By Reed Armstrong

This essay is written in reminiscence of the prophet Jeremiah whose warning to the people, priests and kings and princes of Judah went largely unheeded. (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

While much has been written concerning individual aspects or problems with this document, mainly concerning married priests, laymen and women leading liturgical services, the politicization of the Faith and some individual practices of the local tribes, little has been said about the actual theological underpinnings of the synod.

While Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has labeled  the  “Instrumentum” heretical, if not  apostasy, and Cardinal Gerhard Müller former  head of the  CDF as well as Athanasius   Schneider Auxiliary Bishop of Astana Kazakhstan have joined in  pointing out individual areas of concern, especially the topics of married priests and the role of women in the liturgy,  they do not. however, specify the root cause of the heresy.

In the following, I will present some facets of these underpinnings that deserve a deeper examination.

To start, one must look at the official statement of Cardinal Claudio Hummes as reported by Antonio Spadaro, SJ in the May 13th  2019  edition of La Civiltà Cattolica (italics R.A.):

“So, the risen Jesus Christ is the summit toward which we are all moving, and he is the model that gives a first revelation about how the path we are journeying will be. Humanity does not move in circles, without orientation and without sense. We have to walk. There is a real future. The risen Jesus Christ is the great transcendent point (Omega Point) toward which we walk. So integral ecology is the union of all this.”

“This is why I often say that there is a need to rewrite Christology: St. Paul had referred to this culminating point in a path that continues. Teilhard de Chardin in turn spoke about it in his studies on evolution. All theology and Christology, as well as the theology of the sacraments, are to be reread starting from this great light for which “all is interconnected, interrelated.”

It is Teilhard de Chardin, more than any other contemporary thinker who changed the course of Catholic theology.

Prior to Vatican II,  as presented in the definitive dogmatic constitution of Vatican I, Dei Filius: April 24, 1870,”Deus… est re et essentia a mundo distinctus, in se et ex se beatissimus, et super omnia quae praeter ipsum sunt et concipi possunt, ineffabiliter excelsus. (“God … is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world, of supreme beatitude in and from Himself,  except Himself and ineffably exalted above all things which exist, or are conceivable.) In an attempt to align contemporary religious thought with the then prevailing scientific theories of Darwinian evolution, Teilhard took it upon himself to invent what he considered a new and better religion.

     “What increasingly dominates my interests, is the effort to establish within myself and define around me, a new religion (call it a better Christianity; if you like) where the personal God ceases to be the great monolithic proprietor of the past to become the Soul of the World which the stage we have reached religiously and culturally calls for.” [i]  (emphasis added)

Teilhard’s “God” is no more nor less than  the “god” of Pantheism as described (and      rejected) by St.  Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors   attached to his allocution, Quanta Cura issued December 8, 1854:

There exists no Supreme Being, perfect in His wisdom and in His providence and distinct, all things are God and have the very substance of God. God is thus one and the same thing as the  world and consequently spirit is identified with matter, necessity with liberty, truth with falsehood, good with evil and justice with injustice….”

Teilhard was originally censured and exiled by his superiors in 1923 for questioning the doctrines of Original Sin and Eternal Damnation. In 1947, upon return from banishment in China, he was once again censured by the Holy Office,  Pope Pius XII having called his work a “cesspool of errors,”

Teilhard, through his denial of original sin and of the consequent need for redemption,  tried to inject Christ into his pantheism by naming him the “Cosmic “Omega Point,” Christ” or the “Alpha” and “Omega” of Revelations. He is an emanation of God infused into matter from the beginning,  evolving, was born into this world, died, rose from the dead (Physically? – unclear) and ascended, not to heaven, but to the “noosphere,” a spiritual level, encircling the earth, where all spirits contained in matter will eventually converge at the “Omega Point” where he awaits us, guiding us on with “unconditional love.” At the “Omega Point,” we, and the entire cosmos,  down to the lowliest atom,  will be divinized and “God” will be “All in all.”[ii] The quote was selectively picked from St. Paul’s First letter to the  Corinthians 15:28. Whether this “all in all” will be totally spiritual, as in Hinduism and other Eastern religions with which it shares similarities, (See reference further on) or whether, as others affirm, humans, animals and all matter existent  at the end of time,  become “transhuman,” filled with the transformative knowledge of the “noosphere”[iii] is unclear in the writings of Teilhard.

