A Twilight of the Catholic Idols?

The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet, and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them.
—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, I.38

Friedrich Nietzsche, in the preface of his 1889 book The Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer writes, “There are more idols than realities in the world.” How to tell the difference between an idol and reality? We can apply the meaning “idol” to what has been called “ideology” to show how political programs are not the Gospel, and how neither Traditionalism nor Progressivism are Catholicism.

For the intellect, ideology, perhaps more than anything else, is what obstructs a clear pathway for reality to reveal itself to conscious thought. To confuse divinity for a demon is the worst form of treachery. And to mistake the industrial idol of ideology for the dialogical icon of truth is to think violently like a hammer, since everything contrary to the ideological stronghold is perceived as a nail. The idol of ideology stifles all genuine dialogue because, in ideology, truth (aletheia) is conflated with opinion (doxa) absent any possible doxology to the divine. In the idol of ideology, the infinite glory (doxa) of the Lord is exchanged for the finite power (ischys) of the sword. When might becomes right, truth is treated as a manipulable tool for persuasion and practical action rather than as a guiding light for the intellect and the ripe fruit of theoretical contemplation.

Ideology must be unmasked and deconstructed in order for truth to show itself clearly to consciousness that is disinterested to the degree that it has been divested of pretentiousness, duplicity, sophism, and self-interest. However, exposing and identifying one’s own ideological assumptions is as difficult as confessing one’s own sins. Ideology is reductionism, and Catholic philosophy, as a steadfast thinking toward the whole, is committed to reducing every reductionism so that the whole would be set free from the idolatry of its legion parts. For the reductionisms of ideology to be attenuated and set aside, it is necessary to bracket the unwarranted brackets placed upon reality by the myopic tendencies of ideology. By reducing the reductionisms of ideology, truth is permitted to give itself once again to docile conscious perception.

What Is Ideology?

Is it not impossible for human thought to move beyond ideology? What is ideology after all, and why is it a problem for philosophy and, moreover, theology? Polish philosopher and political theorist W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz defines ideology as what “represents a limited, often dogmatic, partisan worldview that is intended to persuade and manipulate political actors. The chief motive behind ideologies is not really to search for truth, but to achieve definite goals. In them, political action overcomes rational investigation.”[1] If political action overcomes rational investigation, the very standards of rationality are swept out to sea by the undertow of self-interest incarnate as impulsive activism. Rational discourse is traded for sound bites and sensationalism. The idol of ideology asks questions with the answers it already has. The questions it asks are only rhetorical devices to advance its progress by holding the accused—the ideological other—hostage with neither time permitted nor courteous civility granted to respond.

Ideology abbreviates rational thought for the sake of expedient political action. Ideology oversimplifies, falsifying complex realities. An elevation of praxis above theory in the name of self-interest. How can we sidestep “the fact that interest is inevitably reflected in all thought,” as well as the raring “complexes of ideas which tend to generate activities toward changes of the prevailing order”?[2] In our era, we are witnessing a general distrust both of the validity of ideas and of the very motives of those who assert them. “This situation is aggravated by a war of each against all in the intellectual arena where personal self-aggrandizement rather than truth has come to be the coveted prize.” Likewise, “increased secularization of life, sharpened social antagonisms and the accentuation of the spirit of personal competition have permeated regions which were once thought to be wholly under the reign of the disinterested and objective search for truth.”[3] Is it not often the case that “the act comes before the thought,” and that “there is no value apart from interest and no objectivity apart from agreement” within what Karl Mannheim calls “the sociology of knowledge”?[4]

Social Pathology

Relational enmity exploits what has become the democratization of ideas.[5] Social fragmentation, beginning with the gradual disintegration of the nuclear family, has brought about an unprecedented sociopathic dilemma, and “when the bases of unified collective action begin to weaken, the social structure tends to break and to produce a condition which Emile Durkheim has termed anomie, by which he means a situation which might be described as a sort of social emptiness or void.” In daily living, we are met with a maelstrom of “phantom publics” that are unwilling to listen to the political other and readapt to new experiences—an “élan politique.”[6]

