6 December, 2023
Dear Reader,
‘When all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne.’ (Wisdom 18, 14-15)
Of all the images of Christmas this is the one that has always thrilled me the most. The iconography of the Incarnation is so rich, diverse and charming: the Baby in the manger, the Star and the Magi, Mary and Joseph soon to become refugees when they find they must flee Herod, the poverty, the exposure to danger. Our faith is a very physical one, built upon real events in history. Vivid pictures of them readily populate our minds and have the power to move even the hearts of unbelievers like Thomas Hardy, who doubted everything, yet ‘hoped it might be so’.
But this little piece from the Book of Wisdom is quite another thing. It’s pure poetry. Prose simply isn’t strong enough to convey the sheer power and majesty of Christ’s ‘leap’ from his Father’s throne to earth below.
All those other images of the incarnation are literally mundane. Miraculous and marvellous, of course, but grounded in a world we all know and share. They also have a kind of passivity about them. After all, nobody is more passive than a helpless newborn baby, utterly dependent on the kindness of others, yet so easily weakened by indifference or harmed by cruelty.
But that Leap from heaven was and is the most active thing there has ever been since the world began. It is pure energy in action, a deed of positive but loving aggression. If you think that word aggression is too strong, by the way, read on to verse 22: there Christ is a warrior with a sharp sword, who ‘overcame the destroyer, not with strength of body, nor force of arms, but with a word…’
All our images of God are valuable but none is adequate. Since the days of St Francis of Assisi the sufferings of Christ have played a huge role in our imagery, but it was not always so. In the early Church he was more commonly depicted as a shepherd. As far as it is known it was not until the fifth century that he was first shown suspended on the Cross, carved on a screen in the Roman Basilica of Santa Sabina. But such early depictions stressed His impassivity rather than his suffering, and some went even further, showing him crowned and triumphant – Christus Victor, ‘reigning from the tree.’
The brings us back to the One who in full knowledge made that gigantic and generous leap, for our sakes, from Heaven to Earth, and (in Charles Wesley’s words)
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.
SUMMER SCHOOLS
Sadly we have had to cancel two of our summer schools because numbers were too low to be viable. But the Biblical Greek course for beginners is still on and it’s not too late to book. Note, though, that the dates have been changed to 15-19 January, and the location will now be the Benedictine Priory at Colebrook. See below for further details.
With best wishes to all,
David Daintree
IN THE NEWS
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST CHRISTIANS
Anja Hoffmann is Executive Director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe. The Observatory records and documents cases of abuse. It works closely with the perhaps better known Aid to the Church in Need, but with a specific European focus.
This is a Gospel ministry that engages in firm but friendly polemic with Islam. Its leader, Samuel Green, has been a speaker for the Dawson Centre in Hobart. The website is well worth a visit, particularly at the present time when Muslims are so controversial and so poorly understood.
CALLING OUT THE TRUTH ON ANTI-SEMITISM
This article by Gerard Henderson is excellent. It’s a sound and calm antidote for the sort of crazy and naive adulation of Hamas that you’ll find mercilessly exposed in articles like this.
DEL NOCE, SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM
We are publishing the following important piece by Wanda Skowronska in full:
Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989), one of the most perceptive philosophers of the twentieth century, understood how Western culture was profoundly affected by idealism, Marxism, and positivism. His works are being translated and hence discovered in the English-speaking world, through the efforts of scholar Carlo Lancellotti who translated the essays in The Crisis of Modernity in 2014 (though written 70 years earlier). In these, Del Noce outlined that despite democratic institutions and professed liberalism, post-war western society did not mark a sharp break with the Hitlerism and Stalinist totalitarian tendencies. He prophetically saw these as a prelude to a new totalitarianism – what he considered a technocratic, ‘scientistic’ totalitarianism, which would envelop every aspect of life.
How it happened is explained thus: technocratic society absorbed the materialism and the negative aspects of Marxism, in a critique of past cultural and spiritual institutions, but let go of its more positive aspects, the theories of dialectical materialism, as these were too ‘theoretical’.
So, whereas older totalitarianisms politicized reason with grand theories of history (Communism) or race (Nazism), the new totalitarianism slid into a miasma of technocratic well-being. Within this, there arose the view that science represented the ‘only’ true knowledge in this world of progress – and Del Noce called this ‘scientism’ which was a perversion of genuine science. The following points out three of its major features though there are many more.
First ‘scientism’ suppresses any metaphysical or religious dimension. This is not a mere dichotomy of science and religion, but also concealed denigration of any kind of philosophical/metaphysical reason itself. The only knowledge is through science, and a truncated version of it in any case. What is eliminated here in Del Noce’s view, is the natural human attitude to perceive and desire the divine, which expresses itself in philosophical and religious questions about meaning, purpose, and moral values. Scientism, in Comptean vein, dismisses these as non-rational because they lie outside the scope of empirical verification, the only source of knowledge.
The new technocratic society of ‘well-being’ does not argue against God, it simply does not bring up the question – not only does God not exist but the question of His existence does not exist. Teleological explanations do not exist. Death is not a problem – it’s just a question of time being up and ending it all when one wants. Any questions of morality or questions of meaning represent some undue attachment to past customs. If abortion, euthanasia, and any type of IVF combination – 3 parents or even 4 – can be done, let them be done. And if unlimited artificial intelligence can help solve our problems, this is a triumph of progress. If religion remains important to some, however, that is good for them – the totalitarians considered it just added some ‘vitality’ to life if people needed it. It has nothing to do with objective truths.