Teilhard began spreading his ideas among his fellow Jesuits at the French Theologate, La Forvière, in Lyon via unsigned mimeographed monographs. By the mid to late 1950s his theories were extolled by many, if not most, Jesuits including Karl Rahner, , Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, and Henri de Lubac, who wrote glowingly of Teilhard:  “We need not concern ourselves with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence. (sic.)”[iv]   By the time of opening  of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, the Society of Jesus had all but abandoned the Neo-Scholastic theology of Francisco Suarez  in favor of Teilhardian evolutionary “Cosmogenesis.”

This is not a “new and better Christianity,” but a negation of the Catholic Faith. Teilhard’s God, the “soul of the world” is identical with nature and consequently subject to change. Teilhard expounded in his book Human Energy: “As a direct consequence of the uniative process by which God is revealed to us, he in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us.” … “I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself”[v] [God] evolves, via ‘complexification’ and ‘convergence’ to his own perfection, immersed in matter.” “One is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other; … No spirit (not even God within the limits of our experience) exists, nor could structurally exist without an associated multiple, any more than a center can exist without its circle or circumference…. in a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit, all that exists is matter becoming spirit [God].”[vi]

Cardinal Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, an avowed follower of Teilhard, taking part in a ritual of worship of “Pachamama” the Earth Mother, in Argentina on November 29, 2014.

Cardinal Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, an avowed follower of Teilhard,  taking part in a ritual of worship of “Pachamama” the Earth Mother, in Argentina on November 29, 2014.[vii]

For Teilhard and his followers, God is as present in “Mother Earth”  as in the Eucharist.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day —I call before me the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity; those … who,… through their vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe in the progress of earthly reality and who today will again take up their impassioned pursuit of the light…. This is the material of my sacrifice, the only material you desire…. Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day … Lord make us one.”

This quote is taken from Teilhard’s “Mass on the World.[viii]

I would suggest that there is little or no resemblance between Teihard’s “mass” and the traditional Catholic Mass where the duly ordained priest, in Persona Christi offers bloodlessly the same sacrifice as Our Lord on Calvary in expiation for the sins of the world.

Or, in the recent words of Pope Francis:

La actitud eucarística ante el mundo y sus habitantes sabe adoptar el estado de don que cada ser vivo lleva dentro de sí”.[ix] (The  Eucharistic attitude before the world  and its inhabitants  is to know how to adopt the type of gift that each living being bears  within.)

Teilhard’s influence goes beyond the official Catholic world and is inextricably tied to the “New Age” movement in which he is considered a “patron saint” and is explicitly mentioned in the 2003 Vatican Encyclical, Jesus Christ  The Bearer of the Water of Life – A Christian reflection on the New Age.  (This encyclical should be read in its entirety) Adherents actually visit Teilhard’s grave  site  in Poughkeepsie, NY, especially at Halloween.

 

 

The “New Age”  movement  takes its roots from, among other sources, 17th century “Rosicrucianism”  (Rose – Cross) which sought to rebuild a pre-lapsarion (prior to the division of  good and evil) divinized world built on occult knowledge, or in the words of  19th century hermetic, diabolical[x] French author, Saint- Yves D’alveydre, “to bring man back by means of allegory to the glorious kingdom that he inhabited in his primitive estate.” This is, it appears, the aim of the Amazon synod.

Below  to the left is depicted a typical 17the century “Rosicrucian” diagram similar to the diagram drawn by Lutheran “mystic,” Jacob Boehme, who, not formally a Rosicrucian, presents pictorially  the same ideological premise:      “light and Dark, Good and Evil, are resolved in the all loving heart of Jesus.”

The “Georgia Guide Stones” commissioned by one, R. C. Christian, (pseudonym) and built in 1979 atop a hill in Elbert County, Georgia, are a manifestation of  Rosicrucian spirituality and politics. (The stones call for a reduction in population to less than a billion “to maintain a  perpetual balance with nature.”) Once again, one sees the similarity of goals put forth in the  Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazon Synod.

