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Paula Haigh: History and Some Historians - Stone - 01-13-2024
History and Some Historians
Creatorem Coeli et Terram [emphasis - The Catacombs] | February 14, 2014
In an early work, THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST, according to the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, (1931), Father Dennis Fahey, a Holy Ghost father who died in 1955, explored the "real history of the world", and found that this real, true history of the world is the account of the acceptance or rejection, by the world, of God's plan for the restoration of the Divine Life. In other words, it is the story of God's undoing of the awful consequences of Original Sin, taken in conjunction with man's response to God's overtures...(page 33). This acceptance or rejection of God's plan for order can be most accurately gauged by the degree to which any particular culture or community not only refuses to hinder, but positively works to favor the attaining of man's final end, - union with God in His inner supernatural life. (pg.37)
This does not mean that the world of culture becomes like a monastery. It does mean, however, that the world's customs and entertainments, it's serious businesses and even it's wars, are characterized more by virtue than by vice, or by the encouragement of what leads to virtue, - such as prayer, rather than by what leads to vice.
Father Fahey cites the world of Medieval Europe as having exemplified, probably, the closest any society could come to being "the best of all possible worlds" - inasmuch as in Medieval Europe "the State then grasped the formal principle of ordered social life in the actual world - and in which an institution such as the Inquisition - or any similar police force for keeping "law and order" - was set up to defend the hold of the world on order against the fomentors of disorder", (page 38) And, of course, the given principle accepted by all was that man in society, redeemed by Our Lord, is not able to live as God wants him to live - unless he accepts the supernatural and supra-national Catholic Church - the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ our Lord. It is only in and from this one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic church, that people find the sources of the interior life, from which proceed the external forms of a culture. But the modern world has turned aside from order and is suffering for its apostasy and disorder. (page 39). This great truth needs to be proclaimed unequivocally. And today we must begin with the restoration of truth in the natural sciences, because there is no theology, but only an abstract or sentimental fideism, without a true foundation in the natural sciences.
The medieval world possessed such a sound foundation in its Geocentric Cosmology. Cosmology, which defines the Structure of the Universe and the fixed centrality of earth, is the necessary essential of the entire body of knowledge we know as the Natural Order. It is this natural order upon which Grace builds the entire edifice of the Supernatural Order of Divine Grace - producing the Elect and those beacons of light for us, the Saints. Any historian who omits in-depth consideration of the relations between the natural sciences and theology, will not give us true or reliable history. It was first Copernicus - and then his popularizer, Galileo, who first cut the umbilical cord binding the natural sciences to Theology - by way of Holy Scripture. Without the guidance of the theologians of the Church, the natural sciences were bound to go astray, and so they did. The end result is precisely what the encyclical Pascendi describes as the subjugation of faith to science - a science falsely so called, (1 Tim. 6:20). This is a crime of the greatest magnitude - the synthesis of all heresies - overturning in men's minds the very hierarchy of reality.
It is true that Father Fahey himself never focused on the relation of science to theology as indicated in Pascendi (1907). His focus was the deep disorder introduced by Luther's erroneous doctrine of Grace, in effect making prayer meaningless - and his emphasis upon the individual - making the concept of the common good meaningless. And so it has been with all historians following Father Fahey. The emphasis has been upon the social order and its concomitant political and social disorders coming down from the sick heads of state. It has been left for the secular historians such as Arthur Koestler, Thomas Kuhn, and Alexandre Koyre, with a host of others, to focus on the Copernican Revolution and its far-reaching effects on all aspects of culture and civilization. I appeal especially to Arnaud de Lassus, Father Paul Kramer, Dr. John Rao - and all who write about our current crisis of faith, to turn their scholarly efforts towards what appears to be a great conspiracy of silence, forbidding the exposure of "the operation of error" (2 Thess. 2:10) - which has overwhelmed the natural sciences in all their disciplines. Pascendi warned us of modernisms "Law of Evolution" - whereby everything - the Church, her Dogmas - her Worship - Her Sacred Scriptures, even her Faith itself - must change or die. (#26). This is the lie upon which modernism is based.
This "synthesis of all heresies" - can only be confronted and combated and eventually overcome and destroyed beneath Our Lady's heel - by a synthesis of all truths - which is the deposit of faith. Nothing new is needed in this battle. On the contrary, it is all there in the First Article of the Creed:
The existence of God as Creator of heaven and earth. We need only to make these truths shine forth in all their real splendor.
Kyrie, eleison.