Anatomy of a Crisis: From Sede Vacante to St. Thomas

Part II: Metaphysical Diagnosis

In Part I of this three-part series, I discussed the crisis I witnessed while attending a sedevacantist chapel. This essay will propose a metaphysical diagnosis for these problems by tracing an ideological lineage from counterrevolutionary France through Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and will explore the role of a centuries-long degeneration of classic Thomism in the crisis.

While not all sedevacantist groups can trace a direct lineage from Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), the cross-pollination that occurs in these tight-knit communities has established a common, dark, conspiratorial worldview with accompanying elitism and scrupulosity that has more in common with Calvinism than Catholicism. Here, Sola traditio is substituted for sola scriptura in an autonomous stance that rivals Modernist self-determination. Dysfunctional traditionalism is in fact Modernism wearing a cassock. Indeed, the two have a common foundation in Thomistic collapse: the loss of the soul’s anchor in God that inevitably breeds subjectivism.

Many believe the current crisis in the Church derives from recent history. Traditionalists often blame external, non-Catholic forces that infiltrated the Church in a grand conspiracy. Modernists may point to dysfunction localized to post revolutionary France. Contrary to both, careful theological and historical analysis implicates internal intellectual forces growing within the Church over 600 years that ironically birthed both Modernism and dysfunctional traditionalism. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The current crisis resulted from an ideological contagion that spread widely and afflicted both extremes, the false binary offering either demonization or idolization of the world. As 20th-century Thomist master Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange describes in God: His Existence and His Nature, this contagion is the metaphysical collapse within Scholasticism that extends from the pinnacle of Thomism to its degeneration into voluntarism through John Duns Scotus’ Univocity of Being and William of Ockham’s Via Moderna—whose nominalism stripped reality of  inherent qualities and necessitated blind voluntarism. This distorted theology brought about Luther’s spiritual collapse and ignited the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s God was Deus absconditus: terrifying and hidden.

Voluntarism grounds faith in will (voluntas) rather than reason. If reason becomes incapable of discerning objective truth, faith becomes blind and subjective. Voluntarism views God primarily as an Absolute Will rather than a Loving Father whose actions are in conformity with His inherent goodness.

In voluntarism, something is arbitrarily good because God commands it rather than God commanding the good because He is Goodness Itself. Because Luther viewed God as an Arbitrary Sovereign Will, a black box of whim and terror, he formulated his erroneous doctrine of “justification by faith alone” to deal with a crushing burden he could not carry.

The ghost of this collapse haunted the Church beyond the Reformation. While most theologians rejected the voluntarism that had infected Luther, they failed to fully restore Aquinas’ dynamic participatory metaphysics—attempting to codify it into logical formulas, epitomized by Cajetan’s infamous construct: God’s essence/God’s existence = man’s essence/man’s existence.

Jesuit scholasticism, in particular, deviated under the influence of Francisco Suárez, whose 16th-century synthesis imported a Trojan-horse version of voluntarism into the heart of the Church. These errors were brilliantly diagnosed by 20th-century Italian Thomist Fr. Cornelio Fabro.

Suárez’s Disputationes Metaphysicae was even used by Protestants to formulate the German “School Metaphysics” textbooks that shaped the thought of Immanuel Kant. Suárez’s work also influenced 19th- and 20th-century seminary training manuals. He deviated from Aquinas’ Analogy of Being and, similar to Scotus, proposed a version of Univocity of Being. Univocity diminishes the transcendent God to a force on the same plane of existence as man. Instead of conceiving of man’s existence as dynamic participation by analogy in the very Being of God, man is reduced to a free-floating, frozen, abstraction subject to the whims of an Arbitrary God.

Univocity therefore produces voluntarism and paves the way for a false dialectic: God is either equal to the whole of creation or a more powerful, competing force within it. Deism is what results when man pushes this menacing God completely to the periphery. Only with transcendence—requiring the dynamic Analogy of Being—can free will, participation in the Rational Logos, and a natural good be maintained. 

In the 18th century, the influences of both Luther and Suárez coalesced in Immanuel Kant, the godfather of Modernism. He took Luther’s “black box” God and applied it universally. Man was confined to the phenomena of his mind and could not reach beyond its walls to any reality in itself. The whole universe became a black box. “Sapere aude!” (Dare to know!) proclaimed Kant—the Enlightenment’s rallying cry to cast off external authority and rely on autonomous reason. By anchoring morality inside the ego rather than on God-given law, Kant’s system catalyzed the rejection of objective divine revelation and the redefinition of good and evil: a tragic reprisal of man’s original sin in the Garden.

