your life a gift of love from all eternity, and that is why the Son is co-eternal with the Father.

Everything that He has He gave to the Son, and everything the Son receives He returns to the Father, and that life, that gift, that love, that power is the person of the Holy Spirit.

And through the sacraments, we who are members of a human family on earth are raised up and elevated, transformed and enabled to share in the heavenly life of these three divine persons for all eternity.

So after 80 or 90 years of family life on earth, we'll have 80 or 90 trillion years of divine life in heaven.

And that is what we were really made for, and that is why Christ became man and gave us the sacraments.

And for St. Thomas Aquinas, this marriage Faith is expressed intellectually.

Faith does not abolish reason.

Faith presupposes human reason.

And in the same act, it heals human reason of the errors that sinful thinkers commit.

Faith also perfects human reason so we can reason more clearly, more accurately.

But faith also elevates human reason so we can know things by faith that we never knew by reason.

that God is a Father, that His Son became a man in the womb of an immaculate virgin, and through the resurrection, by faith we know that He's truly present in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

So, faith doesn't dissolve reason.

Faith does not diminish reason.

If anything, we can reason more reasonably in the light of faith than we can without it.

And so there's a marriage of heaven and earth, of God and man.

of the soul and the body, of the church and the state, and it's expressed in the monasteries and the universities through the sacraments and the liturgy and the society that tries to make that liturgy central.

And through a vision that we find in St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure of a marriage, a fruitful union of faith and reason.

And another thing that St. Thomas taught, drawing from Athanasius and Augustine especially, was that in God, We have a Father, and not only a God who is fathering the human race, but a God who is fathering each and every single one of us as individuals, as sons and daughters.

God the Father sent the Son to assume our nature in order to communicate his own.

And so it is, for St. Thomas Aquinas, that when we look at God's law, because he was famous for his treatise on law in his most important work, the Summa Theologica, In it he says that God's law is derived from His intellect and His will.

His intellect and His will.

Why both coordinated?

Because God's intellect knows His creatures.

He knows our natures.

He knows our need.

And so with His intellect, He understands who we are and what we need.

And with His will, He only legislates those laws that will meet our needs and fulfill the fundamental purpose He had in creating us.

So, divine power, divine law is no threat to freedom.

It is the condition of possibility to be truly free and really fulfilled.

Freedom in the Via Antiqua is understood primarily in positive and maximal terms.

It's not freedom from, but freedom for.

Freedom for virtue, freedom for holiness, freedom for communion and unity in the body of Christ.

And then along comes the Via Moderna.

You have a sort of intellectual revolution.

I don't know exactly why it is.

Marcus described many of the different historical and social and psychological and spiritual conditions that prevailed at the end of this great period of the 13th century, and we find corruption, we find the plague, we find all sorts of crises in the 14th century.

But the 1300s usher in a whole new way of thinking.

A sort of intellectual revolution occurred.

Now you might think, an intellectual revolution?

Well that sounds safe because, you know, what difference do intellectuals really make?

Well, you know, sometimes they seem to be off in their ivory tower, you know, just reasoning in abstractions that don't seem to really have much practical bearing on everyday life for ordinary people.

But the fact is, Intellectuals rule the world, but they usually do so from the grave.

Because it takes time for their ideas to catch on.

In fact, it takes several generations for people to really work out the implications of these novel ideas.

In fact, the novel ideas have to reach a point where they no longer seem novel.

They have to reach a point where people think that way without even having to think about it.

So an intellectual revolution is not a trivial matter.

As Richard Weaver wrote many years ago, a classic book that I hope all of you read, especially the younger ones here, the book is entitled Ideas Have Consequences.

Ideas Have Consequences.

He wrote it back in the 50s, and he traced the ideas that have such great consequences all the way back to the 1300s.

There was one figure named Marsilius of Padua.

Ironically, he was the rector at the University of Paris.

serving there shortly after St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas had died in 1274. And this rector of the University of Paris had a really new idea, and that was you have faith and you have reason, and some things you know by faith, like the Creed, other things you know by reason, science and everything else that really matters.

And so we have not only two sources of truth, but we have two truths.

