Dr.

Robert Hickson

12 March 2015
Pope Saint Gregory the Great (d. 604)
Saint Nicholas Owen (d.1606)

Speaking the Truth about Oneself and the Barrier of Presumptuous Hebetude

--Epigraphs-I am not here defending such doctrines as that of the Sacrament of Penance; any
more than the equally staggering doctrine of Divine love for man....I am here
engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have
only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines on my own feelings
and actions. And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact
that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as
no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two
problems of my childish happiness and my boyish brooding. And they [i.e., these
two doctrines] specially affected one idea; which I hope it is not pompous to call
the chief idea of my life; I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the
doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things
with gratitude, and not taking things for granted. Thus the Sacrament of
Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it
as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do it.
The gift [of Absolution] is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession.
In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which may also be called
Reality; but it is facing the reality about oneself. (G.K. Chesterton, The
Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936), pp. 341-342
my emphasis added)
***
The thing that I was trying to say then [earlier in my pre-Catholic life] is the
same thing that I am trying to say now [about the idea of taking things with
gratitude, and not taking things for granted]; and even the deepest revolution
of religion [i.e., my final Conversion to the Catholic Faith] has only confirmed
me in the desire to say it. For indeed, I never saw the two sides of this single
truth [and the chief idea of my life] stated together anywhere, until I
happened to open the Penny Catechism and read the words, 'The two sins
against Hope are presumption and despair.' (G.K. Chesterton, The
Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (1936), p. 342my emphasis added)
***
I have said that this rude and primitive religion of gratitude [of mine] did not
save me from ingratitude; from sin which is perhaps more horrible to me
because it is ingratitude. But here again I found that the answer awaited me [in
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the Catholic Church]. Precisely because the evil [of ingratitude] was mainly of the
imagination, it could only be pierced by that concept of confession which is the
end of mere solitude and secrecy. I had found only one religion which dared to
go down with me into the depths of myself. I know, of course, that the practice of
[Sacramental] Confession having been reviled through three or four centuries and
through the greater part of my own life, has now been revived in a belated [and
secular, non-Sacramental] fashion [by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other
therapists]....In short, I would not be supposed to be ignorant of the fact that the
modern world, in various groups, is now prepared to provide us with the
advantages of [therapeutic] Confession. None of the groups, so far as I know,
professes to provide the minor advantage of Absolution. (G.K. Chesterton, The
Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (1936), pp. 353-354my emphasis added)
***
There is the murder of Ali [his domestic native servant]. We do not know whether
Ali was betraying him. If he [the sentimental protagonist] had not been [himself] a
smuggler and an adulterer there would have been nothing to betray. Ali dies to
emphasize the culpability of these [Scobie's] sins. There are [also] the
sacrilegious communions which Louise [his professedly Catholic wife] forces
upon him; and [there is] his suicide, a restatement of that blasphemy in other
terms. He dies [in his act of suicide] believing himself damned but also in an
obscure [and mystical Quietist] way...believing that he is offering his
damnation as a loving sacrifice for others....A love [i.e., as in the passion of
love, or an emotion of compassionate mercy], it is true, that falls short of trust
[and is also bereft of some important truths and traditional virtues], but a love, we
must suppose, which sanctifies his sin. That is the heart of the matter. Is such a
sacrifice feasible? (Evelyn Waugh, Felix Culpa?his 1948 book review of
Graham Greene's own wartime novel, The Heart of the Matter (1948), which
especially includes Evelyn Waugh's acute examination of Sentimental Theology
my emphasis added)
***
It came to pass this morning soon after our breakfast with the children, and when they had already
gone to their studies or play and music in another room, that my German wife turned to me and posed
several searching and sincere questions about the Church. In addition to some historical questions, she
asked about the sacramental doctrine of the Catholic Church, and especially moral doctrine. Having
been received into the Church ten years ago, she is still gratefully striving to understand the truths and
implications of the Faith more fully; and she has been formed by her own teachers in Germany to ask
disciplined and challenging and such sincerely searching questions.
In our conversation I mentioned what I recently had heard from a well-informed friend, namely
that even an excommunicated Cardinal of the Church may still participate fully in the conclave
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charged to elect a new Pope. This apparent canonical fact stunned us both and got us thinking. Could
that excommunicated Cardinal be validly elected as the Pope, or would that election be inherently
invalid, instead, and from its inception therefore null and void? We do not know, and we do not yet
even know where to find the sufficiently authoritative and properly differentiated answer.
Since that excommunicated Cardinal may well have been excommunicated for Heresy, we then
wondered whether it had to be a Formal Heresy, and not just a Material Heresy.
Then we wondered: could a Pope be validly elected if, before his election, he was publicly known
to be a Material Heretic, and even an inveterate one at that and perhaps quite expressive about it as
well, if not flauntingly so?
We knew that some theologians in the past such as Saint Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621) and his
slightly stricter Spanish and Jesuit contemporary, Francisco Suarez (d. 1617) believed that an
actually reigning and ruling Pope could be a Material Heretic without thereby putting himself outside
