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Cardinal Victor
Fernández:
“The Mystical Passion:
Spirituality and Sensuality”
A Profound Disfiguration
of Mystical
Theology
It
is embarrassing.
Academically as much as morally.
This is a book by a mature 36-year-old
man that should never have been printed; not because it is lascivious
(it is) but because it is the product of a mind that had no acquaintance
with serious study and no founding in Catholic primary sources — a “cardinal
sin,” if you will, of any author, especially a Catholic author who illicitly
invokes the names of saints and in so doing pretends to adduce their
support for a thesis that is not simply contrary to their writings,
but is a caricature of them. This is damnable!
Fernández was not, as he also pretends
to be, still a formative young man who later wrote “more serious” treatises
on Mystical Theology such The Healing Force of Mysticism and
The Transforming Force of Mysticism, neither title of which inspires
me to believe that they contain any more mature theological insights
than their “less mature” works, including
Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing.
Fernandez's grasp of Mystical Theology
is shockingly inadequate. Consider the following:
“[in]
a kind of fulfilling orgasm in our relationship with God … God
manages to touch the soul-corporeal centre of pleasure.”
Or:
“The mystical experience God touches the
most intimate centre of love and pleasure…” [emphases
added]
These are but two absolutely fundamental
misconceptions, or complete distortions, of the very nature and
possibility of mystical experience articulated by the sources
he appeals to.
I have argued elsewhere,
with clear and indisputable citations to primary sources that:
-
“Sensuous
negation,
or what St. John of the Cross, [the First Doctor of Mystical Theology
in the Catholic Church], calls the “Night of the Senses.” is therefore
absolutely necessary to that union in which the soul becomes one
with God.”
-
“In the opening
sequences of Book One of the
Ascent, St. John discussed the night of
the senses relative to the will. There we found that the disparity between God and
created nature emphasized the lack of proportion, of commensurability,
between God and the soul in its relation to God through created
nature, and in so doing demonstrated
the inherent impossibility of a
sensuous apprehension of God. And the conclusion, of course, was that if God is to be apprehended at
all, he must be apprehended extra-naturally;
not through a sensuous manifold
accessible to the will — nor, as St. John will now argue, through
any conceptualization available through ordinary understanding.”
-
“the
contemplative must not defer to the senses; however credible their
reports may appear. Moreover, St. John argues, in their tangible
dimensions, these sensuous communications cannot, in reality, bear
any proportion to, and are in fact the ontological opposite of,
the spiritual reality which they purport to convey.”
The Metaphysics of Mysticism
A Commentary
on the Mystical Philosophy of
St. John of the Cross
What is more, absolutely fundamental
to Western Christian Mysticism is the the notion of apophasis,
the understanding of God by a negation of what He is not, commonly called
the Via Negativa, or the
“Negative
Way”.
Because of the ontological disparity between man and God inasmuch as
God is eternal where man is temporal, infinite where man
in finite, God is absolute where man is contingent, God is Uncreated
Spirit and man created spirit and flesh who was created in
imago Dei (the
image of God) in time and not eternity, and we cannot predicate of God
anything
“corporeal”
for everything
sensible
and corporeal
is eo ipso
not God nor predicable of God since it is material, temporal and finite.
The absolutely contradictory and utterly
incoherent notion of something that is “soul-corporeal”
is nothing less than an absurdity, and to argue that it can be radicated
in some imaginary “centre of pleasure”
is beyond absurd. To understand, in any measure, God reflected, however
analogically, in the completely sensual act of sexual climax
is not simply bizarre, it is an utter failure to grasp even the most
fundamental elements in Christian theology and philosophy.
More absurd still is that this less than
pedestrian mind is directing the very office — the Dicastery
for the Doctrine of the Faith — where the most mature and incisive
intellect is required in making determinations concerning the very Doctrine
of the Faith itself. That it should have been given by Francis
to a man of such questionable character and limited intellectual ability
is astounding! It is the highest office in the Church next to the papacy
and should not have been given as a reward for loyalty, or as
a favor to a friend and fellow-countryman with the same horizontal
and anthropocentric agendum. The Church is far beyond the narrow and
calculated reach of any individual who would fashion what is divine
into the marred image of a man.
That Fernández has chosen to articulate
this most superlative love of God for the soul and the reciprocal love
of the soul for God, not just in sensuous terms, but in what is tantamount
to the pornographic terms which he appears to use in characterizing
love in any of its manifestations is not just “regrettable”, or even
“scandalous” — it is, as I have said earlier and now say with greater
vigor still, damnable.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor of the Boston Catholic Journal
and Author
of
The Metaphysics of Mysticism
A Commentary
on the Mystical Philosophy of
St. John of the Cross
January 12, 2024
Feast of the
Holy Martyrs Zoticus, Rogatus, Modestus, Castulus, and forty soldiers
In Africa
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write
us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Totally
Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of Faith entrusted
to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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