With this sociopathic condition of anomie comes a perpetual “vague insecurity and uncertainty” that haunts epistemological stability.[7] Ideology works its spell by taking advantage of the precariousness of social life, promising invariability in a world saturated with variables. As a network of “sources of error,” ideology woos its adherent by liquidating truth in exchange for a contentious sense of confident certitude, with the part masquerading as the whole.[8] Even more fearful than anomie is the fear of death. Ideology serves as a diversion from the fear of death— death understood as annihilation of the self—to the degree that the self participates in a transcendent sociality of the crowd that appears to live on even if one or some of its members die.[9]

The effervescent passion of ideology overcomes the humiliating passion of suffering and death. Ideology, therefore, is a welcome accomplice for defeating death through forgetfulness of its imminence and inevitability. Why be afraid of death if it can be swallowed up by ideological oblivion? If ideology is characterized as “an anti-God state of mind,” perhaps first it should be regarded as an anti-death state of mind. Is not the dream of the conservative status quo to find itself to be so self-sufficient that it need not worry about impending death? Is not the dream of the Marxist utopia to discover a consummate heaven on earth so that there would be no need to go looking for a heaven beyond earth? In either case, ideology parades as a panacean idol.

In the ideological idol, we observe “the gaze gazing at itself gazing.”[10] Ideology ratifies its position simply by thinking of it. It is not interested in dialogue. It is not interested in being informed any further. It is not interested in learning something that it does not already claim to know. Ideology is precisely a self who is not interested in any other besides the self, a collective that regards itself to be complete and sufficient unto itself. An ideologue proves himself right before he even speaks, let alone before he allows the other to speak. An ideologue listens with his own mouth and thereby disqualifies the possibility of learning something new—perhaps even learning something that contests what he already thought to be true. For an ideologue, knowledge is not passive in relation to truth but rather the ideologue’s so-called “knowledge” constructs “truth” as it goes.

Ideology in the Polis and in the Pews

It may very well be that the door separating ideology from truth is locked from the inside. Seeking a way out, may we suggest the following delineations that help to define the universal ideological divide:

Ideology of the Left	Ideology of the Right
Liberal	Conservative
Socialism	Capitalism
Communism	Fascism
Change	Tradition
Future	Past
New	Old
Heterogeneity	Homogeneity
Diversity	Unity
Many	One
Pluriformity	Uniformity
Revolution	Classism
Deconstruction	Normativity
Otherness	Sameness
Atheism	Theism
Equality	Privilege
Solidarity	Subsidiarity
Political Idealism	Political Realism
Auspiciousness	Suspicion
Internationalism	Nationalism
Disaffection	Patriotism
Particularism	Universalism
Inclusivism	Exclusivism

Why are there such fierce fault lines between ideological poles? Why can’t we all just get along and renounce the idol of ideology? Why must life always devolve into a win-lose scenario—a zero-sum game—in which every collaborative activity is always already politicized? Is ideology not but a foil to secure advantage for the self over and against the other who perpetually poses as an inconvenient threat to my ownmost self-interest? Inasmuch as “the collective unconscious” threatens the objectivity of rational values, we need a “sociological view regarding knowledge” that “inevitably carries with it the gradual uncovering of the irrational foundation of rational knowledge.”[11]

Karl Mannheim draws the distinction between the Ideology of the Right, or Tribalism, on the one hand, and the Ideology of the Left, or Utopia, on the other. In the Ideology of the Right, “ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination.” Whereas in the Ideology of the Left, “certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it.”[12] Both ideological attitudes hide certain aspects of reality.

“Ideologies exist, and probably always will exist.”[13] Etiologically, ideologies emerge from each of our own peculiar “blessed rage for order.”[14] Ideologies help us to simplify the daunting complexity of reality into manageable sets of values that mirror our respective temperaments, backgrounds, and “life-situations.”[15] Ideologies help us to find an anchor of identity in a sea of difference. Nevertheless, there remains the necessary conversion away from ideology, for the sake of objective truth and social and ecclesial unity.
What appears most menacing within the evolution of culture today is the replacement of metaphysics, that perennial thinking-toward-the-whole, with pragmatism, that novel thinking-toward-the-part: “Pragmatism is not itself an ideology, but rather the philosophical foundation of ideology.”[16] Pragmatism is the root of ideology inasmuch as “the chief motive behind ideologies is not really to search for truth, but to achieve definite goals.”[17] As a purely pragmatic worldview, “ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers . . . the commitment to the consequences of ideas,” wherein “ideas are weapons.”[18] Ideology foments around the extremities of practical thought. Ideology functions anonymously, apart from face and name, “taking place in a context which is colored by values and collective-unconscious, volitional impulses.”[19]