He developed the duplex veritas approach, the double truth, that we know some things by faith that we know aren't true by reason.

And yet, through a kind of intellectual schizophrenia, you could keep going to church and you continue reciting the Creed because these are articles of faith.

These are interior private matters of religious belief, whereas the articles of reason are public.

They are demonstrable.

And these are the things that really matter most.

And so it was that through Marsilius' influence, you have this split-level kind of existence.

It isn't just reason now over faith, it's reason being assigned the public sector and faith being given over more and more to the private and the interior part of life.

As a result of Marsilius, he wrote a book that is not well known, But it was extraordinarily influential in its time.

In the 1300s he wrote Defensor Pacis, Defender of the Peace.

That was a title that had been given in the past to the popes and the bishops for the peace of Christ.

But this book is arguing that, oh no, if we have two sources of truth, two sources of knowledge, and one is more public and demonstrable, then it's the prince.

It is the ruler, it is the state, not the church, that really has to guarantee the peace, that has to determine when to fight the wars.

It has to determine what truths are going to be the wellspring for certain laws.

And so with the naturalization of knowledge came the de-supernaturalization of the mysteries of faith.

They became increasingly privatized.

It was very subtle at first.

That's always the key.

Because you know that reality is complex and all you've got to do to get it wrong is just to get it a little bit out of order.

You know, I remember as a Protestant pastor, just a year or two of marriage counseling was enough to convince me that the problem emerges not at the end, but typically in the beginning.

And in the beginning, you're usually looking at a person who might be, you know, unfaithful emotionally or a little dishonest.

And they say, hey, you know, we got married because we were friends.

It's a legal agreement.

It's a piece of paper.

It's a contract.

Well, all of those things are true, but they're lesser truths.

It's a sacrament.

It's a covenant.

It's a vocation to heaven and holiness.

When you hear someone talking that way, you've got to figure out quickly what they're doing.

You know, she used to understand me.

She doesn't understand me anymore.

It's not so much what he's saying, it's what he's not saying.

And that is, it doesn't matter whether she understands me or not.

I am bound by a covenant, till death do us part, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer.

But what he really probably means is, my secretary does understand me.

That's the way it works.

It's an unconscious strategy we adopt.

It's often labeled plausible deniability.

We say something, it's a piece of paper, it's an agreement.

I agree, it's a binding contract.

Well, contracts you can get out of.

Covenants are binding for life.

So to affirm the lower truths is just a kind of strategy.

Because then when somebody says, wait a second, you're trying to devise a way to get out of this.

Oh no, what are you talking about?

All I said was, I'm just talking about friendship, an agreement, the law.

And so, down through the history of ideas, you have the strategy of plausible deniability.

Marsilius never said, I'm out to topple the Pope.

I'm out to overturn the Church.

I'm out to get rid of bishops.

He didn't say those things.

He probably wasn't even consciously thinking them.

He was simply sowing the intellectual ideas that were shortly thereafter picked up by a man named William of Ockham, the great Franciscan.

Ironically, both of these men ended up fleeing for safety to a prince, Prince Louis of Bavaria, a politician who wanted to protect them because they were so useful to his political cause because both Marsilius and William of Ockham were condemning the Pope as a heretic and telling princes that they had more power than the bishop.

Telling all of the people that if you really want peace and welfare, look not to the church but the state.

Politicians always love intellectuals who put the accent mark on those syllables.

So it was that William of Ockham, in the work of 90 days and other works as well, I have here William of Ockham on divine freedom.

This was really where he began to do a sort of excavation because he was out to question the Via Antiqua.

Not to deny it, you'll never see this Franciscan William of Ockham Actually denying any of the articles of the Creed.

Actually telling Catholics that the sacraments, popes, and bishops are really false.

He just said they're not necessary in the same way the popes say they are.

Why?

Well, here's the theory that he developed.

It's often referred to as volunteerism or nominalism.

But he only began the development.

He didn't advance it very far.

He didn't need to, but he also didn't have the time to.

At the time, I suppose he would have also had a strategy of plausible deniability.