of the Church, as long as he did not formally try to define it and promulgate it and thus impose it on
the Church as henceforth binding on their Catholic consciences.
Moreover, the general view and cumulative theological consensus now seems to be that only God
or another Pope can licitly and validly judge a Pope, unless that Pope who is under suspicion or
doubtful has freely consented to pass judgment on himself and then actually does it ex cathedra.
We also discussed the concept and reality of the implicit and implicitness. For example, can
someone be implicitly culpable? Can someone be inchoately negligent? What of the case of the
conception of a child? When one acknowledges the state of pregnancy, one cannot be only partially
pregnantor only implicitly pregnant or only inchoately pregnant. One is either with child, or not.
We then realized that many if not all of these threads of thought touched upon the matter of
Human Responsibility and the ways that such Responsibility (and even our desire for a final and
inescapable Accountability) may be attenuated or delusively evaded and even morally (and maybe
culpably) compromised often because we do not truly want to have a well-formed Conscience
(Conscientia). We may not even want Our Sincere and Sensitive Conscience to pose two decisively
formative and sobering and, indeed, very specific questions for deliberation: On what grounds? By
what authority? That is, What are my adequate Criteria and Standards of Judgment? Hence, in our
spontaneity (or impetuosity) we may not sincerely seek to acquire an authoritatively well-formed
Conscience after all; and then also, as an honorable man, to be decisive and to act upon our formed
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Conscience's own practical judgments, while being properly promptus ad bonum as all true virtue
requires, to include the fitting promptness of the First Cardinal Virtue of Prudence (Prudentia).
However, for all too many of us today amidst so much Subjectivist Philosophy and
Personalism and Withdrawing into our Sensitive Consciousness the Conscience (ConScientia) seems to have dropped down into the Will alone and even into the mere feelings, thereby
leaving Moral Knowledge (Scientia) and Intellect behind and without further influence, neither
illuminative nor formative! Is the Will still a blind faculty in need of light?
Then my wife and I went on to consider how such vagueness and seeming laxity conduce to
presumption not only as a form of sinful pride (superbia), but also as one of the two sins
against the virtue of Hope (the second one being despair). For, presumption is a premature and
unwarranted anticipation of our own final fulfillment (as Josef Pieper incisively summarized it)
as in the case of our more-or-less complacent certitude of attaining to Beatitude and to the Beatific
Vision. Hence, as if we are essentially indefectible and already possess the great gift of final
perseverance.
When G.K. Chesterton spoke of taking things as a gift, but not taking them for granted, he
was deftly touching upon this fundamental matter (and even upon the slightly smug and slothful
manner) of presumption. For, such presumption also leads to further laxity and indifference, and
even to religious indifferentism. Ecumenism itself, as now commonly and often promiscuously
exemplified and applied in our Ecclesiastical Glossary and consequent Pastoral Practice, is a cloak for
Religious Indifferentism. Do we agree?
Moreover, do we still agree with the earlier Popes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who
protectively saw the grave dangers of such indifferentism and then warned us of these self-deceptive
tendencies, or logical results from false premises? Or, have we moved beyond these admonitions and
emerged into a new understanding and disjunctive and discontinuous development of doctrine? Is
Credo in evolutionem doctrinarum to be our new disposition and openness and inculturation? Even
unto the Evolution of Defined Dogmas? Are we still to pray for the Gift of Fear (the Holy Ghost's
Donum Timoris) as a merciful safeguard against our unfaithful Presumption?
Saint Augustine soberly said that, for our own good and persevering fidelity, we must
also humbly remember two examples: not only the Good Thief (Dismas) on the Hill of
Calvary, but also the Bad Thief, lest we be (or unfaithfully become) sinfully presumptuous
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ourselves. And not only thereby to evade the abiding existential risks of our still-defectible
free will (until the moment of our death) in that high adventure of our just and fitting divine
probation in this world; but also thus to cling to an illusion and an altogether unwarranted
false hope. That is to say, to have only a false spes salutis (hope of salvation), by selfdeceptively and seductively embracing a form of hopelessness.
Moreover, a valorous French Dominican Priest (Father R.P. Bruckberger, O.P.) a combat
Chaplain in the French Resistance (of 1939-1945) and close friend of Georges Bernanos once
memorably said to Albert Camus, as follows, specifically about those Christians who unconditionally
want to abolish the punitive Death Penalty:
Now then, my dear Camus, if there are Christian abolitionists [of the death
penalty], they must have a patron saint in the Gospels. I think I have found that
patron saint: the bad thief. What did the bad thief want? Above all and exclusively,
to save his skin, his miserable, earthly skin. He was lucky enough to be crucified
with somebody who worked miracles. Why was He waiting before working one
moreit was urgent! 'If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.' Justice? He [that
thief] did not think of it. The main thing was for him to escape punishment, to
escape yet again. He came to a nasty end!
As for the good thief: Having led the life as a bandit, he knew that he had wasted
his life, and he had no intention of wasting his death, as it was all he had left, and
what he had left was no doubt the most important thing in a man's life....
For we receive the due reward for our deed. Where he [the good thief] attains an
epic grandeur, as the Greeks understood it, and, amidst his own misfortune,
perceives the difference between the innocent and the guilty, is when he turns to
Jesus and says: 'But this man hath done no evil.' It was then that he suddenly
became a Christian. He took pity on God, on divine innocence crucified, which he
had the grace to recognize; and, as he recognized the incarnate God in the man
next to him on the cross, hope welled up within him and he implored: 'Lord
remember me when Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom.' 1