Conceding that pragmatism is the taproot of ideology, “for the ideologue, truth arises in action, and meaning is given to experience by the ‘transforming moment,’” in which the ideologue “comes alive not in contemplation, but in ‘the deed.’”[20] As absolute pragmatism, ideology is forgetful of detached political theory in favor of self-interested practical political persuasion. The power of pragmatism and the exigencies of praxis arouse an unquenchable emotional current in ideology’s practitioners: “what gives ideology its force is its passion. . . . One might say, in fact, the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion.”[21] Its affective effectiveness exposes the wiliness of ideology and its imperium to hijack even religion to cooperate in the accomplishment of its zealous purposes.

Ideologies manifest themselves in the Church as well as in the polis. Ideologies are diabolical phenomena insofar as they create divisions and factions by eclipsing and fragmenting the unified coherence of truth. The Church then, as the standard of truth at once rational and revealed, is the premier venue for the coercive force of ideologies to manipulate truth for practical achievement. The Church is precisely where “Satan masquerades as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his ministers also masquerade as ministers of righteousness” (2 Cor 11:14-15).

On one hand, those who make idols of doctrines are fundamentalist ideologues. As Pope Francis puts it, “Rather than offering the healing power of grace and the light of the Gospel message, some would ‘indoctrinate’ that message, turning it into ‘dead stones to be hurled at others.’”[22] On the other hand, those who relativize or disregard doctrines are nihilist ideologues. Pope Francis likewise writes, “The solution is not relativism. Under the guise of tolerance, relativism ultimately leaves the interpretation of moral values to those in power, to be defined as they see fit.”[23]

Today, and admittedly in every generation, the Catholic Church is bedeviled by bitter sectarianism that would sharply divide the ecclesiological Right (traditionalism) from the ecclesiological Left (progressivism).[24] Either ideological brand reduces Catholicism (kata, “according to,” holos, “the whole”) to a truncated dogmatism that emerges to the degree that the part is confused for the whole.[25] In this manner, “the irrational foundation of rational knowledge” has poisoned even the reception and communication of divine revelation, and ressourcement alone cannot escape the fierce competition of ideological camps.

Traditionalism: The Ideology of the Right

In order to grant amnesty before a guilty conscience strong-armed by ideological influence in a religious cast, it is necessary to expose the two primary ecclesial ideologies, namely, Traditionalism (Ideology of the Right) and Progressivism (Ideology of the Left). First, let us consider the peculiar features of Traditionalism. Every ideology “seeks not only to be in the right but also to demolish the basis of its opponent’s social and intellectual existence.”[26] Through a perfunctory demonizing of the opposite ideological enemy by enlisting a litany of derogatory and defamatory epithets in reference to the alien other, the traditionalist (or conservative) position thinks within its self-defined echo-chamber only according to “the sort of knowledge giving practical control.”[27] Lacking any notion of utopia, because it has already achieved it, the conservative mentality “has no predisposition towards theorizing” since “it is in its very structure completely in harmony with the reality which, for the time being, it has mastered.”[28] Traditionalists tend not to be self-aware or globally aware, failing to realize that the universe is actually much more saturating and expansive than they can wrap their minds around all at once.

Traditionalists claim to have a monopoly on the living Tradition of the Church, all the while reducing its dynamism and the organic development of doctrine to a static concept frozen once and for all in a romanticized past—a golden time at which everything was the way it should be. And yet it is precisely this idealized and absolutized past that has become the present reality that they have mastered “by proceeding to label some particular limited viewpoint (usually one’s own) as supra-partisan and authoritative,” landing in “a certain ‘definition of the situation,’” on guard against any kikenshiso (“dangerous thoughts”) that would upset its status-quo-ante prerogative of privilege (“the way things used to be”).[29]

