On ecumenical dialogue with the "Eastern Orthodox"...

Friendly Reminder

Friendly Reminder

Friendly Reminder

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 5

"Unfortunately, it has not yet become axiomatic to accept the Byzantine tradition as a consistent harbinger of the Latin tradition, one lagging centuries behind Byzantine theology of the Immaculate Conception."

-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 15.

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 4

"In negotiations with the Greeks in Constantinople, emperor John VIII [d. 1448] had to choose between two rival Councils for corporate reunion with the West. The Conciliarists at Basel wished to slight Pope Eugenius IV and receive the Greek contingent there. However, the Orthodox tradition was too conscious of the traditional presence of the Pope of Rome at an Ecumenical Council. As such, it was [sic!] beyond their ecclesiology to seriously consider convoking a Council that intentionally excluded the virtual presence of the Pope."

-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 14.

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 3

"[T]he early patristic tradition of the [Blessed Virgin Mary] harmoniously couple her appellation of 'prepurified' and 'immaculate' to such a degree that there is no known Father of the Church, Ecumenical Council, Liturgy or ecclesiastical author, who was at variance with the BVM's absolute holiness and perfection when considered under this quasi-title."

-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 14.

On feminizing the world...

"C. S. Lewis asserts the feminine character of the Christian worshiper as consequent upon the transcendent masculinity of the God who is worshiped, a notion also echoed by H. U. von Balthasar, as in the last century by Matthias Scheeben. For Lewis, see That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 316: 'What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.' ... This quite common and quite unreflective reservation of the reality of masculinity to the Creator, over against a relatively feminized creation, implies a reversion to a cosmological dualism radically incompatible both with Catholic sacramental realism and with the doctrine of the Good Creation which underlies that realism."

-- Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 310, n. 172

The only acceptable and viable economic theory...

The only acceptable and viable economic theory is one that roots all conventional economic factors in the stability and fecundity of the pious nuclear family.

Eucharistic worship or bust...

"Only in [Eucharistic] worship do we enter into our free solidarity with the second Adam."

 

-- Keefe, CT, p. 365, n. 50

Notate bene...

Keefe, unlike many Jesuits of his day, is not trying to "update" or "reform" or "reinterpret" Catholicism, but is, rather, trying to convince fellow theologians to stop explaining the Faith through the ventriloquist dolls of non-Christian metaphysics and presuppositions.

Worship is sacramental or it is not Christian worship...

"There is nothing in the New Testament understanding of our imaging of God which could justify the monadism we find in the notion of the imago Dei as the contemplative imaging of a monadic absolute, the Deus Unus. This notion of the imaging of God by man ... [is r]adically nonhistorical and Middle Platonic in its origins, [and] is saved for theological purposes only by the recognition, in Origen as in those who follow him, that the human imaging of God is fulfilled only in worship, although since Origen the worship has been conceived largely as contemplative, not as sacramental and historical."

-- Keefe, CT, v. 1, p. 356, n. 13

In non-Keefian terms, this passage demolishes the notion of someone being "spiritual but not religious," because literally every-thing in the world is rooted in the Eucharist; and because the Eucharist, in turn, is irreducibly sacramental (i.e., historical), everything in the Catholic life is irreducibly sacramental. This is why we must not trifle with liturgical worship but must see it as one of the primary ways that we "image" God.

Keefe was not a "traditionalist" but he does at times countersignal the cosmological flabbiness of what Vatican II officially taught, and gives no quarter to the immanentist excesses to which that Council's contested claims exploited.

Suffice to say that the obscurity, if not outright ignominy, of Keefe's genius is itself yet another argument against what post-Conciliar Catholicism has become. 

Our Christocentric dependence upon revelation...

"The historical Image who is Christ reveals in his imaging his eternal source in the Father as the Father's Word, the Father's Son, eternally generated by the Father and co-eternal with the Father, One God with the Father and the Spirit. To insist upon the fact and the necessity of the revelation of the Image is not to put the truth or the freedom of the revelation of the Trinity in doubt, but only to stress our dependence upon that revelation."