Although there is no apparent direct link between Teilhard and Freemasonry,  “the Craft,” many ideas of the occult Rosicrucian roots of Masonry are well established.

Image from Secret symbols of the Rosicrucians 1788 displays the two iconic pillars, J & B displayed in virtually every Masonic lodge

Masonic author Albert Pike (Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, 1859-1891) sets the record straight in his authoritative Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry. As Pike explains to the Apprentice Mason, “The pavement (of the Lodge), alternatively black and white, symbolizes the Good and Evil principles of the Egyptian and Persian creeds. It is the warfare between Michael[xi] (fig. 2) and Satan, Light and Darkness, Freedom and Despotism, Religious Liberty and the Arbitrary Dogmas of a Church [Roman Catholic] that thinks for its votaries and whose Pontiff claims to be infallible.” [xii] In the final chapter of this book, entitled “Prince of the Royal Secret,” Pike presents the resolution of this conflict: “The primary tradition of the single revelation has been preserved under the name of the Kabbalah.[xiii]…. The Evil is the Shadow of the Good and inseparable from it. The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence of the Divine Will or Power, and the result is Beauty or Harmony.”[xiv]

Ostensibly, the goal of Masonry is “to take good men and make them better.” In reality, however, the “secret” for the individual Freemason is to work out for himself the balance or harmony of good and evil in his own life to achieve his own “divine” perfection: “Man is a God in the Making.”[xv]

Collectively, the external goal of Masonry is for an emancipated mankind to rebuild “Eden,” without heed to the restrictive demands of the Creator and His established Church. The esoteric goal is to incorporate Lucifer (Satan) into the definition of the “Complete God” that includes both good and evil, or the fusion of opposites, the Gnostic Abraxas or Kabalistic Ayn Sof. [xvi]

In the words of Albert Pike\, the original Sovereign Grand Master of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Masonry:

1. ‘Illustrious’ Albert Pike 33°
Legendas XIX° ~ XXX°
Pg. 40 – 44.

“If the buckler of Satan did not stay the flight of Michael’s lance, the power of the Archangel would be lost in the void, or would necessarily display and manifest itself by an infinite destruction, directed from above to below.

“And if the foot of Michael did not arrest Satan in his ascent, Satan would go to dethrone God, or to lose himself in the abysses of height.

“Satan is then necessary to Michael, as the pedestal to the statue; and Michael to Satan, as the brake to the locomotive. “In analogical and universal dynamics we rest only on that which resists. “Wherefore, as we have said before, the Universe is balanced by two forces, which maintain it in equilibrium; and the force which attracts, and that which repels. This is the equilibrium of the mountain of gold, which the Gods on one side, and the Demons on the other, hold tied by the symbolic Serpent of India; and its scientific reality is demonstrated by the phenomena of Polarity, and by the universal law of Sympathies and Antipathies….”

(The “Binary God” of “good and evil” by Elephias Levi – note that the Serpent    encloses this abomination as does the emblem from Helena Blavatsky’s “Theosophical Society.”) The quotes above and below are taken from complete facsimile books downloadable from the internet.

           The Mysteries of Magic                                            The Secret Doctrine

 

‘Brother’Eliphas Levi  

 

“What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.” page 428

Sister Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 32°
Ancient and Accepted Primitive Rite
Grand Orient of France

“Lucifer represents..Life…Thought..Progress…Civilization…Liberty…Independence…Lucifer is the Logos…the Serpent, the Savior.” (pages 171, 225, 255 (Volume II))

“It is Satan who is the God of our planet and the only God.” pages 215, 216, 220, 245, 255, 533, (VI)

“The Celestial Virgin which thus becomes the Mother of Gods and Devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving beneficent Deity…but in antiquity and reality Lucifer or Luciferius is the name. Lucifer is divine and terrestial Light, ‘the Holy Ghost’ and “Satan’ at one and the same time.” page 539

This exposition of the “Binary God” is further espoused by the occult psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (who strongly influenced Leonardo Boff, one of the inspirers of the Amazon Synod’s working document):

