The
Killing of Heresy
XIX The Faerie Queene
His
lady, sad to see his sore constraint,
Cried
out, ‘Now, now, Sir Knight, shew what yee bee:
Add
faith unto your force, and be not faint;
Strangle
her, els she sure will strangle thee.’ …
Therewith
she spewd out of her filthy maw
floud
of poison horrible and blacke,
Full
of great lumpes and flesh and gobbet raw,
Which
stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke.
His
grasping hold, and from her turned him backe;
Her
vomit full of bookes and papers was,
There
is a great proliferation of books and papers, a vomit of heresy, throughout the
Church. It seems obvious that theology
ought not be established on the basis of experience, but rather on revelation;
it is perhaps not so obvious that theology ought not to be established on shaky
foundation of philosophies. St. Gregory Palamas was right to warn of the
hemlock of philosophy, a poison most insidious.
One
of the characteristics of many philosophical writers is the tendency to work
out their philosophy in the very process of writing. They fall prey to error of Alexander Pope,
“Presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man.” The problem is that man is inconstant and all
of our understanding, apart from divine revelation, is so much theorizing;
rather like trying to understand a storm at sea by gazing at the surface motion
of the waves.
In
the foment of the 60s there was a vile broth of despairing existentialism,
Samuel Becket, the Beat Poets, and writers like Altizer and Hamilton, Joseph
Fletcher and others including that bloodless and immoral theologian Paul
Tillich. Mix in with that the modern
Machiavellian Saul Alinsky, and you have the vile broth that brewed a vomit of
books and papers. “God helpe the man so
wrapt in errours endless traine!” (Faerie Queen xviii). So bound are they that their arrogance is
boundless. When arrogance and errour are
entwined no quarter is offered for truth; for truth is a reproach and an
embarrassment. That is why our
contemporary liberals are the new fundamentalists, and that is why there is
little tolerance for conservative viewpoints.