I'm not out to topple the church, or the popes and the bishops, or to eradicate the sacraments.

All I want to say is I want to question the via antiqua, this idea that God knows us better than we know ourselves.

He loves us more than we love ourselves, and so all of his laws are only legislated to make us happy and to fulfill us.

Isn't that nice?

Isn't that sweet?

Isn't that tidy?

You've got a God in a box.

Your God is in your hip pocket.

In other words, this God of yours would only pass laws that fulfill you and make you happy.

Well, Ockham said, divine freedom, divine power, all of it is greater than that.

And all he did was just to make one adjustment, that God's laws are not originating from His intellect and will, but from His will alone.

Why?

Because the Creator is not bound by the creature.

And in our ears, it has a certain ring.

I mean, who thinks they can bind the Creator?

But St. Thomas would say, what if the Creator, by a covenant, has bound Himself to His creatures?

That's a different matter.

Oh no, that's just a human projection.

God is all-powerful and his potencia absoluta, his absolute power is utterly free.

So God could have crucified a donkey to atone for our sins."

God could have made murder a meritorious act.

God could have made martyrdom mortal sin.

Why?

Because God is God and you're not, and He can legislate whatsoever He pleases.

It's completely up to His freedom, and His freedom is arbitrary.

His will is not bound by any intellect.

And at first it sounds like, wow, this is a loftier conception of God, and who doesn't want that?

But in fact, it's an exchange of one sort of God, Abba, for another sort of God, well known in many parts of the world as Allah.

by intellectuals like Averroes and Avicenna.

There were Arab philosophers who were working overtime to try to get Catholics to think in less Trinitarian terms and more strictly monotheistic terms.

And for many reasons it took.

Occam's view created a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of living.

The Via Moderna seemed to be liberating because suddenly it made sense out of these corrupt Popes and Bishops and Politicians.

Because if it's true for God, that God's laws and God's power, all of these things are expressions of His own freedom.

God could have crucified a donkey to atone for sin.

He could have made murder meritorious and martyred a mortal sin.

And He had many other examples.

Then suddenly, how do you feel when you find yourself under God's power?

Bound by His laws that don't necessarily fit your nature or fulfill your longings.

They just simply bind you because they're imposed by a superior power whose will is over yours.

The Via Moderna introduced a modern way of thinking that power and law is a threat to freedom and fulfillment.

And that when God exercises His power and passes His laws, It's arbitrary.

And so our freedom is diminished.

Our fulfillment is greatly restricted.

And as a result of this whole new way of thinking, you have a cultural revolution.

As you move from the 1300s to the 1400s, the 14th century is an intellectual revolution that paved the way for a cultural revolution in the 1400s, the 15th century.

You have universities split and divided.

You have faculties at war.

You have in Cologne, Germany, in Paris, Cambridge, Oxford, the Moderni, as they're called, that's the label, the moderns.

The Occamisti was another nickname that they took on.

And they were accusing the antiqui, the ancients, the antiques, who are also known as the Thomisti, the Thomists, of a kind of backwards, retrograde thinking that didn't recognize power and freedom.

And as a result, these universities are like ropes in a tug-of-war going back and forth, Paris, back and forth, Cologne.

And the universities have usurped the monasteries.

The princes have usurped the bishops.

The intellectuals have, in a certain sense, begun to kind of naturalize, i.e. de-supernaturalize ordinary life.

Now today we call it the Renaissance.

Why?

Because it's the rebirth of classical paganism.

We're kind of getting over this one-sided preoccupation with the supernatural in all of our music, in all of our art, in all of our architecture.

It doesn't always have to be liturgical or sacramental, religious and biblical.

It can be nature.

It can be Greek.

It can be Roman.

And you know what?

It can be.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

so long as the natural is subordinate to the supernatural.

But when you advance the natural at the expense of the supernatural, you've got an agenda.

You're hiding ulterior motives.

You're devising a strategy of plausible deniability.

What?

All I'm saying is creation is good.

All I'm saying is sex is good.

I didn't say anything bad about celibacy or sacraments.

I'm just advancing what the Greeks and the Romans and classical pagan sources had.