“In our diagram, Christ and the devil appear as equal and opposite, thus conforming to the idea of the ‘adversary.’ This opposition means conflict to the last; and it is the task of humanity to endure this conflict until the time or turning-point is reached where good and evil begin to relativise themselves, to doubt themselves, and the cry is roused for a morality ‘beyond good and evil.” …”In the Age of Christianity and in the domain of trinitarian thinking such an idea is simply out of the question, because the conflict is too violent for evil to be assigned any other logical relation to the Trinity than that of an absolute opposite.”[xvii]

The pre-Vatican II Church knew the pernicious character of Freemasonry and denounced it for what it was and is. According to the 1917 Code of Canon Law, article #2335, to belong to a Freemasonic Lodge was grounds for automatic excommunication Latae Sententiae (the act itself bringing the penalty without formal accusation). Pope Leo XIII explained the Church’s position on Freemasonry:

“The race of man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, “through the envy of the devil,” separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ; and those who desire from their heart to be united with it, so as to gain salvation, must of necessity serve God and His only-begotten Son with their whole mind and with an entire will. The other is the kingdom of Satan, in whose possession and control are all whosoever follow the fatal example of their leader and of our first parents, those who refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and who have many aims of their own in contempt of God, and many aims also against God….. At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardor and assault. At this period, however, the partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons.”[xviii]

All of these religious systems – Teilhardism, New age, and Rosicrucian Freemasonry –  coincide with the Advaita  Vedanta [xix] (Monism – the unity of being) of Hinduism, which, according to Swami Vivekananda, posits three fundamental precepts:  1. That man’s real nature is divine. 2. If in this universe, there is any Reality, a Godhead, then the Godhead is omnipresent. If the Godhead is omnipresent, it must be within each one of us and within every creature and object. Therefore man, in his true nature, is God.  3. That it is the aim of man’s life on earth to unfold and manifest his Godhead, which is eternally existent in him, but hidden.

All in all they all fall under the general category of Gnosis or Gnosticism.

Gnosis, or knowledge, as understood in Gnostic religious systems, does not refer to rational understanding of natural or supernatural reality, but “involves an awareness through illumination, intuition, initiation or induced trance that the human spirit is consubstantial with the divine ground of being.”

Let us consider here the Vatican’s “climate change” light show: The presentation opens and closes with an “eclipse” or conjunction of the Sun (M) and the Moon(F), an occult reference to the union of opposites, of Male and Female elements, as seen in the Rosicrucian/Masonic  pillars  J & B  shown above, along with matter and spirit, Good and Evil.

[xx]

On December 8th 2015, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, there occurred a “paradigm shift” in the focus of Catholic theology in the presentation of a projected light show on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica. No longer was it the role of the Church to guide souls to heaven via sacramental incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ, but the new role was to “Save the planet, our common home.” Thus “environmentalism” became the new world religion based on the false science of man made climate change.

That this environmentalism is a false science can be seen from the authoritative NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) graph. It becomes obvious that the infamous “Mann Hockey stick” made famous by Al Gore in his doomsday predictions (seen lower right of the graph) is well below the mean temperature changes of centuries and millennia.

On the political level, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy the existing capitalist economic order.

She said: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution…. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

The Amazon document proposed by Pope Francis, as pointed out above, it is not simply the imposition of a Socialist economic order, but a call for what it calls, “Integral Ecology.”

INTEGRAL ECOLOGY as explained  in Pope Francis’s Encyclical Laudato Si’ (which was highly influenced by Leonardo Boff): “When we speak of the “environment,” what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature, and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves, or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it, and thus in constant interaction with it. … We are faced, not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis, which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and, at the same time, protecting nature (§139).”

The most disturbing element of the Instrumentum  Laboris (39) is an attitude that effectively teaches that Christianity is not the only salvific religion: “There is a broad and essential arena of dialogue between the Amazon’s spiritualities, creeds and religions that requires an approach of the heart to the different cultures. Respect for this space does not mean relativizing one’s own convictions, but recognizing other avenues / pathways that seek to decipher the inexhaustible mystery of God. Insincere openness to the other, just like a corporatist attitude, that reserve salvation exclusively for one’s own creed, are destructive of that very creed. ” Much of the theology contained in the Instrumentum Laboris is allegedly based on the work of the Brazilian Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff.