Rmi Fontaine, who quoted these above words of Father Bruckberger (1907-1998), then
immediately adds:
It is no parable that Father Bruckberger relates here. It is what really happened at
the most decisive moment in our human history. Christ did not reply to the bad
1 This citation is part of a longer Dossier, entitled Arguments about the Death Penalty, and written by the French scholar
Rmi Fontaine. It was first published in French in 1992, in Issue 99 of Action Familiale et Scolaire (BP 80833-75828
Paris cedex 17, France). Its 9 pages were then soon translated into English and published in Scotland in Apropos
Magazine, No. 12/13Pentecost 1992. It has been posted on the Apropos website: www.apropos.org.uk .

thief on Calvary. He did not miraculously suppress his punishment. To the

good thief He said: This day thou shalt be with me in paradise. This is the
reality which, two thousand years later, is still producing 'good thieves,' just like
Jacques Fesch, one of the last to be sentenced to death in France. 2

May we, upon further reflection, now come to learn even more from G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Augustine, Father Bruckberger, and the Bad Thief about the Sin of Ingratitude and about the Sin of
Presumption. And may we also now learn further from Evelyn Waugh's literary and moral vividness
about the desolation of ingratitude and the fruits of hopeless presumption. So that, even in our
sometimes slothful hebetude, we may also thereby come to grasp and deeply cherish the humility and
indispensability of gratitude and the adventurous poise and resilience of true hope.
CODA
In the final part of this brief essay, we may also learn unexpectedly much from Evelyn Waugh's
theologically lucid and morally candid, as well as modest and hesitant, 1948 book review of The Heart
of the Matter, Graham Greene's novel on the corruption of compassion and mercy, set in colonial
West Africa during World War II. In Waugh's own vivid but astringent and then poignant words:
The scene is a West African port in war-time. It [the port] has affinities with
Brighton [in East Sussex, on the southeast seacoast of England] of Brighton Rock
[Greene's earlier 1938 novel], parasitic, cosmopolitan, corrupt. The population
are all strangers, British officials, detribalized natives, immigrant West Indian
Negroes, Asiatics, Syrians. There are poisonous gossip [sic] at the club and
voodoo bottles on the wharf, intrigues to monopolize the illicit diamond trade. The
hero, Scobie, is deputy-commissioner of police, one of the oldest inhabitants
among the white officials; he has a compassionate liking for the place and the
people. He is honest and unpopular, and, when the story opens, he has been
passed over for promotion. His wife Louise is also unpopular, for other
reasons. She is neurotic and pretentious [and presumptuous!]. Their only child
died at school in England. Both are Catholic. His failure to get made
commissioner is the final humiliation. She whines and nags to escape to South
Africa....Husband and wife are found together in the depths of distress. (Felix
Culpa?362my emphasis added)3