-- CT, v. 1, p. 365, n. 41.

What is said of the Church...

"Following Paul in Ephesians 5, the patristic tradition has understood what is said of [Mary] to be said of the Church. The degree of this identification is disputed, particularly in the context of the 'co-redemptrix' title, whose legitimacy was debated in the 1940s and 1950s, and resisted as if implying a species of synergism.... The relegation of Mariology to ecclesiology at Vatican II did nothing to settle the issue.... Much of the criticism ... of the thoroughgoing communication of idioms between Mary and the Church, bears finally upon this emphasis of a Mariology then [ca. the 1960s] perceived to be old-fashioned and now perceived also to be an affront to the ecumenism taught at Vatican II. Nonetheless the Marian piety associated with the ascription of a redemptive role to the Theotokos had and has a better base than has the criticism made of it, and is far more deeply grounded in the analogy of faith than it has been given credit for by either side of the debate."

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 304, n. 140.

Wait, what?

"[T]he _Summa Theologiae_ does not treat of the Christ's marital relation to the Church".

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 303, n. 129.

Hail to "one and the same" Son...

"Mary is not the Christotokos in Nestorius' sense of the term ... but is rather the Theotokos, the mother of the one Son who is at once her Son and the Son of the Father. She is the mother of Christ the man, not of his human nature: to require, with Nestorius ... anthropotokos in addition to Theotokos, as its necessary corrective, or to prefer Christotokos, is inevitably to deny the unity of Christ. Theotokos is properly said of Mary only because of the historical unity of her Son; she is the mother of a human Son, a human Person, not a human nature—which does not at all imply a 'two Sons' doctrine, for it is as Son that Christ is 'one and the same,' the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and the historical son of Mary, in the unity of one Person who is not 'two sons' but one."

-- Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 295, n. 92.

The pre-Anselmian Ontological Argument for God's existence...

"[A] millennium earlier [than St. Anselm] Seneca had designated the pantheist Stoic divinity also as that than which nihil majus cogitari potest".

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 289, n. 72.

This is the first time I'd ever heard about this!

I made a thing...

This happened to my SCOTUS one time...

Sinlessly on a cruciform tree...

The First Adam 
consumed 
sinfully 
from the tree of the knowledge of good 
and of evil, 
while the Second Adam
was consumed
sinlessly
on the cruciform tree,
to impart knowledge
of the victory of good
over evil
to Old Adam's heirs,
whose heirs are we all.

"Where the reality of the sin originans is rejected, the reality of an original moral agent for the fall is immediately abandoned, and with this, the moral character of the fall. At this point, the fall itself becomes a metaphor for the materiality of the created order. ... It is curious that attempts to avoid the supposed 'pessimism' of Paul, and of Augustine's reliance upon Paul, so regularly conclude in the definitive pessimism of metaphysical dualism, in which the root of evil is not sin but our material dispersion in space and time."

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 287, n. 59.

For reference (c/o Fr. John Hardon, SJ): 

Five qualities are generally attributed to Adam's transgression. It is seriously culpable, personal with Adam, technically original originating (originale originans), implied total aversion from God, and conversion or turning to creatures. ... It is sin as something habitual and not actual, natural and not personal, involving a moral state of soul and state of culpability, implying both the reatus culpae and the macula peccati, and properly described as original originated (originale originatum) as distinct from the personal sin of Adam.

Say what you will...

The recent SOTU was reason enough, among many other reasons, why NeverTrump cuckservatives should eat shit and die (in Minecraft, that is.)

Immigrant Catholicism and affronts to modernity...