And again, it's very hard to pin down, because it's still an early stage.

But in 1469, in the midst of this cultural revolution, an architect was born by the name of Niccolo Machiavelli.

And he was born in a corrupt family, and he had a lot of corrupt connections, but he was a brilliant thinker.

But he was a lousy colleague.

He found himself unemployed a lot.

That gave him more time to write.

And he worked on one book that became the most influential masterpiece of the time.

It didn't come out until the 1500s.

It's called The Prince.

There's one phrase that all of you know that's traceable back to Machiavelli's classic work, The Prince, and that is, the ends justify the means.

So if you have a certain goal, Mr. Prince, then whatever it takes to get there is right for you.

Why?

Because it's that way for God.

If God is the prince of the universe, and his power is wielded arbitrarily, and he can legislate whatsoever he pleases, and he can change the laws at will, then we ought to continue on the path of being imitators of God.

Only we shouldn't be stuck in this fatherly mold.

We should see divine power and divine freedom as a whole new source of liberty for the prince.

to pass laws, to wage wars, and to depose enemies, to dispose of all potential foes.

Why?

Because the ends justify the means, and the one in power decides the ends.

This culture revolution found its apogee in this work.

Just in time.

You talk about catching the wave if you're a surfer.

The intellectual revolution of the 1300s paved the way for the culture revolution of the 1400s, But Machiavelli's writings were just in time for Luther because, frankly, Luther would not have been able to succeed if he didn't have the help of the German princes.

And the German princes wouldn't have loaned him their help if they hadn't seen the advantages they would gain over the bishops and the popes.

So Luther grows up in an intellectual environment where he says, and I quote, this is from a Protestant author, lest you accuse me of bias, Martin Luther studied under the nominalist teachers at Erfurt and at one point called William of Ockham, my dear master.

He said on another occasion, I'm nothing if I'm not an Ockhamist.

And so when it came to his Spiritual youth as an Augustinian monk.

Why was it that he had such a terror when it came to God?

Am I in a right relationship with God?

What does it take?

What must I do?

And he just seemed to be going from day to day, living in uncertainty and terror.

How can you placate this all-holy, inscrutable God?

How can you predict what He's going to demand tomorrow?

And a lot of people trace this back to a psychological aberration.

But I would like to propose that its source could just as easily be a theological aberration.

Because if God wields his power in an absolutely arbitrary way, and his law can be anything he wants, he can condemn murder one day and then he could legislate it another, then how do you know whether you're in a right relationship with that sort of despotic deity?

And if God, in fact, can legislate anything He wants, then why can't He just simply save by arbitrarily stipulating, all you need is not love or holiness, all you need is faith alone.

So as an Ockamist, Augustinian, reading St. Paul in Romans 1, the just are saved by faith.

He could have said that the only way we could be saved is by becoming martyrs, or for that matter, mass murderers.

But he arbitrarily stipulated one condition, and that is faith, and faith alone.

As an Ockhamist, he sees God just dealing arbitrarily with us, but thank God it's that easy, because he isn't a father.

who is raising his children, he is a creator, he's a lawgiver, he's a judge who wields his power with total freedom.

And you can see it isn't that far of a step from Luther to Calvin, and from Calvin's notion of double predestination, that this kind of God is just as glorified in damning a soul to hell and predestining him to be damned as he is in bringing a soul to glory.

Why?

Because it's all arbitrary freedom and power to begin with.

And so Luther's notion of salvation, Calvin's notion of predestination, were ideas whose time had come.

I mean, if they hadn't been born, somebody else would have come along and devised those same ideas and caught the same cultural, theological wave and rode it to success.

Ideas have consequences.

The intellectuals rule the world from the grave, but they still rule it nonetheless.

And intellectually, it gets complicated.

And personally, a lot of us are lazy.

We never made the connections in high school or college.

We had disconnections from many of our professors, and so we've just given up.

But the fact is, a lot of Catholics, even still today, think of the law in terms of the via moderna.

That is, why do I do these things?

Because I don't want to go to hell.

Because, you know, God calls them mortal sins.