After the former British Commando officer and well-known writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
wrote his own literary (and partly theological) book review of Graham Greene's The Heart of the
2 Ibid., p. 7my emphasis added. Dr. Rmi Fontaine draws his several quotes from Father Bruckberger's own 1985 text,
entitled Oui la peine de mort [Yes to the Death Penalty, or Yes to Capital Punishment) (Paris: Plon, 1985).
3 See the following footnote 4 for this textual reference and for all other textual references to Felix Culpa?

Matter (1948) in the American Jesuit Journal Commonweal on 16 July 1948,4 he soon thereafter also
wrote a personal letter to Greene, wherein he said, in full:
Dear Graham,
I am delighted that you did not take the review amiss. My admiration for the book
was great as I hope I made plain.
It was your putting that [theologically confused and confusing] quotation from
[Charles] Pguy at the beginning which led me astray. I think it will lead others
astray. Indeed I saw a review by Raymond Mortimer in which he stated, without
the hesitation I expressed, that you thought Scobie a saint [the novel's
protagonist and a suicide].
I think you will have a great deal of troublesome controversy in USA. The
Bishops there are waiting to jump on decadent European Catholicism and I
just escaped delation [denunciation, accusation by an informer] by [my] sending
everyone to heaven [in one of my pieces as they initially and rashly thought].
Do please come whenever you have a spare night or nights.
Yours ever
Evelyn 5

Evelyn Waugh's letter was in part a reply to an earlier letter from Graham Greene himself,
wherein Greene commented, as follows, so as also to make this seeming, but rather shallow,
clarification: A small point [sic] I did not regard Scobie as a saint, and his offering his damnation
up was intended to show how muddled a man full of goodwill could become once 'off the rails' [?].6
However, as Greene has actually and quite clearly depicted his compassionate protagonist Scobie in his
novel, Scobie himself became somehow so muddled that he also finally committed suicide but
after he had also gravely sinned in his protracted adultery and by his manifold criminality (smuggling
in the illicit diamond trade and with a probable murder) and after his own sacrilegious Eucharistic
4 See Evelyn Waugh, Felix Culpa? in The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Edited by Donat Gallagher)
(Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984first published in London in 1984 by Methuen London Ltd),
pp. 360-365. Henceforth, all references to this 1948 Review will be placed above in the main body of this essay, in
parentheses. The Latin Felix Culpa?, as suchbut without the question mark is (or once was) a well-known phrase
meaning O Happy [or O Fortunate] Fault and it still is to be found in a beautiful piece of Liturgical Poetry, known as
the Exultet (i.e., the Laus Cerei or, Praise of the [Paschal] Candle), which was (is) intoned by the Deacon at the
traditional Easter Vigil Mass. It will soon be clearer, moreover, why Evelyn Waugh has placed a mark of interrogation in
his essay's titleas if he were at least quite doubtful about a certain man's not-so-fortunate Fault and Final Culpability.
5 See The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (Edited by Mark Amory) (New Haven and New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), p. 280
my emphasis added.
6 Ibid.my emphasis added.