"[C]urrent revisionist theology is concerned with the 'retrieval' rather than the exploration of the doctrinal tradition, with political therapy rather than redemption [cf. Bergoglio], and the eschatology in view is invariably monist, a ritual flight from the hazards of the historical order to the immobilist security of the ideal. Uniformly, the sexual symbolism expressed in sacramental marriage is discovered to be radically incompatible with this ancient fear of historical responsibility, and the symbolism which marriage underwrites is everywhere under attack by those who recognize in it the fundamental barrier to a renewed gnosticism—whose dévots [irony alert!] proclaim the demise of that 'immigrant Catholicism' characterized by its commitment to such affronts to modernity as the reservation of priestly orders to me, clerical celibacy, virginity outside of marriage and life-long fidelity within it, as well as by a clear eye for the distinction between the criminal homicide which is abortion and the lawful homicide which vindicates the symbols of public order by the execution of salient offense against the public decencies."

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 276, n. 21.

The Future of Traditional Catholics and the Rise of New-Class Catholicism...

"The intense involvement of the American episcopacy in a broad range of political questions, and their relative unconcern for the sacramental worship which is the actuality of Catholicism and their prime responsibility, speaks volumes for the routine acceptance of an ever more politicized orthopraxis as the substance of what amounts to New-Class Catholicism. The utopian [i.e., ahistorical, cosmological] quality of this aberration is manifest in the paradoxical willingness of the bishops to submit even the moral abomination of abortion to political judgment, and yet at the same time to transform highly controversial political decisions upon domestic and foreign policy into touchstones of Catholic orthodoxy and morality. A putatively national episcopal policy which could reject as impractical the quest for a constitutional amendment barring abortion as slavery ... in favor of an amendment which would leave such matters to the political processes of the individual states has lost its bearings, for at the same time the American bishops are strangely unwilling to leave economic and foreign policy decisions to such popular decisions."

click:

— Donald Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology, vol. 1, p. 112.

Theological modernity delenda est...

"Schillebeeckx ... proceeded in his later work ... to a notion of the relation of the Church to the Eucharist in which the faith of the Church is the cause of the Eucharistic presence: this of course rules out the notion of the Eucharist as the representation of the One Sacrifice, and thus the need of ordination to offer that Sacrifice. ... Schillebeeckx can then only conclude, given his a priori relativization of tradition, that the Tridentine doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass must go. Here he is at one with the whole of the cosmological and dehistoricizing agenda of theological modernity, which must finally converge upon the negation of this Event, for it celebrates the good news of the falsehood of that historical pessimism."

— Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 108.

A sentimentalized version of the priesthood...

"Archbishop Thomas J. Murphy ..., chairman [ca. 1989] of the U. S. Catholic Conference Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry and advisor to the Committee on Priestly Formation [endorsed, ca. 1982, a National Catholic Vocation Council Booklet that presented] the contemporary priestly ideal as that of 'the enabler and the leader, as a poet and storyteller, as a builder of community and as a person who concelebrates the gifts and ministries of all the people.' ... One is reminded ... of Aldous Huxley's celebrated relegation, in Brave New World, of the bishop of the future to the role of 'community arch-songster.' The declining number of vocations [ca. 1991] to this sentimentalized version of the priesthood—all that is left when dissent is given its head—is hardly surprising; still less is it much to be regretted, for a vocation actually meeting that description cannot serve the Church."

— Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 99.

"Ecumenism is our strength... compromise is victory... war is peace..."

"The willingness—indeed the eagerness—of Catholics to accept [the] exclusion of the fundamental affirmations of their faith from public life in order that they may enter the 'main stream' is the foremost scandal of Catholicism in this past half century: in this, they literally trade a mess of pottage for the human birthright."

- Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 97.

Yo, dawg, I heard you liked Blind Watchmakers, so...

"The universe, [according to Richard Dawkins], mindlessly following its mechanical laws, has succeeded in crafting these astonishing [biological] structures by repeated trial and error. What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his Blind Watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch," and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves? Paley, if still alive, would be entitled to ask Dawkins how his Blind Watchmaker came to be there. Perhaps Dawkins would answer that it was produced by a Blind "Blind Watchmaker" Maker."

— Stephen M. Barr, _Modern Physics and Ancient Faith_ (Notre Dame, IN: NDU Press, 2003), p. 111.