Let us consider here an article on this matter written by Professor Roberto de Mattei. He shows that in Boff’s book, The Cry of the Earth and the  Cry of the Poor, he refers to Teilhard de Chardin, who “saw in the Omega point the great Force of attraction which calls the universe to reach its supreme height in the theo-sphere.” Boff explains, “We are not talking about placing God and the world each facing each other, as was classically done, but rather of placing God within the process of the world and considering the world within the process of God. “Nature is the result of a long cosmic process. It is cosmogenesis.” According to Boff, the majority of the peoples of South America were predominantly panentheist –  panentheism is the theological position which maintains that God is immanent in the universe but at the same time transcends it – as were the ancient cultures of Southeast Asia. “The universe in cosmogenesis invites us to live the experience that underlies panentheism: in every slightest manifestation of being, in every movement, in every expression of life, of intelligence and of love, we find ourselves dealing with the Mystery of the universe in progress (cosmogenetic process).” Boff  is a disciple of Karl Rahner S.J.,  one of the most liberal of the Conciliar theologians who is not far behind Teilhard. As quoted by Bernhard Lakebrink in his book, Die Warheit in Bedrängnis, “God and the grace of Christ are in all things, as the secret essence of each reality…. He who accepts his own existence, and thereby his humanity, even though he doesn’t know it, says yes to Christ.” [xxi] Boff is also a disciple of Karl Jung who is cited above. [xxii]

However, as St. Paul clearly states in 1 Corinthians 10-21, “You cannot drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons, you can not partake of the table of the Lord and the table of the demons.”

As we have shown above, this is exactly what the Freemasons, following the Kaballah,  propose: a harmonious balance of Good and Evil.

As do the Gnostics, the Kabbalah places the origin of evil as belonging to the essential nature of the “unknowable god beyond God” – the unlimited Ayn Sof.

Joseph Dan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem explains that “the Kaballah often presented the universe as a battleground between satanic divine powers and good divine powers, drawing a parallel world of ‘divine emanations of the left’ which are the enemies of God, yet they are divine in the full sense of the term.” [xxiii]

A further  explanation or overview of Kabbalah is given by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges who tells us that, according to the Kabbalah, “Evil is in the Variety, but variety is necessary for the world…. It is in the doctrine of the Greeks called apokatastasis,; that all creatures, including Cain and the Devil, will return, at the end of great transmigrations, to be mingled again with the Divinity from which they once emerged.”[xxiv]

While the general thrust of the Synod’s working document follows the Teilhardian theology – that is to say, that  the entire cosmos is evolving toward divine perfection drawn on by the “unconditional love” of Jesus at the “Omega Point” – one cannot rule out the influence of Freemasonry. Or: to put it another way: while we cannot prove any direct influence of freemasonry on the Amazon Synod’s working document, we can state that it is permeated by ideas that originally stemmed from Freemasonry.

In October of 1917, St. Maximillian Kolbe witnessed a group of Freemasons marching in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United Grand Lodge, carrying banners  showing Satan overcoming  St. Michael while chanting: “Satan will rule in the Vatican and the Pope “will be his lackey.”

Commemorative medal to celebrate 7 years of Pope Francis pontificate and the implementation of the Amazon Synod.

 

[i]                   Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Léontine Zanta, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 114 (letter dated 26 January 1936).

[ii]                      [ii]  “What we call inorganic matter is certainly animate in its own way … Atoms, electrons, elementary particles … must have a spark of spirit.” (Science and Christ, written in the 1920s, published in English in 1968)

[iii]                https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/prisco20090120

[iv]              [iv]     Henri Cardinal de Lubac, S.J.  – The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin    ( New York: Image Books (1967) De Lubac is  generally considered the main influence on the Vatican II document, the Church in the Modern World, Guadiam et spes ) [iv]. De Lubac, first censured by Pope Pius XII, went on to named a Cardinal  by Pope John Paul II in 1983.