Communions and some additionally admitted acts of blasphemy, as well. Thus, upon our first hearing
the author, Graham Greene's own interpretation of all of these things, we would not so easily come to
consider the matter of Scobie's conduct and cumulative culpability to be so trivial nor such a small
point theologically, as Greene himself implies.
Nonetheless, after Graham Greene's personal and putatively expository letter to him about his
actual intentions in The Heart of the Matter, Waugh wrote a correcting letter [dated 17 July 1948] to
The Tablet [on page 41 of this well-known Catholic publication in England] and when the [book]
review was translated into French he [Waugh] altered it to read 'Some critics have taken Scobie to be a
saint.' 7
Just as some professed Catholics todayespecially in relation to marriage and the family seem
to affirm that Mercy as a loving sacrifice for others even sanctifies their sins, so, too, Evelyn Waugh
will tell us later about Scobie's own dying by suicide while believing he is offering [even] his
damnation as a loving sacrifice for others....actuated throughout by the love of God....A love
[moreover] which sanctifies his sins. (364my emphasis added) But, is this final act in itself not
also a very dangerous form, even a deeply sinful form, of Ingratitude and Presumption?
More specifically now, after his polite framing remarks, Waugh will have us go with him
gradually deeper into the substance of his July 1948 book review, deftly entitled Felix Culpa?:
In the last twenty-five years, the artist's [Greene's] interest has moved from
sociology to eschatology....His eyes are on the Four Last Things, and so
mountainous are the disappointments of recent history [World War II and its
Aftermath], that there are already signs of a popular breakaway to join him, of a
stampede to the heights.
I find the question most asked by the agnostic is....Do you believe in Hell?
Mr. Greene has long shown an absorbing curiosity in the subject. In Brighton
Rock [Greene's earlier, 1938 novel] he ingeniously gave life to a theological
abstraction. We are often told [as Greene himself says in that book]: The Church
does not teach that any man is damned. We only know that Hell exists for those
who deserve it. Perhaps it is now empty and will remain so for all eternity [cf.
Hans Urs von Balthasar]. This was not the sentiment of earlier and healthier
ages.....Mr Greene [himself has thus] challenged the soft modern mood by
creating [in his pre-War Brighton Rock] a completely damnable youth. Pinkie of
Brighton Rock is the ideal examinee for entry to Hell....By its completeness [but
still short of being an adequately fearsome doctrinal sermon]....we leave our
[reading of the book] edified but smug....Brighton Rock might be taken [thus all7 Ibid.

