The Heresy of Peter Kwasniewski

There are definite extremes: first, that all non-Christian religions (leaving aside Judaism as a special case), and all non-Western forms of theoria and praxis (prayer, contemplation, exercise, medicine, and so on), are just plain false. Perhaps some Christians would not formulate their attitude in such words, but it is often what they think. For example, one often hears thoughtless dismissals of Hinduism, Buddhism, yoga, acupuncture, etc., as though all of them were the devil's instruments. This conflicts not only with the Church's Magisterium�one might consult the nuanced teaching of the Second Vatican Council and "commentaries" on it like Crossing the Threshold of Hope�but also with natural reason. As St. Thomas Aquinas argues, it is impossible that any view be altogether false, since the human mind cannot embrace anything as true unless it has some truth in it, nourishing it.

As was said earlier, the Christian faith is fundamentally an Either/Or, not a Both/And. The Christian believes in, adores, and seeks salvation through Jesus Christ alone, Son of David, Son of Mary, Son of God. Anything else, even the slightest deviation, is not Christianity. The early Councils of the Church were not playing games of intellectual leisure; they were solemnly defining the divinely revealed mysteries which separate the Christian faith from every conceivable narrowing or corruption of the truth. Between Catholicism and any other religion, regardless of how close or distant it may seem, there is an infinite gap, the gap between the religion God has revealed and approved, and the innumerable religions he has not.

As for the perplexing question of Eastern Orthodoxy versus Roman Catholicism, the room for congenial harmonization decreases as the insistence on idiomatic differences increases. If there are truly irreconcilable doctrinal differences, then obviously ecumenism, at least in regard to these differences, is impossible. Nevertheless, the supposition that there are two basically incompatible Christianities, Eastern and Western, is a rather facile one; the reality is more subtle. There is a certain kind of Christian, whether Latin or Byzantine, who will insist until blue in the face that Athos and Rome are as far apart as being and non-being. With such a person, there is no possibility of fruitful dialogue. A kind of a priori machine has been installed that will exalt each peculiar doctrine in its peculiarity and amplify each divergence in its divergency. The common faith is broken apart until nothing common remains. Such a method can only come from a pre-intellectual insistence that there must not be anything truly common; and one may justly ask whether this attitude is compatible with the Christian charity that always seeks higher common ground in the worship of the same Lord and adherence to the same life-giving mysteries.

All religions contain something of the truth, and sometimes a religion that is essentially false has preserved certain truths better than followers of the true religion have. This may sound unacceptable, but a moment's reflection shows that there is no reason why it cannot be so, at least in the realm of natural truths. For example, most non-Western religions have a superior holistic understanding of nature, the body, and medicine than modern Catholics whose minds have been poisoned to a greater or lesser extent by false materialistic philosophies inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Since other religions can emphasize a truth forgotten or only obscurely known among us, we should not arrogantly refuse to look to them for the enrichment of our own faith, for recovering aspects of our own tradition that we have lost sight of.

"⁴But... false brethren... came in privately to spy our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into servitude."—Gal. 2 (Douai-Rheims)