The text, authored by Robert Lazu Kmita, draws from Joseph Ratzinger's doctoral thesis on St. Bonaventure to diagnose the modern crisis. It highlights Bonaventure's warning against a purely speculative theological rationalism, which the saint identified as the "Beast of the Apocalypse." This rationalism, by privileging the "natural light of reason" over faith and "infused science," empties reality of its symbolic and theophanic content. The author turns to Jean Borella to argue that Galilean physics caused an "epistemological shock," reducing the cosmos to mere geometry and rendering the Incarnation and Resurrection meaningless concepts in a materialistic universe. Theological modernism is presented as an attempt to adapt faith to this new mentality, and the Neo-Thomist reaction, for being excessively rationalistic, is seen as inadequate. The solution, according to the text, lies in a return to a mystical theology that subordinates reason to faith and recovers the "primacy of the supernatural." The final note, from "Chiesa e post-concilio," accuses Ratzinger of subjectivizing the concept of Revelation, aligning him with modernism by merging revealed truth with the subject who receives it (the Church).
The analysis of the dangers of a rationalism that opposes faith, while perceptive in its symptomatic diagnosis, risks mistaking the nature of the adversary and, consequently, the efficacy of the remedy. The described crisis is not born from a mere excess of logic or an epistemological failure inaugurated by modern science, but from a much older spiritual and metaphysical choice: the deliberate amputation of the horizon of consciousness to imprison it within the confines of the physical, immanent world.🧠The True Nature of the Enemy: The Choice for the Walled Garden
The central problem is not "rationalism" as the exercise of logic, but materialism disguised as philosophy, whose primary function is psychological, not cognitive. It is a strategy to obtain peace of mind (the ataraxia of Epicurus) by denying everything that might cause anguish: God, the immortality of the soul, judgment, and the transcendent meaning of life. Epicureanism, with its cosmology of atoms falling randomly in the void, already offered the perfect prototype of a universe emptied of purpose, where the gods, if they exist, are indifferent to human affairs. This system is not a search for truth, but a flight from it; a narcotic for the soul that fears the infinite (Carvalho, 1998). Reason, in this context, is not an instrument of knowledge but a tool of psychic self-defense, used to build an ideological fortress against transcendent reality. Arguments become mere pretexts to justify a pre-existing decision not to see.
💥The Demolition of Reality: More than an "Epistemological Shock"
Attributing the destruction of the symbolic universe to Galilean physics is to mistake the effect for the cause. Modern science did not destroy the theophanic capacity of the world; it merely flourished in a cultural ground previously tilled by a philosophy that had already declared matter to be the only reality. The reduction of the world to "pure geometry" is the logical consequence of a worldview that, a priori, denies that sensible forms and qualities can be vehicles of a higher meaning. The "shock" was not Galileo's telescope, but the acceptance of a worldview that transforms the cosmos (an ordered and meaningful whole) into a mere universe (a collection of brute and aimless facts). This mentality is not science, but the civil religion of materialism, which instrumentalizes science to impose its worldview as the only "rational" and "objective" one, treating any other perception of reality as "subjective" or "primitive" (Carvalho, 1998). The result is the replacement of the real world with a second, artificial, and impoverished reality, administered by an intellectual elite.
🏛️The Civil Religion and the Resurrection of Caesar
When the spiritual authority of the Church is weakened and man is convinced that the heavens are empty, power does not disappear; it simply migrates from the spiritual to the temporal domain. The vacuum left by God is immediately filled by a new candidate for the absolute: the State, Society, Humanity, History. The "Cult of Reason" of the French Revolution was merely the baptism of a new faith: the religion of the worldly Empire, whose goal is not the salvation of the soul in eternity, but the construction of an earthly paradise under the management of a centralized power (Carvalho, 1998). This is the true apocalyptic "Beast": the temporal power that arrogates to itself spiritual functions, promising collective happiness and demanding, in return, total control over the lives and consciousness of individuals. Its priests are the intellectuals, the social engineers, and the bureaucrats, who administer souls in the name of a purely earthly common good.
⚔️The Inadequacy of the Response and the Nature of the War
The critique of an "excessively rationalistic" Neo-Thomism misses the mark. The problem was not an excess of reason, but a catastrophic failure to diagnose the nature of the enemy. An attempt was made to fight with logical arguments and syllogisms a force that operates not on the plane of philosophical debate, but on that of psychological warfare and the magical manipulation of consciousness. The modern adversary does not present a thesis to be refuted; it casts a spell to paralyze the intellect, using language not to describe reality but to hypnotize and induce a state of mental slumber (Carvalho, 1998). To argue with it is like trying to read the Penal Code to a mugger in the act. The proper response would not be a "more mystical" theology, but rather one that is more realistic, capable of unmasking the fraud, exposing the hidden intentions, and calling evil by its name. What is required is the attitude of a spiritual combatant, not an academic debater. The crisis is not one of epistemology, but of the perception of reality and the courage to name it.
References
Carvalho, Olavo de. O jardim das aflições: de Epicuro à ressurreição de César: ensaio sobre o materialismo e a religião civil. 2nd ed., rev. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998.