too-presumptuously] to mean that one has to be as wicked as Pinkie before one

runs into serious danger [of damnation].
Mr. Greene's latest book, The Heart of the Matter, should be read as the
complement of Brighton Rock. It poses a vastly more subtle problem....[the
protagonist, Scobie's] life and death comprise a problem to which the answer is
in the mind of God alone, the reconciliation of perfect justice with perfect
mercy. It is a book which only a Catholic could write and only a Catholic can
understand. I mean that only a Catholic can understand the nature of the
problem.....To them [some devout, but insufficiently formed Catholics] this
profoundly reverent book will seem a scandal. For it not only portrays Catholics
as unlikable human beings but shows them as tortured by their Faith. It will be
the object of controversy and perhaps even of condemnation. [As a second class of
readers,] Thousands of heathen will read it with innocent excitement, quite
unaware that they are intruding among the innermost mysteries of faith.
There is a third class [to which Waugh himself also belongs] who will see what
this book intends and yet be troubled by doubt of its theological propriety.
(360-361my emphasis added)
Moreover, Waugh has observed over the years that Greene's novels deal mainly with charmless
characters although they have been baptized, held deep under the waters of life, about which matter
Greene himself has so revealingly and intimately said:
These characters are not my creation but God's. They have an eternal
destiny. They are not merely playing a part for the reader's amusement. They are
souls Christ died to save. (361my emphasis added)
Evelyn Waugh then immediately says:
This [the gravity and intensity of the author's intimate self-revelation], I think,
explains his preoccupation with the charmless. The children of Adam are not a
race of noble savages who need only a divine spark to perfect them. They are
aboriginally corrupt. Their tiny relative advantages of intelligence and taste and
good looks and good manners are quite insignificant. The compassion and
condescension [and gracious humility] of the Word becoming flesh are glorified
in the depths. (361my emphasis added)
After giving a lucid summary of The Heart of the Matter, Waugh has a piercing interim
observation to make about the deputy-commissioner of police, Scobie's desperation and grim end:
Unable to abandon either woman [neither his wife Louise, nor his recently
widowed mistress Ruth], inextricably involved [as a British colonial official] in
crime, hunted by his enemy [and by his rival in love], Scobie takes poison [in an
act of suicide]; his women become listlessly acquiescent to other suitors. (363
my emphasis added)
Waugh will now go into the deeper parts of his review, so as to get to the heart of the matter:
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As I have suggested above [on page 361], Scobie is the complement of Pinkie.
Both believe in damnation and believe themselves damned. Both die in mortal sin
as defined by moral theologians. The conclusion of the book is the reflection that
no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God's mercy.
Nevertheless the reader is haunted by the question: Is Scobie damned?.... It is
the central question of The Heart of the Matter. I believe that Mr Greene thinks
him a saint. Perhaps I am wrong in this. (363my emphasis added)
After these gracious concessions, Waugh will first recall for us five of the main elements so
formative of Scobie's moral state and of his spiritual state; and he will then draw us on to consider how
those two very complex and ambiguous (363) states are somehow also interrelated. Those five
formative factors are: first his professional delinquency (363); secondly, there is his adultery (364);
thirdly, there is the murder of Ali [Scobie's supposedly devoted native servant (363)]; fourthly,
there are his sacrilegious communions (364); and fifthly, his suicide, a restatement of that
[Eucharistic] blasphemy in other terms (364). About Scobie's act of suicide, Waugh then acutely says:
He dies believing himself damned but also in an obscure wayat least in a way
obscure to mebelieving that he is offering his damnation as a loving sacrifice
for others [as wouldand sometimes didthe Heretical Quietists of old].
We are told throughout [the novel] that he [Scobie] is actuated by love. A love, it
is true, that falls short of trust [and truth], but a love, we must suppose, which
sanctifies his sins. That is the heart of the matter. Is such a sacrifice feasible?
To me the idea is totally unintelligible, but it is not unfamiliar [already in 1948].
Did the Quietists8 [as somewhat Mystical Passivists] not speak in something like
these terms? I ask in all humility whether nowadays logical rule-of-thumb
Catholics are not a little too humble towards mystics [or charismatics and
emotional syncretists, as such]....We may well fight shy of discussing ecstatic
states of prayer with which we have no acquaintance, but sacrilege and suicide
are acts of which we are perfectly capable. To me the idea of willing my own
damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a
mad blasphemy, for the God who accepted that [all-too-presumptuous]
sacrifice could be neither just nor lovable....And it is there, at the heart of the
matter [and despite the poet Pguy's mumbled version and preposterous
deduction about the [Christian] bond...made by one's sins], that the literary
8 Quietism: A doctrine or tendency according to which, in the highest mystical states, the soul would have merely to
abandon itself quite passively to repose (quies) in God. The accusation of [against] quietism was leveled against many
people engaged in the spiritual life, such as the medieval Byzantine Hesychasts, or in more recent times in the West
against Molinos, Malaval, and especially Madame Guyon and Fnelon in the 17th century. Fnelon's Maxims of the
Saints was [papally] condemned for various formulas that lent themselves to this interpretation. However, it is at least
questionable whether these interpretations [concerning an inordinate passivity and indifference!] actually corresponded
to the real intention of the author. This complete, and rather sympathetic, passage (the only entry under the letter Q]
comes from Father Louis Bouyer's own learned Dictionary of Theology (New York and Tournai, Belgium: Desclee Co.,
Inc., 1965). Father Bouyer (1913-2004), a convert from Lutheranism, became a Catholic in 1939 and later an Oratorian
Father. He was part of the Nouvelle Thologie Movement, though in the more conservative wing, as it were, especially
about the Liturgy. In 1969, he wrote a brief, but deep and farsighted, book, entitled The Decomposition of Catholicism.

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critic must resign his judgment to the [faithful, not the Modernist] theologian.
(364-365my emphasis added)
Evelyn Waugh's sincere modesty here touches the faithful heart who prays always for the gift of
fear, lest he also be found sinfully presumptuous at the end, or finally without gratitude and also
without hope.
That is to say, without that gift from the order of Grace: the infused virtue of supernatural hope.
Thus, also without The Hope of the Christian Martyrs, in Josef Pieper's own conceptual
words, which my beloved mentor often repeated to me and has so profoundly explicated even once
in France, in the 1950s, with the resistant and mightily irritated Father Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.,
himself alertly present in the audience and strongly expressing his several objections! Indeed, Josef
Pieper was then himself to be face-to-face with the Barrier of Presumptuous Ideological Hebetude. For
the reality of the fundamental virtue of hope (esprance, as distinct from espoir) did not at all fit into
that Modernist Jesuit priest's quasi-Hegelian evolutionary pantheistic framework. Nor did Mortal Sin.
Nor did Supernatural Sanctifying Grace.

--Finis- 2015 Robert D. Hickson

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