The “philosopher” identified in Pope St. Pius X’s anti-Modernist encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, refers primarily to Kant. While Kant believed he was elevating reason, his isolation of human reason from external reality detached man from objective truth and forced full reliance on autonomous will—sliding into the extreme voluntarism of blind faith and, in later philosophers, the reformulation of God and the World as a projection of human consciousness.

Catholic intellectuals in Germany and France in the late 19th and 20th centuries synthesized this modern philosophy with Catholicism to create panentheistic versions of the Faith. Twentieth-century descendants of this movement include Jesuits Karl Rahner and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose panentheism informs contemporary Jesuit eco-theology, apparent in Laudato Si’. Teilhard’s theology proposes a Christ who is the “Omega Point” of the developing cosmos. The unique incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth is replaced by Christogenesis, where all matter is evolving into the Cosmic Christ.

The dysfunction on the traditionalist side arose when this same degenerated Thomism collided with postrevolutionary France. Because of the trauma of the Revolution, French Catholics had understandably developed an attitude of fear and radical noncooperation with secular society. Reason, the false god of the Enlightenment, was demoted in favor of unthinking obedience to tradition—understood as a code of doctrines inaccessible to proof by reason, the same blind faith and voluntarism we saw arising in Luther and Kant.

The school was originally called French Traditionalism, and this ideology was condemned by a series of Roman decrees and, finally, by Vatican I’s Dei Filius. The Church labeled this traditionalist error “fideism,” the same label that St. Pius X applied to Kant’s Modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis.

Conditioned by voluntarism’s rejection of the Rational Logos in which all human beings naturally participate by analogy, later French integralists—including the figures that shaped the formation of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre—were susceptible to viewing tradition as a rigid external code that demands compliance and crushes its enemies rather than a set of divine principles that could transform secular society from within.

They supported L’Action Française, a far-right movement that demonized perceived enemies of Catholic monarchy such as Jews, Freemasons, immigrants, and Protestants. These enemies were easily conceived as fundamentally deficient—an echo of Jansenist total depravity—and lacking Thomism’s natural good. Pope Leo XIII attempted a correction with his ralliement policy, and Pope Pius XI condemned L’Action Française in 1926.

The movement was supported by many French Catholics as a pragmatic strategy to restore l’ancien régime.The New Catholic Encyclopedia notes a line of influence from French Traditionalism to L’Action Française to Fr. Henri Le Floch, who directed Lefebvre’s seminary formation and was dismissed as rector for vocal support of the group after its condemnation. Lefebvre never fully acknowledged the movement’s dark side—including its subversive and violent tactics, its sociopolitical naturalism, and its anti-Semitism which later fostered the Vichy regime’s complicity in the Holocaust.

While Lefebvre was a complex figure who was heroic in his zeal for the Faith and the Traditional Latin Mass, he was clearly influenced by this French counterrevolutionary lineage, especially in pinpointing recent external forces as the primary explanation for modern ills. The foundation was laid for a conspiratorial and Pharisaical worldview: an “us versus them” mentality and a persistent seeking for the speck in a neighbor’s eye rather than the plank in one’s own.

Contemporary traditionalists exhibit the same worldview when they are unable to find a natural good in secular society and demonize the “organized forces of naturalism”—a concept almost all SSPX and sedevacantist clergy have been exposed to, particularly through Lefebvre’s promotion of the conspiratorial worldview of Fr. Denis Fahey. Sedevacantism radicalizes this trajectory into a totalizing conspiracy, an “us versus everyone else” mentality. When all is illusion, lie, and malice, perhaps the earth is flat—as some believe.

In this worldview, grace competes with nature rather than grace superintending and perfecting nature. Grace repels nature just as oil repels water. Grace becomes just a “holy” part of the natural realm rather than transcending it entirely. Modernists, as the flip side of the voluntarist coin, tend to view the natural and supernatural orders as so intertwined that they become indistinguishable.

The fundamental error on both sides is a de-supernaturalization of reality—a betrayal of Thomism where God’s transcendent reality and goodness have disappeared.

