THE POOL OF TEARS

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!"

From Reader #4

Let’s make something clear now: Fr. Cekada’s Work of Human Hands is not a serious book and assuredly will not “find an enthusiastic audience among professional, academic philosophers” as one gushing (and self-referential?) comment reads on his blog. Just one example will illustrate.

On pp. 171-172, the author aptly quotes a passage from Spirit of the Liturgy, which substantiates Joseph Ratzinger’s debt to the unsound speculations of Teilhard de Chardin. The quotation itself is enough to make the author’s point, but Fr. Cekada then exceeds his limitations by hazarding an analysis. In a muddle of superficial observations, Father astounds the reader by asking sophomorically whether the quotation marks surrounding the word fullness in Ratzinger’s text were intended to distinguish the word “from just plain fullness.”

Now even a callow undergraduate recognizes the academic convention of enclosing in quotation marks technical terms possessing a special meaning. Just a few lines above we find “Noösphere,” so it doesn’t require too much effort to assume that “fullness” must also have a specialized sense in Teilhard. And indeed it does. Throughout the disgraced Jesuit’s works, it is a term of art, based on the New-Testament Greek word plērōma (cf. Col 1.19, John 1.16) and signifying something like "God and His completed world existing together."

Just like right-thinking Catholics everywhere, I find Teilhard’s “Christocentric evolutionary biophilosophy” as repugnant as Fr. Cekada does. The difference is that I know the real perils lying underneath all that vivid lyricism and clever word coining. In graduate school, I formally studied several of his more popular books, and I did so under the tutelage of a real Catholic theologian (that is to say, trained in a Roman institution, published in Latin, a contributor to refereed academic journals, recognized by peers with genuine credentials etc.). There I learned that Teilhard’s vocabulary and text do have a meaning too dangerous to be dismissed so fatuously.

The sad fact is that Teilhard’s —and now Ratzinger’s—language and style shape the privileged discourse of today not only in the Novus Ordo but in the secular academic world, too. Nobody, friendly, hostile or indifferent, will consider Fr. Cekada’s facetiousness a sober contribution to the discussion. Bottom line: this book makes the potboilers of Danielle Steele read like works of penetrating genius.

Within the Octave of the Feast of Corpus Christi