Correspondence
ROSSI, VINCENT & BLECK, JOHN E. & Senser, Robert A.
Correspondence Women & World Church Bonn, Germany To the Editors: In promoting a cause, reformers often describe their goals in terms not of what ought to be but of what will be. History is...
...John W. Glaser uses this technique in his article, "Epoch III: the Church Feminized" [Jan...
...pg...
...It is fashionable today amongst intellectuals afflicted with the Hegelian virus to castigate the alleged "male chauvinism" of the Catholic church...
...This is odd, because such a result is hardly self-evident...
...and in so doing, he reveals how difficult it is for even a mind sympathetic to the sapiential tradition to overcome the all-pervasive influence of the modernistic mindset...
...This only goes to show how he has failed to grasp the point...
...On what will Epoch III Catholicism stake its claim to being triumphant...
...In fact, the writings of Schuon and Nasr have such clarity, depth, and force that one is compelled to ask "By what authority do these men speak...
...From there, Glaser goes on to make explicit what he finds implicit - a "silent assumption" - in Rahner's analysis: that as World Church "will become de-Europeanized, so will it become de-masculinized...
...Perhaps the prophetic witness of the sophia perennis is best summed up in these words of Jacques Maritain: "When it comes to absolutely essential matters that have been ignored by an intellectually degraded epoch, and when one is dealing with the great idols of the day (venerated moreover by a great many (Continued on page 190) Correspondence (Continued from 162) thinkers, some of whom are first class and deserve esteem and respect, even admiration - a qualified admiration), it is one's duty toward what is highest in the world to use the knife (and there is no point in being too gentle...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...History is moving their way, they say, implying that we'd better get on the bandwagon...
...However, when he attempts to criticize certain aspects of S.H...
...In America the church has, to use a fashionable word, the "infrastructure" to maintain and advance Catholic intellectual initiative...
...To the Editors: As one whose contact with the thought of Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, and Nasr has immeasurably deepened his own roots in the Christian tradition, I wholeheartedly concur with Robert El wood's assessment of S.H...
...The answer to my mind is, clearly, by the authority of realized knowledge or operative Grace...
...It expresses a frozen mentality, a mentality of paralysis...
...World Church, as described by Rahner, could indeed be the wave of the future, but, for the male/female church Glaser foresees and desires, it may also have a powerful undertow, the world being what it is...
...Glaser's visions represent simply a bathetic example of pre-Vatican II Catholic triumphalism...
...It is difficult to understand, therefore, how a shift to a de-Europeanized church will foster a move forward on feminist questions, including the "seminal" one that Glaser cites: the ordination of women...
...VINCENT ROSSI Director General Holy Order of MANS Hegelian virus Hillsborough, Calif...
...Elwood begins by labeling Nasr's position "neo-traditionalism" which has the effect of relativising and devaluing the perspective of Tradition...
...In Mr...
...vertically beyond the boundary of male culture...
...And finally, what could be more "fatuous" than to imply that thinkers of the caliber of Schuon and Nasr fail to perceive the value of "twentieth century mainstream philosophy" only because that philosophy has neglected to attach the label"sacred" to its peregrinations...
...Strangely, the church used to be castigated for emasculating men...
...It is particularly unfortunate for Catholic intellectuals in America to encumber themselves with this philosophical apparatus...
...From the perspective of sacred knowledge, or gnosis, Wittgenstein's mental reductionism is a prime example of the poverty of thought without the light of the Intellect...
...Yet throughout the book, Nasr carefully discriminates between the contemporary world in which the spiritual transmission of the sacred knowledge of Tradition is always a possibility, and modernism, the secularist, relativist, profane frame of reference in which we all swim today like alewives in polluted waters: "Tradition is not opposed to all that exists in the world today and, in fact, refuses to equate all that exists today with modernism...
...In reality, the status of women in those cultures generally suffers by comparison with that of women in European cultures...
...Nasr's book Knowledge and the Sacred as "splendid" [Jan...
...Nasr's argument, Mr...
...Shall we then expect Pope E. T. in Epoch V? Has it ever occurred to him that the futurologi-cal theology from which these sorts of ecstatic visions issue is incredibly dubious...
...As for Rahner's thesis that Vatican II represents the beginning of the process by which the Catholic church will become substantively universal, the negative proposition of the meaning of this, i.e., the end of European dominance, is intellectually unsatisfying . How easily this translates into the end of the domination of intellectual civilization by philosophers whose heritage is in the Enlightenment...
...and Heidegger's ardent cult of subjectivity is only an example of the absence of intellectual intuition, for lack of which he cultivates the small ec-stacy of an alleged "ontaological" self-liberation...
...JOHN E. BLECK...
...ROBERT A. SENSER 'Sophia perennis' San Francisco, Calif...
...World Church, writes Glaser, will "expand beyond two boundaries: horizontally beyond the boundary of European culture...
...Once we call the sapiential perspective "neo-traditionalism" it is only a short step to dismissing Nasr's critique of the modern world as excessive and indis-criminatory, the negative rhetoric of a "romantic conservative...
...Elwood unfortunately does little more than trivialize and misrepresent the cogency and authenticity of Nasr's thesis...
...Glaser provides no evidence to explain why the "horizontal" expansion will promote the "vertical...
...Glaser's view, it will be that Catholicism is appealing to women...
...This is why Germanic thought is so alluring to Catholic intellectuals...
...But a more logical explanation is that the church has antagonists on all sides...
...85) Elwood calls the traditional argument "fatuous" for failing to recognize the "ecstatic" contributions of Wittgenstein and Heidegger...
...it becomes only one "school of thought" among many others, characterized by "bookish, hothouse" scholars suffering from a nostalgia for the past...
...This paradox can be resolved in some weird dialectical historicism...
...No steps forward, two steps downward...
...Drawing on Karl Rahner, he portrays the church as entering a "new epoch" - out of a nearly two-thousand-year-long "European epoch" into that of "World Church...
...He mentions some evidence to illustrate that this epoch has already begun...
...It might be if non-European cultures, or even at least the Christian leaders in them, were characterized by a firm dedication to feminine equality...
...I would go further: it is the best and most complete introduction to the principles of the sophia perennis yet to appear...
...To the Editors: John W. Glaser urges us to look forward to Epoch III ". . . and IV, to the pregnant, African pope - and far, far beyond" [Jan...
...In the new epoch the, church will be transformed from a male-dominated institution into "the church of both sexes, female as well as male," meaning, for example, that female priests will be accepted as normal...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 6
