Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.
[‘Nonage’ is the immature inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance].
He continues: “This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” — Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?(3)
Here Kant lays out the plan, the “daring” emergence from thousands of years of knowledge, knowledge both received and conceived, to begin the project of building a New World from the ground up without the “tutors” and “guardians,” i.e., specifically without Christendom’s priests, philosophers and authorities of the past in order to emerge into the wholly New.
“Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage, they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man’s value and of his duty to think for himself…This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom–and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.”
As if none had ever heard of or employed reason before, and as if his New World would not impose its own authoritative tutors and guardians, backed up by forces the likes of which has never been seen in human history.
It all happened more slowly on this side of the Atlantic, but to the same ends. The “Novus Ordo Seclorum” which we see etched on every dollar bill today was underway all over the West after 1776. Here was a new, secular, syncretistic and powerful messianism set in ideological opposition to two thousand years of Christianity. The American Founders were more sophisticated in the weaponization of deception than the French. They knew how to wait on “progress” until the formidable opposition (all those Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics and others) slowly weakened over time under the pressure of incessant propaganda.
The licentious Marquis de Sade was one of the prophets. A false rationalism and specious revaluation of “Science” was substituted for genuine hard science, Christian revelation, metaphysics and the teaching of every moral precept. A new gospel was announced to all humankind, where “human rights” and “equality” slowly eclipsed traditional human obligations.
Today, a phenomenaly licentious and propagandistic media is the Revolution’s handmaid and the main means of indoctrination, though Kant, a Republican, opposed “democracy” – “which, in that era, meant direct democracy. He believed that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He wrote, “…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which “all” decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, “all”, who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.” [Wikipedia]
Futurism. A new transhuman view of “progress” was superimposed over all previous certainties and institutions. The Future is now to be heralded in glorious Utopian terms and concepts. Those who do not agree may be sanctioned, targeted, or worse, often at first in subtle ways.
The Final Revolution
“…the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” — Treaty of Tripoli, President George Washington
The New Man today collectively seeks to act as God (Gen.3:5), the New lawgiver, the Creator and Parent of all new values, now and into the Future. The goddess Reason, per French Revolution propaganda, is the symbol which embodies, participates in, the sign to which reason points. And all reason in the end points to Man according to the new revolutionary ideology.
Evil, however, is, in Scripture, Unnatural opposition to the Creator, to His Commandments, to creation’s natural and moral order and laws; and today the spiritual war extends even to the biological order, gender and family.
This is the “New World,” the new gospel, “Enlightenment,” “Science”… announced first in the blood of the French Revolution and then through the schools, Novus Ordo Seclorum. Young ‘men’ and ‘women’ are expected to kill and die for it because the Revolution worships only itself. Worships itself as “progress” for the whole of humankind.
We must choose. Not to choose is to choose. Signs and wonders are manifest every day everywhere as the new “Science” (Scientism) and Magik, more and more, converge into one.
And it is taught that if nations and peoples cannot be persuaded of these “truths” nonviolently then they must be persuaded by other means.
We did not create ourselves however. And, despite all variations of it’s practical atheism, nothingness is nothing, and therefore is impotent to “create” anything but delusions. Nothing emerges from nothing.
And because we sow to the wind we will inevitably reap the whirlwind— unless we come to rediscover genuine reason and true everlasting values.
True “Liberty”. Leo XIII.
“Those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well-being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men’s souls in the wisdom of their legislation. But, for the increase of such benefits, nothing more suitable can be conceived than the laws which have God for their author; and, therefore, they who in their government of the State take no account of these laws abuse political power by causing it to deviate from its proper end and from what nature itself prescribes.’ — par. 18 of Libertas, encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, on the nature of human liberty. June 1888.
In Catholic-scriptural teaching there can not be a justifiable “liberty” to sin. Only to prevent even greater disorders can some evils be tolerated within carefully circumscribed limits. But evil can never be accommodated in principle, or rationalized as not evil
Jn. 8:12: “Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
Freedom: Jn. 8: 31 Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
SH
Updated
— C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell on Scientism the “Magicians Twin”.
— Dr. Ralph Martin on the Rise of the Antichrist
Catholic Critique 