Similarly, the current emergence of the New Age with all of
its occult accessories, can he viewed as the fully ripened fruit of these
earlier fleurs du mal. For, New Age
thinking infects all of reality with its poison. It is a complete and
thoroughly perverse world view.
How many times have we
not all had the frustrating experience of being told, “Well, that’s your
opinion” or “That’s just your interpretation” when what we have put
forth is the plain, bold-faced TRUTH! Ah, but this is America where everyone has a “right” to their own
opinion and Truth is really no different from Error because all things are
equal, meaning equally subjective because no one has the “right” to claim any
objective Truth since it always comes back, perversely, to “your opinion”.
We in America have, indeed, a head start in the New Age
thinking, because it is a fact that the person who counters a statement of
doctrinal, moral, or natural-law Truth (e.g., “abortion is murder!”,
“homosexuality is perverse because unnatural”, or “The Book of Genesis
precludes belief in Evolution!”) with this kind of reductionist ploy – “That’s just your opinion” – is
clearly a victim of New Age ideology.
All that the term New Age stands for can be summed up in two
comprehensive concepts:
1) subjectivism:
everything is in the mind, including God; a position also described as
immanentism; and
2) evolutionism:
everything is in process, nothing ever stays the same, not even God.
It is obvious that these two concepts obliterate from all
discourse the self-evident fact that some things are and remain true no matter
what anyone may think of them. Theological, metaphysical and moral truths all
contain that same hard-core of reality so often attributed to the law of
gravity: defy it at your peril; “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
After the mind embraces these two comprehensive concepts of
subjectivism or immanentism and evolutionism, everything else is but acting out
with the accompanying accessories such as rainbow symbols, pagan rituals, key
words and phrases like “compassion” and “global consciousness”.
Nor is it difficult to see that New Age thinking attacks
every article of our Faith and even fundamental truths of natural reason. The
attack is massive, everything is hit at once, but it is not frontal. The
approach is as subtle and as devious as Satan’s appeal to Eve. The sin he
persuaded her to commit was modeled on his own, and so is the sin of New Age
ideology.
Lucifer’s non serviam
is based on the choice of his own mind and will over and above that of God’s.
Despite the angelic clarity and integrity of his intelligence which showed him
indubitably the wrongness of his choice, he nevertheless loved his own personal
self-hood more than the Being of his Creator. Not yet having earned the
Beatific Vision, the reward of love, his choice was not based on a confirmation
of love but rather on an examination or test of love. And Lucifer, fully
cognizant of this fact because of his angelic intellect, chose the wrong person
to serve and willfully failed the test of love.
He approached Eve, and he approaches us today with this same
seductive appeal to self-love rather than the love of God. It takes a humility
born of love to submit our own strong ideas and desires to the mind and heart
of another. And that is precisely the nature of the test.
Traditionally, the subjectivist philosophy stemming from
Plato has been termed idealism (from idea, not ideal), but a more radical form
of it is called solipsism. Fr. Kenneth Baker in his Philosophical Dictionary (1972) defines solipsism as that form of
idealism which recognizes nothing but the act of thinking (“consciousness” in
New Age terminology) and one’s own subjective person (New Age’s “self”) as
authentic. Everything else is either unknowable or suspect.
The dethronement of truth about which Dietrich von
Hildebrand complained twenty years ago has issued in a tragic loss of the need
for an objective standard and source of what is real and unerring. When people
are not only content but enthusiastic about finding in their own ideas and
desires the source and stuff of reality, then the world itself has become an
insane asylum. And yet, this is just what New Agers make of society and the
world. Randy England tells us how common in the business world is this reality
manipulation.
“Through the occult technique of visualization the
practitioner believes that he does in fact create his own universe,
continuously. Imagine having such power! Imagine using it! That is exactly what
the New Agers would have us do.” (The Unicorn in the Sanctuary. Trinity
Communications, 1990, p. 27.)
“Visualize the new car you want. Whatever it is, visualize it
as if it was already yours, believe it, and do it daily. You will bring it
about through the power of your mind.” (Idem.,
p. 29.)
This is more than “the power of positive thinking”. This is wanting to be like God.
Just by way of footnote, Donald De Marco noted this same
predominance of will and personal desires over reason among infertile
couples in his excellent book, Biotechnology
and the Assault on Parenthood (Ignatius, 1991). In an article in Fidelity magazine (July-August 1991, p.
38) entitled “Frankenstein’s Dilemma” he observes the same anti-rational
emphasis in the women’s groups advocating new reproductive technologies. Theirs
is an…uncompromising commitment to freedom of choice, the desire
to possess what one wants, apart from any governmental [and we must add,
objective-moral] interference,...
Such women are “examples of an ideological mind-set.” They
are also examples of souls out of touch with the reality of God, of His Will,
of His Love, – souls in the grip of Satanic egotism. Feminism, in all its
aspects, is very much a part of the New Age synthesis.