The traditionalist ideologue lacks necessary self-awareness of his own deficiencies and blind-spots largely due to “the unconscious collective motivations” which always guide the direction of ideological thought.[30] To quote Francis Bacon, human understanding has the tendency to deny evidence that proves its current understanding to be in error “rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusion . . . for man always believes more readily that which he prefers.”[31] Traditionalists tend to conflate objective orthodoxy with subjective preference, especially in the domain of liturgy, falling prey to exclusionary unwarranted dogmatisms and sectarian viewpoints. Ideology prefers to appear to be in the right than to be right.[32] The ecclesial Ideology of the Right runs with a hermeneutic of suspicion vis-à-vis the ecclesial Ideology of the Left. Conspiracy theories abound as a means to scapegoat the ideological other as the cause of all ecclesial ills and imbalances.[33]

For example, during the pontificate of Pope Francis, traditionalists have attempted to put the teaching and governing authority of the Church in competition with itself: Trent vs. Vatican II, Pope Saint Pius X vs. Pope Francis, the extraordinary form of the Latin liturgical rite vs. the postconciliar ordinary form of the Latin liturgical rite (rhetorically dubbed the “Novus Ordo”), Saint Thomas Aquinas vs. every theologian who has written since the year 1274 and has not merely aped the Angelic Doctor, and so on. This pitting of one council against another or one magisterial document against another or one pope against another only serves to undermine the authority to which the traditionalist argument incompletely and incoherently appeals. Even more shocking is when the traditionalist acts as if he knows better than the ecumenical council, knows better than the pope, and seems to pick and choose those magisterial texts that are authoritative and those that are not. This phenomenon points to the pretentious authoritative autonomy of the ideology over and against the unified, global, cohesive and infallible magisterial reality of the Church.

Traditionalist attitudes that desire to co-opt Aquinas as their chief representative theologian, as if he exemplifies monolithic and homogeneous thinking, sadly have not read enough of his actual work to know that he is paradigmatic of Catholic theology precisely because his thought is dialogical and cosmopolitan, serving well the aggregate exigencies of fidelity to truth as the whole. This is to say that Saint Thomas’ thinking is dialogical and cosmopolitan precisely because this is what is demanded by truth and the Catholic conjunction et (“and”).

What is most true to truth is a thought process that remains in dialogue with the world. We need only recall several of Saint Thomas’ non-Christian interlocutors that bear witness to his Catholic genius: Moses Maimonides (Jewish), Avicenna (Muslim), Averroes (Muslim), and Aristotle (Greek pagan), as examples. Traditionalism, precisely as an Ideology of the Right, undermines the very notion of Catholicism—that perennial thinking toward the whole through faith and reason—by betraying the living Tradition of the Church and the polyphony of theological traditions within the Tradition, as well as turning its back on an unwavering commitment to the sincerity of living conversation as the necessary condition of possibility for encountering the personalism of truth.

Progressivism: The Ideology of the Left

Having uncloaked several of the defining features of Traditionalism, let us consider next the ecclesial Ideology of the Left, namely, Progressivism. Progressivism involves a reductionism opposite that of the traditionalists. Progressivism tends to reduce all religious concepts and categories to sociological, anthropological, psychological, political, or cultural ones—thus the recurring error of intersectionality, as if all hermeneutics could be consolidated to socio-political axes and analyses.

As Mannheim admits, progressives (if they are not at once Marxists) have a particular utopian vision in mind that history and progress await. When it comes to ecclesiology, progressives tend to aim most of their darts at clericalism, institutionalism, biblical and doctrinal fundamentalism, moralism, and, above all, Traditionalism. They are interested in acting as agents of change to overturn oppressive power structures, economic disparities, and infractions against common human rights. They fixate on the new while renouncing the old. They envision a Church that is so open and inclusive to new ideas that perennial philosophy and the stability of doctrine are relativized to the point of evanescence and nonrecognition. Because they conflate identity and difference, progressives champion a disunified diversity that amounts to a fragmented collective of divisive factions. Rooted in class struggle and the revolt of the repressed, Progressivism champions the cause of the vanguard of the proletariat by making it an ideological absolute. Progressivism fires all of its ammo at hegemonic structures of power that privilege the social status of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, whether in the hierarchical Church or in the stratified polis. The contextual narratives of marginalized groups become the Gospel, with Jesus as their human (and not divine) spokesperson. In Progressivism, every meaningful idea becomes a new political campaign, lobbying public opinion in the direction of collective action that disenthrones the dominant and prestigious elite who never could withstand the tide of the manic masses of people become machine or the violent and mechanical mob mentality. Progressivism is sustained by the utopian vision of the equality of diversity ironically become sameness. Differences are exalted temporarily only to be eliminated in the end. Ecclesiologically, clericalism is opposed by laicism and a gradual process of declericalization. The result is already evident in the radical reform movements of Protestant Christianity in which the process of desacralization has achieved its goal in the secular ecclesia that has been called out of the sacred to worship the profane. Opposed to the puritan traditionalist obsession of demarcating between the sacred and the secular in order to hallow the hegemony, Progressivism secularizes the sacred in order to baptize brokenness, thereby normalizing fragmentation, anonymity, and depersonalism.

