Intelligence in Danger of Death
By Marcel De Corte
Translated by Brian Welter
Introduction by Miguel Ayuso
Arouca Press, Waterloo ON Canada 2023 (Originally published in 1969; reissued in 1987)
We have been recently reading some of the intellectual “first responders” to Vatican Il. These authors had to confront the initial impact of the revolutionary changes of the Council and formulate a response. Their task was daunting. For what could be more challenging than to come to grips with this unprecedented, even unimaginable situation: the Roman Catholic Church overthrowing its seemingly immutable liturgy, structure, and even its morality and doctrine? Thomas Molnar, Dietrich von Hildebrand, the other contributors to Triumph magazine, Cristina Campo, Bryan Houghton – it was a remarkably talented, intellectually “diverse” group who nevertheless shared the ability to look facts in the face. Their first reactions often have a freshness and force that often was missing in the subsequent decades – when “conservatives” felt they had to be ecclesiastical politicians and “nuance” their positions. Only with Martin Mosebach’s Heresy of Formlessness (2001) and, even more so, in the literature published after the accession of Pope Francis did direct speech in defense of Catholic Tradition more generally reemerge.
We must add the Belgian philosopher Marcel De Corte to the number of these early critics. His Intelligence in Danger of Death, however, is far broader than a discussion of the Council. De Corte sets out to analyze the situation of the Western world in the 1960s. The reforms of the Council were a characteristic phenomenon of that world. Now De Corte situated these upheavals in Church, society, and intellectual life in a broad philosophical framework – that of Thomism and Aristotelianism. In other words, the catastrophes of the present – for De Corte saw them as such – proceeded from philosophical error. In the case of the Catholic Church, that involved departure from its inheritance of philosophical realism. But De Corte enriches his philosophical considerations with perceptive observations on the facts of his times. In this and many other respects the thought of De Corte resembles that of Thomas Molnar.
De Corte’s overall theme is the decline, or rather the marginalization, of the intellect. While the intellect is disparaged, the creative function of the mind (De Corte calls it the poetic) is exalted. The result is the loss of contact with reality since the external world becomes the creation of the mind.
De Corte divides his book along three broad headings. First, he considers the pursuit of utopia by intellectuals which replaces the real world with an artificial world of technology. The wise are replaced by experts and technicians who can provide practical solutions. De Corte quotes Joseph Stalin’s description of engineers of the soul. “Everything is determined according to decisions inspired by ‘specialists.’” The intelligence is sidelined in favor of Marxist praxis or liberal pragmatism. (pp. 31-32)
One thinks of parallel observations found in Thomas Molnar’s Decline of the Intellectual (1961).
Second, he treats of the idolization of science and the application of the scientific method to all aspects of existence. This is of course valid criticism. I had difficulty following De Corte, however, where he seems to critique the theoretical approaches of modern science in favor of philosophical realism of the ancients. It seems to me that modern science is a post-1300 A.D phenomenon that requires new philosophical considerations.
Third, De Corte gives us a creative analysis of today’s tidal wave of information: “information that deforms.” The information culture of today inevitably involves manipulation and vulgarization. News and propaganda are indistinguishable. How can man’s intellect come to an understanding of anything in the ceaseless torrent of images and sounds? How can a man enter into a real fellowship with others when he is constantly engaged by ( = is connected to) the central producers of the media which occupy all his time? De Corte, moreover, was writing before the internet had arrived….
How does De Corte apply these concepts to the Catholic Church of the 1960s? More than most commentators, he clearly identifies as a defining fault the loss of reality by the hierarchy since the Council. He writes of:
A parallel hierarchy contemptuous of its values of truth, which are then removed from the true hierarchy; the extraordinary isolation of this hierarchy from the real world and the real man, the curtain of illusions of chimeras, of mirages even of visions that blind it, even sometimes …. its most eminent representatives.
The mere concept of a “pastoral” Council implies the abandonment of realism, of contemplation, of the intellect. De Corte:
The first [key element] is, without any possible doubt, the orientation imprinted by the recent Council of the Universal Church which relegated to the background the values of contemplation to the benefit of the values of action. These in turn, in the post-conciliar mentality, were sidelined in favor of the values of fiction and the will to power. These two falls were fatal. Right from the first meetings when the majority of the fathers rejected the scholastic-styled schema on the definition of the Church, under the pretext that it was inaccessible to the modern mind, truth had to yield to efficiency, the intelligence to the will, and the eternal to the temporal.
…
In becoming engaged in the “pastoral” path, in aggiornamento, and in adaptation to the “modern world” following the Council, many clergymen were moved to sacrifice the values of the truth for the values of efficiency. To reach contemporary man it is necessary to drop the parts of dogma to which his mentality can no longer give its consent. … That is the abyss into which the clergyman who subordinates contemplation to action and action to the will of power topples into. This abyss of iniquity no longer has the smallest place for the intelligence.
The second key element that we would equally like to underline in contemporary Catholicism is parallel to the first: it is the subversion of the liturgy. Let us rest content with bringing out what is, in our opinion, the essential point, which is the abandonment, even the proscription, of Latin….
Why is this an issue?
Ultimately, for the believer, it is not by chance or arbitrary decree that Christ was born in a given place, at a given time, within the orbit of the civilization of the intelligence and realism of the mind. The disposition of Providence is obvious: Greco-Roman civilization is the sole civilization that, having confidence in the human intelligence in its capacity to be measured by the real and to understand it, had the universal reach…. Christian civilization, which in a way sublimated this civilization, is its most perfect expression.
After the Council:
In many cases, pastoral work and liturgy were abandoned to the bilious zeal of innovators, the darkness of an intelligence gorged on illusions, and the will of clerical power. This work and liturgy have incited the faithful to work with all their strength in collaborating with those who dream of changing man and the world.
(All these quotes are taken from pp. 60-66)
Has not John Lamont recently written of the indelible relationship between the Christian faith and the civilization in which it arose ? 1) We note, too, the passionate tone of De Corte’s remarks: this is no dispassionate participant in an academic debate! For the foundations of the Christian faith are at stake.
Admittedly, any primarily philosophical approach also has limitations. It is conducive to determinism, historical reality becoming the inevitable function of an intellectual process. Hegelianism is the classic example, but Thomists are not immune to this temptation. Historical reality so often takes its own twists and turns!
In his 1987 preface to the reissue of Intelligence in Danger of Death, De Corte could review the continued disastrous progress of the “paradigm shifts” (to use a current cliché) of the post-World War II era. And he recognized that, on the Church front, John Paul II was no solution but rather part of the crisis. Indeed, De Corte wrote that the crisis was still in its early stages. And now, nearly 40 years after that preface? In the last few years, the “woke” ideology has triumphed in the West. Regarding the Church, De Corte’s fears and warnings have proved so terribly true – in contrast to the continuing fantasies of the Church establishment.
De Corte (quoting Charles Maurras!) does, however, offer this hope:
‘It is characteristic of the intellectual to lead the reaction to hopelessness. Faced with the threatening horizon, the national intelligence [ De Corte clarifies: the universal intelligence] has to become connected to those who try to do something beautiful before sinking.‘
It is the optimism of a philosopher who has faith in human intellect, in the priority of contemplation over action and in the objective existence of the real.
- Lamont, John, “Dominican Theologian attacks Catholic Tradition (Part 4): what is at Stake in the attempted Suppression of the TLM?” Rorate Caeli (accessed 9/25/2023)
- P. 66, quoting Maurras, Charles, “L’Avenir et L’Intelligence” at 87, Romantisme et Révolution (Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, Paris, 1924)
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