The second key idea is evolutionism which translates into
that hypnotic word change. Randy England says belief in evolution “is an absolute
article of faith and central to New Age-Modernist thought.” (Idem., p. 34) The acceptance of theistic evolution by most Catholics today and
for decades past has been and continues to be the best preparation and
conditioning for their embrace of the entire New Age synthesis.
Donna Steichen tells of an ex-nun who admits that
… Her faith began to decay … when she was introduced to the re-interpretation of Scripture as
‘myth’ containing a “kernel of truth.” The doubts born then “had a domino
effect”, … (Unholy Rage: The Hidden Face
of Catholic Feminism. Ignatius, 1991, pp. 48-49)
It was the theory of biological evolution that caused first
the German “higher critics” and then the rest of the theologians of the Church
to begin their re-interpretation of Scripture, specifically, the first three
chapters of Genesis. Pope St. Pius X knew exactly whereof he spoke when he
singled out evolution as “the principal doctrine of the modernists.” And this
pernicious doctrine of evolution remains, as Mr. England points out, an “absolute
article of faith and central to New Age Modernist thought.” (Idem.)
There is further an intrinsic connection between the first
idea of subjectivism or immanence (the latter term is preferred by New Agers)
and this second one of evolution. The connection is God and is made by way of
process theology. Donna Steichen quotes a feminist “theologian” building on the
philosophy of A. N. Whitehead:
Process theology asks us to give up absolutes. Everything is
relative, even the deity... We must let go of God, believing that God lets go
of everything all the time that it may be new all the time. (p. 202)
Surely, only a feminist could write such nonsense! But this
idea of “letting go” is very popular these days especially amongst religious.
It’s a perversion of the traditional spiritual doctrine of detachment, made
into an important part of the rhetoric of
change. Once you make God not only a part but the very “structure that
makes the world possible” and which He needs in order to fulfill Himself and
“be real” (Steichen, p. l53), then it is easy for such immanence to bring on
self-divinization. But for this goal
of empowerment, so coveted by feminists, it is necessary to reduce God to an
evolutionary process. And it is a short step from the God of the evolutionary
process (theistic evolutionism) to God as
evolutionary process.
So the two ideas of immanence and evolution or an
evolutionary immanence are necessary for each other. They constitute the
Satanic perversion of the true relation between God the Creator and His
creatures.
We know that in
reality God absolutely transcends every one of His creatures, being infinitely
superior and all-sufficient in Himself while at the same time, being immanent
to every one of His creatures, because not an atom or molecule or a particle of
one could function without the active power of God’s agency both
empowering and sustaining it.
He brought all things into existence from nothing, freely,
because of His goodness, and His active agency is necessary every instant of
time to keep all things in existence and enable them to work according to their
created natures.
We do not confuse God’s creation with His concurrence and
His providence. Holy Scripture teaches that God’s work of creation was finished
when He rested on the seventh day of the first week of the world. During those first
six days, God both created from nothing and formed and fashioned the materials
He had already created. In the case of Adam’s body, He formed the first man
from the “slime of the earth” and in the case of Eve, He fashioned her body
from that of Adam. Empirical Science confirms the Scriptural account when it
tells us that our bodies are about 96% water, And, according to Antoine
Béchamp, 19th century Catholic scientist, man is a “walking mineral”. This is
an accurate description of “slime”, or
dust mixed with water.
But God commanded animals and man to “Increase and multiply”
by the power of generation created in and with them. Only the human soul must
be created directly by God because of its rational-spiritual nature. The life
principle of animals is an inherent part of their material-formal casuality and
is transmitted with the material-formality of their natures. Thus creatures, as
secondary causes, carry on through time, increasing and multiplying according
to the command of God at their creation.
The relation of creation, as St. Thomas calls it, and which
characterizes the order of generation in which creatures, as secondary causes,
live and work according to their natures, is a strictly one-way street, running
from creature to Creator, in e relationship of absolute dependence upon God
both for their existence through time and for the power to operate as the kind
of creature that God constituted each one on its specific day of creation. When
Our Divine Lord said “Without Me you
can do nothing”, He referred to the natural as well as to the supernatural
order.
Furthermore, it is very important to realize that creation
by God is not a process. It is an Act. It did not take place in time but by His
creative act in the beginning, God also created time with the first mobile
being. This fact must be insisted upon because otherwise, we risk thinking of
God as mutable, whereas He is absolutely immutable, unchanging; or else we risk
reducing His creative power to the dimensions of human activity which do, indeed,
require the changes of time constituting a process. But there can be no change
or alteration in God, for He needs no such restrictive limitations to create.
