Modernism and the Two Sources of Revelation. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri

Modernism and the Two Sources of Revelation. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri

We know that there are two sources of Revelation: Sacred Scripture and Tradition. The imbalance on one or the other is what causes problems and real heresies.

When Sacred Scripture is elevated to the detriment of Tradition, we have Lutheranism, which also had a certain influence on modernism at the beginning of the last century and through various streams until today.

The so-called historical-critical method which was applied to Scripture with destructive intent has practically wiped out all traditional exegesis, from Genesis to the Synoptics and the Gospel of John. Nothing has remained standing, you only have to read "The fabricated Paul" by Hermann Detering to understand how nothing remains of Saint Paul, not even his name.

If something is applied to destroy in the end nothing remains. This method was applied not only to the Bible, but to traditions, to hagiography. Almost everything was crushed under a precise strategy of demolition.

On the other hand, there are those who put Tradition above Scripture. You may be surprised, this does not concern the traditionalists so much as the modernists. Alfred Fawkes, in Studies in modernism (1913), quotes Alfred Loisy

who is said to have observed: "On ne connait le Christ que par la tradition, a travers la tradition, dans la tradition chretienne primitive". ["Christ is known only by tradition, through tradition, in the early Christian tradition."]

What Loisy seems to suggest is that Holy Scripture is not reliable, Christianity is only the fruit of the elaboration of the primitive Christian community, the mythical "Church of the origins".

There is also a traditionalism that promotes a distrust of reason in attaining a certain knowledge of God. Francesco Saverio Venuto (quoted from StoriaDellaChiesa.it) explains it as follows:

"Ventura, unlike the ‘founders of traditionalism’, did not entirely exclude an argumentative autonomy of natural reason, regarding the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and the foundations of morality, although he continued to defend a prior and necessary revelation from God to men, at least for a first knowledge.

Gregory XVI with the encyclicals Mirari vos (1832) and Singulari nos (1834) reiterated the theorems of traditionalism, although it was the First Vatican Council with the Apostolic Constitution Dei Filius (1870) that condemned its erroneous theses in a more precise manner. It reaffirmed full confidence in the possibility of human reason to arrive by analogy at the knowledge of the existence of God from created things, the immortality of the soul and the foundations of natural law, and at the same time, the necessity of Revelation in order to have access to the divine realities that are in themselves inaccessible to human reason alone".

Of course, this is not about Catholic traditionalism that knows very well how to reconcile Scripture and Tradition. It was important to me to explain that there can be a false overemphasis on one aspect or the other that will mislead the right understanding.