[v]               [v]  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,  The Heart of Matter, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1978)  p. 54

[vi]      [vi]  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1969),  pp. 57, 162. Emphasis added.

[vii]               -cardinal-ravasi-culte-pacha-mama-terre-m http://reinformation.tv/forum-gentils ere-39733/

[viii]             “Mass on the World” by Teilhard de Chardin

[ix]                https://www.aciprensa.com/noticias/la-destruccion-de-la-amazonia-tendra-consecuencias-a-nivel-planetario-advierte-el-papa-43871?utm_source=boletin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=noticias_del_dia

[x]               … Quant à toi, Lucifer, astre tombé des deux, Splendeur Intelligente aux ténèbres jetée, Ange qui portes haut la colère indoptée, Et gonfles tous les seins de cris séditieux, …On y soufre, il est vrai; l’on jouit quand même puisqu ‘on y peut bave sa bile, O Lucifer, Mon bourreau de demain, je t’honore, je t’aime. (“… As for you Lucifer, star fallen from the sky, Intelligent Splendor thrown into darkness, Angel who holds on high the untamed rage, Breast inflated with seditious cries, One suffers there, it is true, One enjoys it just as well, as there that one may slobber out one’s bile, O Lucifer, my executioner of tomorrow, … I honor and love you.”)(16)

[xi]              The angel Michael is, for Freemasons, the “planetary angel of the Sun,” a solar being, ruler of the “Cosmic Fire,” dedicated to the expansion of consciousness and freedom. David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of our Nation’s Capital: The Masons and the building of Washington, DC (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 30.

[xii]             Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, p. 14

[xiii]             Iibid, 844

[xiv]             Ibid. 846. Emphasis added.

[xv]             Manly P. Hall, 33° The Lost Keys of Free Masonry (Richmond: Mason Publishing and Masonic Supply Co., 1976). p. 65

[xvi]             As do the Gnostics, the Kabbalah places the origin of evil as belonging to the essential nature of the “unknowable god beyond God” – the unlimited Ayn Sof.  An interesting explanation or overview of Kabbalah is given by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges who tells us that, according to the Kabbalah, “Evil is in the Variety, but variety is necessary for the world…. It is in the doctrine of the Greeks called apokatastasis,; that all creatures, including Cain and the Devil, will return, at the end of great transmigrations, to be mingled again with the Divinity from which they once emerged.” Seven Nights (New York, New Directions, 1984) Cited in The University Bookman, Ed. Russell Kirk, Winter 1987 p. 15

[xvii]        Carl Gustav Jung, Zur Psychologie der Trinitätslehre, translated in Vol. 11, 2nd ed. Of his Complete Works (Princeton University Press, 1969,  p. 174

[xviii]       Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884. article 1.

[xix]            Swami Vivekananda, His Gospel of Man Making, revised and enlarged edition, published by Swami Jyotirmiananda, Chennai, August, 2000 for the UN “Millenium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders,” New York, Aug. 28-31, 2000, New York, NY, USA

[xx]             Vatican ‘climate change’ light show: More than meets the eye? | News | LifeSite

[xxi]              Quoted in,  Bernhard. Lakebrink, Die Warheit in Bedrängnis (Stein am Rhein: Christiana-Verlag, 1986), p. 23. As cited by  30 Days, No. 4, 1993 p. 61

[xxii]            https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/48366.Leonardo_Boff

[xxiii]           Joseph Dan, “Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics,” an interview with the author by Jewish Book News (The Jewish Book Club, Allentown, PA:), May 9, 1996, p. 27

[xxiv]           Seven Nights (New York, New Directions, 1984). Cited in The University Bookman, Ed. Russell Kirk, Winter 1987, p. 15

 

About the Author

Reed Armstrong is a Catholic artist (sculptor) living in Front Royal, VA whose work is displayed in churches, public spaces and private collections both here and abroad. He is also a writer and lecturer on religion and art, often with a focus on occult, or diabolical influences on art starting in the Renaissance and proliferating in the 19th and 20th centuries. His writings have appeared in Crisis Magazine, Communio, Latin Mass and the Journal of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, among others. Some of these essays, along with examples of his sculptural endeavors, may be found on his website www.agdei.com

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