In traditionalist naturalism, God resembles Luther’s Deus absconditus—a distant taskmaster waiting for man to fail in external conformity to His commands. This view is more apparent among sedevacantists due to their more profound rejection of reason. God as Arbitrary Sovereign Will commands inscrutable minutiae, and grace becomes a reflection of God’s favor toward man rather than a supernatural reality capable of transforming him interiorly. Catholic life degenerates into running a gauntlet. An all-consuming vigilance, external conformity to rules and rubrics, and fear of contamination by the depraved masses starve charity.

An example of voluntarism in 20th-century manuals is their focus on a definable boundary between venial and grave matter for sin, which tends to downplay the centrality of internal factors in mortal sin. A classic example is the definition of grave matter regarding sins against the third commandment. More than two hours of “servile” work on a Sunday is considered grave matter. This gives the impression of a God hiding in the bushes with a stopwatch waiting for the hapless individual to cross the timeline into eternal damnation. It also suggests that you could spend all day on Sunday catching up on work emails without dishonoring God. Garrigou-Lagrange laments turning minds into manuals and “substituting an artificial mechanism for the profound dynamism of the life of grace” in his Preface to The Three Ages of the Interior Life.

While well intentioned, this cookbook approach had already impoverished the practice of the Faith prior to Vatican II. Sedevacantism retains this mindset and adds the additional burdens of isolation and radical autonomy, so it is no surprise that it readily produces a firestorm of crippling insecurity and scrupulosity in its adherents.

The tragedy of any kind of voluntarism is that it leaves the soul mired in the natural plane. In an environment that does not exemplify natural participation in the Logos and its capacity for elevation by real, supernatural grace, the soul is hindered in its ability to receive or cultivate supernatural virtues.

In sedevacantist chapels, the voluntarism-derived scrupulosity is magnified by the sola traditio principle of private judgment. Many parishioners arrive in the chapel having dedicated countless angst-filled hours poring over interpretations of canon law and papal encyclicals. They scrutinize Mass rubrics for any deviation. One individual suggested that the new rite of ordination was invalid because the candidate’s vestments were not lifted in the traditionally prescribed way. Another suggested it was the elimination of the traditio instrumentorum that invalidates the new ordination rite.

In Modernist naturalism, voluntarism manifests as a primacy of the subjective human will, which is conflated with the will of God. Since we desire mercy with no sacrifice, God is redefined as a Bare Will that is Mercy Itself.  His mercy is thereby uncoupled from His justice—reducing “mercy” to a sentimental indulgence that affirms human desire rather than transforming human nature. This progressive voluntarism implies universal salvation, since God is locked into a Therapeutic Indulgent Will whose mode is to comply with the will of man.

The fallout of traditionalist naturalism was that it provided fodder for Modernists to make metaphysical misdiagnoses and to overreact by proposing a faith of sentimentality and good intentions. Traditionalists’ political and social naturalism was correctly identified by Modernists as a compromise of Catholic principles and a dead-end approach, causing them to reach for their own unsatisfactory solutions.

Luther’s collapse under voluntarism and subsequent formulation of permissive doctrines to combat it is analogous to the ongoing battle within the Church between traditionalist and Modernist naturalism. The crisis before and after Vatican II has resulted from a tug-of-war between these two flawed systems, which continue to exist in a toxic symbiosis. Reaction to Modernism drives souls into a traditionalist bunker, and traditionalist dysfunction breathes life into Modernism. The “diabolical disorientation” seen in the Church today reflects the ongoing competition between the two.

This Hegelian wrecking ball can be stopped only by transcending the false dialectic and rising above the chaos—in St. Thérèse’s elevator—to the center, which Aquinas noted as a place of virtue. The golden mean is a pinnacle of excellence between two valleys on either side—where God’s supernaturality actively sustains nature’s very existence and makes possible its redemption by grace.

Seeing that there is plenty of blame to go around is humbling, and it will hopefully enable the rebuilding of consensus around the Angelic Doctor that is necessary for the resolution of the crisis.

After proposing a metaphysical diagnosis of the problems I witnessed within sedevacantism, I was then motivated to establish a theological refutation based on magisterial teachings—the remedy enabling me to return to the Church. This remedy, as well as a summary pointing the way to a full healing of the crisis, will be tackled in Part III of this series.