In the context of every major crisis in the history of the Church, God has ensured the presence of enlightened minds capable of understanding and responding to heresies that endanger the salvation of His faithful. The Arian heresy was denounced and overcome by theological and philosophical geniuses such as Saints Athanasius the Great (c.297–373) and Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390). To counter one of the most subtle Christological heresies, Monothelitism, Saint Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662) was chosen.

In this regard, we might ask ourselves: who are the chosen minds to denounce and combat the liturgical heresies that culminated in the replacement of the Traditional Roman Liturgy with the Liturgy of Pope Paul VI? Very likely, some of the most serious candidates are Fr. Roger Thomas-Calmel O.P. (1914–1975), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1899–1977), Romano Amerio (1905–1997), Michael Davies (1936–2004), and, undoubtedly, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905–1991). Alongside these figures, an author with a highly complex intellectual trajectory must be mentioned: the French philosopher Jean Borella (born in Nancy in 1930).

No one can understand better than a Catholic who loves Tradition how unbreathable the cultural and social atmosphere of the modern world is. We are like the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, struggling to live in a radioactive context.

His contribution to understanding the unprecedented crisis in which we find ourselves today is remarkable. Among his many books, several extensive monographs stand out, including Le Mystère du signe. Histoire et théorie du symbole (The Mystery of the Sign: History and Theory of Symbol, 1989), Symbolisme et réalité (Symbolism and Reality, 1997), La crise du symbolisme religieux (The Crisis of Religious Symbolism, 2009), and Histoire et théorie du symbole (History and Theory of Symbol, 2015). In all of these works, in addition to a profound and detailed conception of the fundamental concept of “symbol,” we find reflections on the causes that have led us into the vortex of the most extensive crisis in the entire history of the Church.

For the present article, however, I will refer to another work by Borella, which has fortunately been translated into English—a work in which he synthesizes all of his contributions. In this volume, titled The Sense of the Supernatural, he aims to uncover the causes of the modernist heresy exposed by Saint Pope Pius X. From his analysis, I will highlight a single, substantial passage that fully, precisely, and succinctly presents the external, cultural causes of modernism. As we shall see, these causes have led both to the crisis of traditional Christian faith and to the replacement of the Roman Catholic Liturgy. But first, here are Borella’s insights:

“The truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted with the most formidable problem that a religion can encounter: the scientific disappearance of the universe of those symbolic forms which let it speak for and manifest itself, that is to say those forms which let it ‘exist’ . This destruction was effected by Galilean physics; not because, as is ordinarily claimed, it deprived man of his central position— which for St Thomas Aquinas is in any case the least noble and the lowest— but because it reduces the texture of the body, its material substance, to sheer geometry and, by the selfsame stroke, renders this world’s ability to serve as a medium for the manifestation of God scientifically impossible (or stripped of meaning). The theophanic capacity of the world is denied. In an indefinitely extensive and isotropic universe, neither the Incarnation, the Resurrection, nor the Ascension make the least sense. Gone is the sensible basis for the divine and the supernatural. Never had humanity suffered a similar ‘epistemological shock,’ and it has not recovered. Science was thus set up, whether it wanted to be or not, as the enemy of religion. Theology had to proceed, by degrees, with the revision of all its concepts; exegesis was condemned to rank all scriptural data under the category of ‘cultural curiosities’, ‘primitive representations.’ One’s only choice is between ‘demythologising’ and ‘cultural neurosis,’ that is to say reducing all of Holy Scripture to a few words of ethical proclamation, or else carrying on as if one believed in events known to be quite impossible.”^[i]

The dominant cultural paradigm, the media that constantly disseminate it, and the entire secular educational system do nothing but repeat the mantras of liberalism, mechanicism, progressivism, and evolutionism whose authors—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Voltaire, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, etc.—have “set up” a cultural context in which the Gospel has become impossible.

No one can understand better than a Catholic who loves Tradition how unbreathable the cultural and social atmosphere of the modern world is. To put it metaphorically, we are like the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, struggling to live in a radioactive context. Both the dominant cultural paradigm, the media that constantly disseminate it, and the entire secular educational system do nothing but repeat the mantras of liberalism, mechanicism, progressivism, and evolutionism whose authors, from Galileo (1564-1642), Bacon (1561-1626), Descartes (1596-1650), Newton (1642-1726), and Voltaire (1694–1778), to Hegel (1770-1831), Darwin (1809-1882), and Marx (1818-1883), have usurped the authority of the Holy Fathers of the patristic era and the Doctors of the Church of the Middle Ages. Basically, what they have “set up,” voluntarily or involuntarily, more or less consciously, is a cultural context in which the Gospel has become impossible.^[ii]

This “mutation” affecting the entire cultural, social, and political context of Christian Europe has been noted by many authors. Here, I will mention only Father Claude Barthe, whose excellent work La messe, une forêt de symboles: commentaire allégorique ou mystique de la messe romaine traditionnelle avec indications historiques et rituelles (Via Romana, 2011) was recently translated into English: A Forest of Symbols. The Traditional Mass and Its Meaning (Angelico Press, 2023). In it, he shows that the decline of the spiritual, mystical interpretation of Holy Scripture and the Liturgy began toward the end of the 17th century.

