In his Smoke of Satan" homily, Paul VI warned that those who do
not think with the mind of the Church may be exposed to “the influence of ‘the
mystery of iniquity” in evidence when “the spirit of the Gospel is watered down
or rejected…” The reason behind this disregard of the authority of the
documents of divine revelation was the neomodernists'’ assimilation of the
principles of modernity. Fr. Jonathan Robinson has shown how
various Enlightenment themes have played a role in the formation of the modern
consciousness as it has impinged most directly on the Church. To
cite one example of this, Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar criticized the
Enlightenment’s understanding of religion in an analysis of its influence on
Karl. Rahner’s anthropocentric theology:
The Enlightenment was
the change from a theocentric to an anthropocentric viewpoint; for religion . .
. this means the change from a positive historical religion to a religion valid
for man in general, who is essentially religious. . . . Everywhere in the world
and in history, God's self-communication takes place in the Holy Spirit offered
to every human being, a self-communication which itself already possesses as
such the character of a revelation of truth and which finds in Jesus Christ,
crucified and risen, only its full historical tangibility. Positive dogmas,
based on history, are transcendentally outlined in human nature. . . . The
better the Enlightenment understands its own program, the less it will seek
this absolute in contingent historical facts rather than in the inner
enforcement of truth in the subject. This also applies to the Church, which
wants to make the transposition of Christian faith into today's modes of
understanding her business. As a necessary consequence, there must ensue a
shift of accent from the objective dignity of truth in itself to recognition of
and respect for the dignity of the subjective awareness of truth.