Process enters only with the creature, the created product. And so, God
is the creator and author of all processes, but there is in Him no shadow of
alteration, or of change, or of any kind of process. Even the Angels change as
they pass continually from potency to act. But such is not the case with
God. He is all Act.
Processes multiply and take on direction as soon as matter
is introduced. And yet, however extensive and deep the changes may be, the
underlying nature, essence, or kind created by God in the beginning, is never
destroyed. It remains, underlying all changes. The stability of species is an
empirical fact. The instability of chemical elements and the fact of
substantial change in the sphere of inanimate bodies, is a vast subject and
must be discussed in another place. The facts are all there in the books of the
Thomistic renaissance of the early 20th century, so much vital knowledge
pertaining to the sciences, but neglected and abandoned by apostate
theologians.
So, processes multiply and take on direction as soon as
matter is introduced, for matter is the principle of potentiality, the principle
of change. But the created formalities endure, just as men and animals undergo
the changes of growth, development and decline, but human nature and the
animals’ natures continue essentially the same as new beings are born and old
ones die. It is a fact, for example, that scientists have never yet found a
fossil that they were not able to identify as belonging to some family
presently in existence. The stability of the created forms is an empirical
fact.
And so, we know
that God is in all things by His power, keeping all things in existence and
enabling them to act according to their different natures. But this immanence
of God is natural, of the natural order, and not the same as the supernatural
order of Grace. In this latter case, theologians speak of a truly divine
immanence, the very life of God in us. This is the definition of sanctifying
grace that we learned from our catechisms. And this ineffable gift is, of
course, only for God’s rational creatures and only for those rational creatures
who love Him above all things and remain in His friendship by avoiding all sin.
Only angels and men are capable of loving God freely and cooperating with His
action in us by a use of our liberty that is pleasing to Him. This wonderful
life of God in the souls of His lovers leads, through the action of the Holy
Spirit, to our conformity with Christ and transformation in Him. It is Mary’s
task, as Spouse of the Holy Spirit and Mother of Christ, to form Jesus in us as
she formed Him first in her immaculate womb.
However, New Agers, all to the
contrary, and following in the footsteps of Teilhard de Chardin and his many
devotees of all religions (Hindus, for example, find in him much to admire)
along with modernists of all stripes, hold a radical naturalism, rejecting all
distinctions between nature and grace, between the natural and the supernatural
orders. The spectrum of naturalism ranges from the rank materialism of the
atheists to the pantheism and pan-entheism of Teilhard de Chardin and Matthew
Fox. New Agers tend to fill the vacuum left by rejection of orthodox
spirituality with such pseudo-mysticisms as Fox’s “creation-centered
spirituality”. They thereby “change the truth of God into a lie, and worship
and serve the creature rather than the Creator.” (Rom. l:25)
The two ideas of immanence (subjectivism) and evolutionism
(process, constant change) are connected, then, by the idea of a God who is
immanent in all things and Himself in process, evolving toward His own
self-fulfillment and reality. This was Hegel’s idea of God, transformed by Marx
into the dialectic of history. This so-called “divinity” of all things causes
the “inter-connectedness” of everything, so that whoever “taps into” this
omnipresent “divinity” is thereby automatically “empowered” to be and to do
whatever he desires. The techniques used to achieve this “empowerment” are
many, and none of them were unknown to the medieval theologians of the occult:
mind control, holistic health practices such as yoga and transcendental
meditation, “centering prayer”, channeling, visualization, automatic writing,
etc. All are essentially forms of invoking demonic intervention.
The Prince of this world, who is Lucifer and Satan, has
tremendous power over natural objects and processes, but only, of course,
within the limits allowed to him by God. And God allows him such awesome powers
in order to test our Faith. His grace is
sufficient for us if we truly love Him above all things.
But Satan “seduceth the whole world” (Apoc. 12:9) And that’s what the New Age is all about – a New World
Order in the power of Satan.
Perhaps the most startling and unprecedented aspect of the
New Age is feminism. It has always existed in such forms as female deities of
ancient myth, in the female priestesses of pagan religions, and in Christian
times, in witch-craft. What strikes us today is the extent to which religious
women in the Church have succumbed to this diabolical temptation and the
complacency with which the bishops accept and even encourage the perversion.
Feminism could never have arisen to its present towering
stature if theologians had not abandoned the theology of St. Thomas . There is nothing demeaning to a
woman to find her proper place in subordination to men. Her real glory, in
fact, is in her obedience to the order created by God in the beginning. This
was Mary’s glory, for Our Lord said that she was to be praised because she did
the will of His Father, even as He did. A woman today can do nothing greater
than to look up to Mary and imitate Her.
The true immanence is that of the divine life of grace in
us, the immanence of God’s life that purifies us and keeps us from all sin,
especially the sins of pride and impurity.
And the true evolution is that of our growth in these
virtues which brings us close to God and will give Him glory for all eternity.
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