And there's no intrinsic connection necessarily between, you know, What I need, what I want, what I long for to be fulfilled in what God legislates.

He says it's mortal sin, and so it's mortal sin.

And so we can often enter into this covenant family called the Catholic Church and live like slaves.

Our fundamental fear sometimes is not the fear of a loving child who's afraid of offending his father, but the fear of a disobedient slave who's just scared of getting caught and punished.

That's the key to the Via Moderna.

It's what Pope John Paul II described at the end of his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

He said, the more we sin, the more sin affects the way we think.

And the way sin affects our intellect is not by transforming us into atheists, but by exchanging the vision of God as our Father, and we as His children, to God as a Master, and we are merely His workers, His slaves.

And so we live our lives out of fear of getting caught and punished and going to hell.

You can do the right thing in the wrong way.

So you can hear, I hope, in these three forerunners, Marsilius, William of Ockham, and Machiavelli, how it is that things have begun to kind of unfold or unravel, if you will, in our own day.

I would like to indicate a sequence Because once you see power wielded in this arbitrary way, you can sense that the inferior's freedom is diminished by the superior power of the lawgiver.

It wasn't that way in the Via Antiqua.

If the lawgiver is a father who, again, knows us better than we know ourselves, loves us more than we love ourselves, we can have a certain peace and confidence that in his laws we find true liberty, as well as personal fulfillment.

But if that power, and if those laws are simply arbitrary, then suddenly, where there was harmony before, there's a kind of deep and profound tension.

Then God's power diminishes our freedom.

Then His laws, in a certain sense, threaten our own personal fulfillment.

And not only God as the lawgiver, But princes, popes, bishops, presidents, governors, justices, we all now think this way without even thinking about it.

Because what is law but the arbitrary dictates of the one in power?

And the only hope we have is to get enough individuals to form a majority to overturn that arbitrary law-giver and set up one of our own.

You know, when I explain this to my undergraduates, and show them how, for over a thousand years, people thought about divine power and law, and human power and law, in reflection and imitation of God, in terms of fatherhood, so that His laws are the condition of possibility for true freedom and fulfillment.

You can see their eyebrows.

They shoot up two inches.

Wow!

I never thought about it that way!

But that was how they thought about it without thinking about it.

Now we've got to think long and hard, and then if we stop, we lose track of that and we fall back into old patterns, just at the risk of oversimplifying and overgeneralizing.

I want to propose that in the 1300s, there was an intellectual revolution, that we see the forerunners of the Reformation.

In the 1400s, it's a cultural revolution that we see in the universities, we see among the politicians as well.

But in the 1500s, it's a theological revolution.

Now it is the theologian who is over the bishop.

It is the individual who is over the church, and it's also the king over the bishop.

Just go across the English Channel to King Henry VIII, and he now makes himself the head of the church.

Why?

Because he's got more power.

It almost anticipates the Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin's quip when he heard that the Pope might speak out against communism.

He said, remind me, how many divisions does the Pope have?

It's a cynical view.

that ultimately law is nothing but the imposition of the will of the one who has the power and the possibility to inflict harm.

And there are always more than enough rulers to kind of reinforce that misconception, to deepen that sort of misunderstanding.

So in the 1600s, we have a philosophical revolution.

Why?

Because now, Catholic Christianity is no longer the glue or the cement of society.

Now suddenly, the pope and the sacraments and the creed, these things aren't what we all need to become the family of God and to grow up as sons and daughters.

These are just the arbitrary dictates of popes and bishops.

These are just sort of the private truth claims of those who have faith, whereas we have reason.

So reason now trumps faith in the philosophical revolution.

The philosopher replaces the theologian.

The university does away with the monastery.

All the churches left with are seminaries, where you go to study this view that you privately hold, and these doctrines that you only know by faith, whereas in the universities, it's mostly all about reason.

That sort of philosophical revolution that occurs in the 1600s leads to the political revolutions of the 1700s.

What is our battle cry?

We'll serve no sovereign!

That's what our founding fathers said, referring to King George.

But you apply that to God, or any other monarchical father figure, and you're in trouble.