Extremes Meet

In Book XVI of his Conferences, when promoting the via media of virtuous living, John Cassian writes that extremes meet (akrotetes isotetes). Thomas Aquinas expresses a similar notion in his Summa theologiae when he writes that “no virtue resides in extremes” (nulla virtus est in extremis).[34] In the disoriented orientation of ideology, extremes meet. The secularization of the sacred can be witnessed both in the far Left and in the far Right, just as the homogenization of difference can be witnessed both in the far Right and in the far Left. Where the transcendence of God goes absent, the hyper-immanence of the secular becomes pedantic, even in so-called sacred spaces of worship.

Ultimately, the essence of ecclesial ideology is the phenomenon of conflating one’s ecclesiological outlook with an earthbound secular hermeneutic of the Ideology of the Right (Traditionalism) or the Ideology of the Left (Progressivism). In either case, God has nothing left to do among us, since we have assumed all tasks to ourselves alone. The idols of ideology are many and varied, but, at some point, their faces all look the same. Ideological extremes meet when the other-than-the-self is obliterated. In ideology, “the proximity of the idol masks and marks the flight of the divine, and of the separation that authenticates it,” yet “the confrontation with the ‘living’ God, a terrible thing except for the one who happily ignores it, follows the collapse of the idols.”[35] When ideology infiltrates the Church, the living God is nowhere to be found. Truth has been traded for idolatrous certainty, suspicion, and “spiritual worldliness.”[36]

Even though I would certify that Christ is the very meeting place of fact and value, I cannot help but blush before the accusation that my Christ is at once my own ideological idol and halo. How am I to renounce the near occasion of ideological idolatry, especially when I suspect that my own object of worship is a reification of my disguised predilection for innocent self-affection? Is it possible to renounce both the Ideology of the Right and the Ideology of the Left, rendering oneself homeless and without belonging in the ever-present ideological wars of the world that even creep into the Church?

The Royal Color Purple

Catholicism bleeds the royal color Purple, neither exclusively Blue (Ideology of the Left) nor exclusively Red (Ideology of the Right), because both Blue and Red. Catholicism is neither liberal nor conservative because it is both. Catholicism is both liberal and conservative because it is neither exclusively liberal nor exclusively conservative. Catholicism transcends the dichotomy between liberal and conservative because it is concerned with the whole and not the part; it is committed to the communio and not to the party. Catholicism need not be qualified by any adjective since all predication is contained within its all-encompassing concept. Jesus is the thorn in the side of both sides of the ideological divide. Why political ideologies and parties get certain issues incredibly wrong is because, as ideologies, they compromise the integrity of the whole for the idolatry of the part, terminating the irreducible otherness of the other in the name of the self-interested self.

By considering the often unnamed definition of ideology, as well as its subtle genealogy, we are able to unmask the sinister strongholds of the collective unconscious that function to accomplish the feverish urgency of the pragmatic. Renouncing the idolatrous totalitarianisms of Traditionalism and Progressivism, wherein extremes meet in the most radical reductionisms of the whole, Church and society breathe again according to the synodal harmony of mutual and missionary peregrination toward definitive truth and the common good. When “life feels like a fight . . . why not be the Happy Warrior willing to listen to all, struggle with and for all, help all to hear other voices than the self?”[37]

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