Ocean Kayaker: Words of Relevance: Edmund Burke on The Age of Reason

Monday, May 26, 2014

Words of Relevance: Edmund Burke on The Age of Reason

Edmund Burke, famous Irish author and statesman of the 18th century, is quoted in Russell Kirk's seminal work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot,
on the subject of The Age of Reason. Those among us who profess to believe only in Reason, and totally ignore Faith (except for their Faith in Reason), might give some thought to the reasoning of Burke.

Here's the quote:

The Age of Reason...was in reality an Age of Ignorance. If (as most men, since the beginning of human history, have believed) the foundation of human welfare is divine providence, then the limitation of politics and ethics to a puny “reason” is an act of folly, the refuge of a ridiculous presumption.

Kirk goes on: Precisely this blindness to the effulgence of the burning bush, this deafness to the thunder above Sinai, is what Burke proclaims to be the principal error of the French "enlightenment."

Transubstantiation

The Catechism of the Catholic Church: 1376: The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”

Pope Benedict XVI

The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and and limits of [papal] authority, which of course, as such, had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith. … The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.

Ocean Kayaker

Restoring the Sacred

Monday, May 26, 2014

Words of Relevance: Edmund Burke on The Age of Reason

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