And so it is, in the French Revolution you have a much worse form of this, where you have literally tens of thousands of priests and nuns who are imprisoned, who are tortured, who are raped or beheaded.

Why?

Because it's now reason over faith.

It's the state over church.

It's history over eternity.

It isn't salvation history so much as it is conflict, political strife.

This is how the superior advances his will.

And at the same time, individuals feel vulnerable.

Because our freedom is threatened and diminished by those in power.

So we have to topple them when we can.

In the Via Antica, it was a sacred covenant.

In the Via Moderna, it's a social contract and nothing more.

And it's an utterly sacred thing?

No, it's an utterly secular affair.

Religion has been privatized by the 1700s, setting the stage for the 1800s.

If we move from an intellectual revolution to a cultural revolution, to a theological revolution in the time of the Reformation, we have a philosophical revolution in the 1600s, the political revolution In the 1700s, the scientific revolution in the 1800s.

You have Marx, who applies this theory of power and conflict and the survival of the fittest and the strongest to all of biological history.

You have Marx applying that same view of conflict and power and freedom to social history.

And you have Freud applying that same principle of power to our own psychological history, the Oedipus complex.

It's the absolute uprooting of the father figure.

Where are all of our hang-ups and inhibitions rooted?

In father figures.

And so we have to uproot paternity.

We have to deconstruct fatherhood in order to really be freed from all of the inhibitions.

So these Social sciences of Darwin, Marx and Freud, they're catching the wave.

They're going far beyond Luther and Calvin, Zwingli and Knox, but they're also picking up on the same fundamental principles of the ideas that are having long-reaching, far-reaching consequences.

And in the 20th century, all the chickens come home to roost in what we now call the sex revolution.

Because if the model of the world is no longer a marital union of God and man, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, if it is no longer church and state in a kind of marital union, again, marriage doesn't make it easy.

It only makes it possible to be fruitful and loving.

But if that marriage is now overturned as just a piece of paper, or really just a legalistic contract invented by men, and patriarchalists, in order to foist it upon unsuspecting feminine partners, then what is freedom but the right to abortion, the right to choose?

This just follows with a certain inexorable logic, even though it's nothing about what Marsilius or William of Ockham or Machiavelli or Luther or Calvin or Zwingli, but they've been caught up in something.

that they never really understood.

But I would say if you look at the sex revolution, the breakdown of marriage, widespread no-fault divorce, zero population growth, population decline, cohabitation, homosexuality, abortion rights, and all of the other issues that we're dealing with, we don't even understand the logic of sexual union being life-giving.

Now we're hard-pressed to explain why homosexuals don't have the right to get married and call it marriage.

Because after all, laws are just the arbitrary expressions of power and freedom of individuals who must find freedom in strict individualism.

And so we find ourselves centuries into this, and some of you thought it started in the 1960s.

No, it didn't. In a sense, it started in the Garden of Eden, but it really kicked up again in the 14th century.

And we have got to really understand this sort of conflictual outlook if we're going to launch the kind of spiritual and intellectual counter-revolution that our young people need, that we ourselves need.

It's interesting, I've just been reading some Protestant writers and thinkers.

For example, Frank Sen was describing how the sacraments of the medieval church were overturned.

He writes as a Protestant, while we usually think of the Reformation as a rejection of ritual, we need to see that it was actually the substitution of one ritual system for another.

Why?

Because it's all about freedom and power and it's arbitrary in any case.

Ellen Chary of Princeton writes this, perhaps the most daring feminist suggestion is the elimination of God the Father She said, at stake is nothing less than the Nicene faith of historic Christianity.

She continues, Patrophobia is what she calls it, the fear of the Father, because it's the intellectual, theological, and social repression of Father as nothing but a mask.

Fatherhood is just a mask that disguises one's own brute will to power.

Patrophobia extends beyond sacramental liturgies and church traditions If mention of fathers and the fatherhood is so offensive that the word itself must be excised from public usage, this appears to be a negative judgment about the concept of fatherhood itself.

She writes, on a human level, disdain for fathers and the concept of fatherhood cannot be good for children or their mothers, especially at a time when fathers are vanishing from their children's lives at an alarming rate.