And if someone were to argue that the situation was similar in the pagan world where the Savior Christ and His first disciples, the apostles, preached, I would respond with a clarification whose importance cannot be overstated. Namely, that the ancient world, although pagan, when not outright monotheistic, still recognized the existence of an unseen world, an immortal soul, and, at times, even post-mortem rewards and punishments. Yet, this is not even the most important aspect. What is essential is that the world into which God became man had never before heard the Gospel. Rejections of it were mostly circumstantial, usually motivated by adherence to other religions or by vices such as envy, adultery, and usury.

The Altar is far more real than the stone from which it is carved, for it is the symbol of the “cornerstone”—Christ—with whom it shares a mysterious connection that transforms it into an essential liturgical object. Our transient world contains such objects that participate in the reality of eternal and divine archetypes from the unseen realm.

In contrast, the modern world, as is so clearly illustrated by the Protestant revolution sparked by the arch-heretic Martin Luther, was built on a systematic rejection of authentic Christianity and the Revelation upon which it is founded—exclusively represented by the Roman Catholic Church and those branches that place themselves under its authority (such as the Greek Catholic Church— of Byzantine Rite— in Eastern Europe).

The entire cultural paradigm characterized by the marginalization and even elimination of Faith inspired by the supernatural Christian Revelation, it is based on elevating empirical-experimental science to the rank of supreme authority. The “official” public discourse and the closing of the churches during the Covid pandemic has abundantly shown us this. Now, this “authority” at the heart of the modern world is based on a secular rationality conceived in opposition to supernatural Faith and on a vision of the cosmos that excludes both the hierarchy of beings—from the lower realms to humans and angels—and, as Borella puts it, the symbolic capacity of the universe to “speak” about the unseen world and the Creator of all that exists, God.

This explains, for example, why Darwinian evolutionism, along with all its “post-” variants, has gained and continues to maintain such widespread acceptance: because its explanations for the origin and genesis of humanity exclude the existence of a divine Creator of the cosmos. Today, one may, at best, be a believer at home, but certainly not in a physics or microbiology laboratory. On the contrary, any attempt to propose theories that establish rational connections between nature and the existence of a Creator endowed with infinite intelligence—infinitely superior to human intelligence—is met with marginalization and even exclusion from the scientific community.

This is what the modern culture has forgotten, a culture that no longer wants to acknowledge anything beyond what is accessible in this fallen reality, here and now.

However, the gravest consequence is noted by the French author: the loss of the sense of the supernatural and its mystery, phenomena that accompany the inability to think in terms of symbolism—the key concept of any authentic Christian understanding and, likewise, of every liturgical element.

For the Traditional Christian world, the notion of “symbol” was the key to understanding our reality. First and foremost, a symbol was not conceived as something unreal, imaginary, conventional, or subject to human whim—like, for instance, the colors of road signs for drivers. On the contrary, sacred symbols are bridges created by God Himself between our physical world, which can be perceived by the senses, and the metaphysical, unseen, spiritual world, which can only be grasped by the intellect.

For example, the Holy Altar of a church is far more real than the stone from which it is carved, for it is the symbol of the “cornerstone”—the Savior Christ—with whom it shares a mysterious connection that transforms it into an essential liturgical object. In this way, our transient world contains such objects that participate in the reality of eternal (i.e., divine) archetypes from the unseen realm, where angels and saints contemplate and glorify God. From this perspective, symbols are more real than any object, than any creature in our world, which will one day come to its end.

This is what the modern culture has forgotten, a culture that no longer wants to acknowledge anything beyond what is accessible in this fallen reality, here and now. Clearly, such “amnesia” can have only one explanation: the terrible crisis of faith that, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, has generated all the mutations that led to the destruction of the “social reign of Christ the Savior” and the birth of the modern world.

Latest from RTV — The Latin Mass in Africa | Michael Matt interviewed by Kenyan Traditionalist

[i] Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 23-24.

[ii] This is the main thesis of Dominican Father Roger-Thomas Calmel, a thesis that I will discuss in future articles.