The second feature of scientism is a rejection of scientific reasoning itself, which in the face of corporate interests has affected current science. Thomas Kuhn had noted in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientific research is often allied to powerful interest groups. But perhaps not even Kuhn could have foreseen the pervasive extraordinary growth of corporate and media empires which could compel ‘consensus’ scientistic views in our times.
Consider the following recent examples: Professor Ian Plimer, Australian geologist and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, has raised questions about climate change, inviting discussion, only to be sidelined and cancelled by the ABC and invisible ‘fact checkers’ of dubious qualification. When American Patrick T. Brown got his paper on climate change published in the prestigious journal Nature, in September 2023, he later admitted, in a non-mainstream forum, The Free Press, ‘I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work,’
And consider Dr Robert Malone, an internationally recognized scientist in virology, immunology, and molecular biology, one of the original architects of the mRNA and DNA vaccination. When he simply questioned methodological aspects of the Centre for Disease Control studies surrounding the new vaccines, he expected authentic scientific discussion, having been trained in the strictest scientific methods. Instead, he was ‘cancelled’. HisWikipedia pages were rewritten, he was thrown off Twitter, (then reinstated a year later) and had a tsunami of botts condemn him, though his research was well-known. All for asking scientific questions! Even beyond Malone’s cancellation, when renowned professorial researchers Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University (with 30,000 academics and researchers) questioned the Covid pandemic policies in the 2020 Barrington Declaration, their questions were ignored by public health officials.
These recent salient issues highlight the suppression of scientific discussion, reflecting Del Noce’s understanding of power-based ‘scientism’ as opposed to science. Eminent scientists are accused of being ‘unscientific’ or spreading ‘misinformation’ if they challenge a consensus view in the corporate, political, and media world. Australian gastroenterologist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Borody, who uncovered an effective early Covid intervention strategy in 2020, was initially interviewed on the ABC – and despite his evidence, was summarily ‘dropped’. He was not anti-vax, he had simply exercised his scientific judgement and found a cheaper, effective drug in treating 440 patients at the time, Ivermectin. He welcomed, even to be proven wrong. When dropped by the ABC, he made guarded reference to ‘other interests’ at work. Like other cancelled scientists he sought other media outlets, such as Rumble, Bitchute and Substack.
Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, professor in Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022) is an expert in what social psychologists call ‘mass formation’, which has pervaded the twentieth century. He refers particularly to the mass arousal of fear, as a velvet glove technocratic totalitarianism, to enable a scientism which induces people to follow what the ‘experts’ say, which replaces democracy and true research, and is a means of controlling society. No matter how hopeless the odds, true scientists have fought back against ‘scientism’ and have at times won.
A third feature of Del Noce’s view of the new totalitarianism is the application of ‘scientism’ to explain the human person by extending science to psychology and sociological research. That is, quasi-scientific explanations were applied to an understanding of human beings which claimed a scientific status, replacing the legacy of Judeo-Christian theological anthropology.
Consider two psychologists – Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) and Carl Rogers (1902-1987) who were contemporaries of Del Noce (1910-1989). Frankl observed, with his recent lived experience in concentration camps, that a human being may have physical and mental disorders explainable by science BUT inescapably has a ‘noetic’ dimension, searching for spiritual meaning in a way that cannot be explained by science. This was enough to sideline him from academia for decades, though his books were translated into 24 languages and spoke to the souls of ordinary people around the world. By contrast, Carl Rogers, in his rejection of the Judeo-Christian anthropology, enabled scientism. He asserted that from his ‘new revolution’ would emerge ‘a new kind of person, thrusting up through the dying, yellowing, putrefying leaves and stalks of our fading institutions’. This was ‘humanism’, without the soul, presented with the assurance of science. It has taken over half a century for the spiritual dimension to creep back into psychology. Critics of such ‘humanism’ such as American psychologist Paul Vitz, challenged the scientism and noted, as an empirical fact, that all human beings seek meaning, seek a spiritual dimension. It was unscientific to ignore this.
Del Noce proposed, in The Age of Secularization (2017) that the new totalitarianism was another form of millennialism, an attempted break with the past with which our technocratic civilisation is imbued. He said to counteract it was important, to ‘regain a genuine historical awareness’ and ‘an authentic demythologization’ of ‘the false idol of the technological society’. May there be further demythologization, and new courses established in Catholic and secular universities entitled ‘Critiques of the New Totalitarianism’, in particular highlighting the unique, perceptive, and prophetic thought of Augusto Del Noce.
COMING EVENTS
COLLOQUIUM 2024 – DATE CLAIMER
The 2024 Colloquium will be on SATURDAY 6 JULY
Topic: Authentic Humanism and the Crisis of Culture
SUMMER SCHOOL – BIBLICAL GREEK FOR BEGINNERS
Monday 22 to Friday 26 January 2024
Priory of our Lady of Cana, Colebrook
The New Testament and Koine Greek school is for beginners who want to experience the excitement of reading parts of the Bible in the original language. We shall read extracts from the Gospel and Epistles, as well as some important passages from the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament), as well as some pieces from the early Fathers of the Church and the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Accommodation at the Centre is available on request. We are trialling the Emmanuel Centre for the first time – it sounds ideal. ENROL HERE