All in the name of freedom.

And women are deserting from marriage and from motherhood.

And we don't even know why.

Well, perhaps we might understand it a little better the more we look at the natural crises in the supernatural light of our faith.

Because our faith is rooted in God the Father, Almighty.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there's a wonderful section in paragraphs 270 and 71. I don't usually find a lot of philosophy in the catechism, but I was very interested by the fact that in this one section, paragraphs 270 and 71, you have a little bit of philosophical language.

Listen closely.

In 270, we read, God is the Father Almighty, and Father is italicized, whose fatherhood and power shed light on one another.

God reveals his fatherly omnipotence by the way he takes care of our needs.

by adopting us as His children, that He gives us finally by His infinite mercy, for He displays His power at its height by freely forgiving us of our sins.

God's almighty power, therefore, is in no way arbitrary.

In God, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, power Will, intellect are all identical.

Nothing can be in God's power which could not be in His just will or His wise intellect.

You're like, whoa, what is that talking about?

The via moderna.

The whole point, the cornerstone of the via moderna is God's intellect is not the source of law, It isn't just that God has to know what we need and then He can only legislate to meet our needs.

It is God's absolutely sovereign will, not His intellect.

And His will can legislate anything He wants.

It can impose His power as He chooses in an absolutely arbitrary and despotic fashion.

That is the cornerstone that is laid by Marsilius and William of Ockham.

Machiavelli erects the foundation and modern society That is steeped and soaked in blood, all in the name of freedom.

That is nothing but a sequence of revolutions leading up to the sexual revolution which defines freedom as freedom from marital covenant laws.

This is why paragraph 271 is in there.

Despite the fact that in teaching the Catechism to graduate and undergraduate students, I don't usually find a single one who gets it the first, second or third time.

Because paragraph 271 is targeted at an enemy that is far removed by about six or seven centuries.

But if we could only understand the very opening of the Creed, I believe in God Almighty.

No, I'm sorry.

It is, I believe in God, the Father Almighty.

His fatherhood precedes His power and His wisdom.

This is why, in a certain sense, we don't have to overturn seven centuries in order to overcome the Via Moderna.

The counter-revolution of the Via Antiqua is what is going on all around us, under our noses, every time we get up on Sunday morning and go to Mass.

And we say, I believe in God, the Father Almighty.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, but it's a family kingdom.

He's a royal Father.

And so it is that He sent His Son to make us His children in the spirit that we receive in baptism, in the flesh and blood that binds us in the Holy Eucharist.

The fact is, whether we know it or not, God is fathering us in the church as His family through the sacraments that are possible, that are powerful, and are absolutely necessary.

And there is the marriage supper of the Lamb, the union of heaven and earth, of divinity and humanity, of eternity and time.

Because the good news for us Catholics is we don't have to die to go to heaven.

We all want to get there, we just don't want to die, right?

All we've got to do is go to Mass and Heaven is where we are, and the angels and saints are who we're with, whether we know it or not.

And it's wonderful because knowing it doesn't make it more real.

But not knowing it makes it less fruitful.

And knowing it makes it very powerful for us and for our loved ones and all of God's loved ones.

This is the great adventure for us, to understand what we have been saying all our lives, what the church has been teaching throughout salvation history.

And it's something that is coming slowly but surely.

I want to give you some other examples besides Alan Chary and Frank Senn.

I want to read to you from an amazing article by a very well-known Protestant theologian, Stephen Long.

He wrote this several months back in late spring after John Paul died and when Pope Benedict was It was brought into the papal office.

The article is entitled, In Need of a Pope?

And he writes, and I'm just going to read a few brief excerpts, Protestants find ourselves in the odd situation of seeing a need for the papacy for the first time.

Our fate seems to be linked with it.

Three reasons in particular.

The first reason is negative.

Protestants need the papacy because we have to have something to protest against.

He said, after all, for 500 years, Protestantism is an old tradition of protesting against tradition.

And then he goes on to the other two reasons.

Protestants need the papacy for the sake of church unity and for the sake of a truth that is grounded in love and not merely power.

When it comes to visible unity, it is time for us Protestants to admit that we failed.

We are disunited beyond repair and cannot solve our divisions.

Perhaps it is time to look to the papacy for the necessary visible manifestation of Christian unity.

Perhaps it alone provides the necessary unity of the church.

And it continues.

He said, Could we ever see in our own churches the transnational, multicultural, universal expression of love and joy we witnessed on St. Peter's Square?

If not, then how can we refuse to acknowledge the beauty of the papacy?

He said, don't get me wrong, I have no romantic illusions about the papacy.

I understand its historical legacy and the legitimate reasons why Protestants separate it.

At one point in history, though, to be a Protestant was explicitly to will an end to the papacy.

I think many Protestants can now confess that was a mistaken view.

Both the church and the world would sorely lack a necessary witness if there were no papacy.

If being a Protestant means willing the end to the papacy, then I find myself no longer capable of willing such an act.

And he's not alone, though he's still a Protestant.

Reinhold Hüter down at Duke, Russell Reno out in Creighton, Douglas Farrow up in McGill, an unprecedented number, not just of pastors and missionaries, Like Marcus and Father Ray and Kimberly and I have seen now for well over a decade, hundreds and hundreds of pastors and missionaries have come into the church.

But for the first time we're seeing established Protestant theologians, church historians like Robert Wilkin, biblical scholars as well, recognizing that in the Catholic Church do we find the biblical faith, the faith of history, and the one force that comes from God's love and his fatherhood that can reunite us and overturn the tide of secularism that they too are now tracing back to the birth of the Via Moderna back in the 1300s.

This is a sign of hope.

But as Marcus pointed out, we can't do it on our own, and we can't do it just with the aid of converts, pastors, missionaries, theologians, and scholars.

We need the help of God, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints.

But I want to also say this, that that help is right there at our fingertips.

Just a month ago, a new president was elected in Notre Dame, Father Jenkins, and I don't know what the outcome will be.

All I know is that through the work of John Cavadini, the chair of the theology department, a lot of neat changes are occurring there.

But I read, with interest, his presidential address when he was installed last month, and it concluded with a story that I found very inspiring, and I want to share it with you.

Because in late 1842, this French priest, Father Sorin, And his company arrived in the woods of Northern Virginia with $300 and 24 months to build Notre Dame.

And they did.

And then, after years of growth, on the morning of April 23, 1879, the worst fire ever to strike the campus broke out on the roof of the east wing of the main building.

In those days, the main building contained classrooms, dorm rooms, the dining hall, the library, the laboratory, the museum, the administrative offices.

It was really the whole college itself.

It seemed to many that Notre Dame was finished.

The story of what happened next has been handed down through the generations.

Father Soren was seen by faculty and students walking through the ruins while still smoking.

He felt the devastation and signaled to everyone to enter the church where he stood on the altar steps and spoke I came here as a young man and dreamed of building a great university in honor of Our Lady.

But I must have built it too small.

She had to burn it to the ground to make the point.

So tomorrow morning, as soon as the bricks cool, we will rebuild it bigger and better than ever.

And the next morning, students saw Father Sorin, then 65 years old, walking among the smoldering bricks with a wheelbarrow.

300 laborers worked 16 hours a day to rebuild the main building in time for classes that fall.

They rebuilt it from the ground up and when they got to the top and came to the place where the dome had been, they built one taller and wider than the one before.

And this time, for the first time, they covered it with gold.

He said, Father Jenkins concluded, this is our goal.

We've got to build it bigger and better than ever.

Let no one ever again say that we dreamed too small.

I believe that right now we are witnessing the deconstruction of European civilization, of Christendom as we've known it.

We have the opportunity now to learn from the mistakes of those who've come before us.

And to figure out not only what they did wrong, but what those before them did right.

Because that right is still being done today.

In the Holy Eucharist, through all the seven sacraments, God is fathering us as His family.

Through His Son, we are given the spirit of sonship and made partakers of the divine nature.

This is what's going on all around us every day, especially Sunday.

And it's our privilege, our opportunity, our challenge to go out Let's ask our Heavenly Father for help.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.