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Cassini,

Enjoyed your post and your point it well taken.  Those that keep Dogma in its proper order of reference will have the last and only laugh.

I hope you have not pushed some S&Sers to think we have had no pope since 1835.

Drew

Drew, nominalist "universals" have absolutely no relation whatsoever to Universal in the Church ... other than a similar etymology.

When you introduce a time element, what you're essentially saying is that the Church can defect at any given time.

Foundational to this question concerning God’s love for us is another. Does this love of God for man entail that He endowed man with the ability and faculties to know Him and to come to Him? Did God create us in such a way as to make knowledge of Him something that is fully natural to the human mind and heart? If not, then it would seem that man has some justification for not knowing and loving God, and that any judgment of God upon us for not knowing and worshipping Him in spirit and truth would be the act of a capricious and unjust tyrant. Implicitly responding to this question, St. Paul writes:
 

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.” (Rom 1:18-20).

 
St. Thomas writes, “all knowers know God implicitly in all they know.” (De Veritate, Q. 22, a.2). Thomas rightly teaches, of course, that all of our knowledge, barring a direct infusion from God, comes through the senses. We come into this world with no innate ideas or knowledge, and this includes no knowledge of God. The “natural” knowledge of God of which Thomas speaks is therefore acquired through the encounter of man’s mind with the world, and through sense experience. It is, in other words, natural, but not innate.
 
But there is a very important truth involved here which I think is often missed. The human mind, in order to posses such “natural knowledge” of God, must be in possession of an innate, intellectual light which is structured in such a manner as to know, in a finite and analogical manner, as God knows. St. Thomas writes:

“And thus we must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.” (I, 84, 5).

This created participation by the human intellect in the uncreated intellectual light of God operates in response to both areas of human knowledge – natural and supernatural. The passage from St. Thomas quoted immediately above speaks of this light as specifically related to our knowledge of created things. Simply put, God sees the substance known as man and man sees likewise; God sees a tree, man sees a tree. Man, in other words, does not just know the “units” of individual sense data, but his intellect is so constituted by God so as to immediately abstract to the knowledge of the substantial nature of things. Man naturally knows “universals,” which are the “eternal types” (the “kinds” of Genesis) of God’s creation. The very foundation of all intellectual sanity, therefore, is man’s knowledge of “abstractions” which the modern-day empiricist dismisses as mere human fabrications.
 
But what about God and the supernatural truths which constitute His very Being? Does the created structure of the intellectual light within us also possess a structure which “naturally” responds to supernatural truths? Did God so constitute a relationship between Himself and our own minds as to make it a fully natural thing for us to “hear” the voice of Revelation, even though the truths involved may be quite abstract and even appear to involve things that are contradictory to previous experience and thought?
 
A remarkable explanation of this relationship is available to us in the writings of Newman’s contemporary and alleged arch-rival, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. His work, The Glories of the Sacred Heart, contains a chapter titled “Dogma the Source of Devotion.” After quoting Our Lord’s words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Cardinal Manning offers the following analysis (selected quotes):
 
“He (Jesus) declared that all truth was contained in Himself; and when the Apostle said that he judged himself to ‘know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified,” he meant the same thing, namely, that he who knows Jesus Christ aright knows the whole Revelation of God, the radiance which flows from the Person of Jesus Christ.”

“Now our Divine Lord, speaking to the woman of Samaria, said, ‘You adore that which you know not,’ because they were an idolatrous people, of mixed race…and they had a sort of fragmentary knowledge of the old revelation; but they did not rightly know the True God; and so much as they did know of the True God, they did not know truly. Therefore they could not worship Him ‘in spirit and in truth.’”

“From these words I draw one conclusion, namely, that knowledge is the first and vital condition of all true worship.”
 
“My purpose, then, will be to trace out the connection between what the world scornfully calls dogma and devotion, or the worship of God ‘in spirit and in truth.’”
 
“Now, first of all, let us see what is dogma….It means the precise enunciation of a divine truth, of a divine fact, or of a divine reality fully known, so far as it is the will of God to reveal it, adequately defined in words chosen and sanctioned by a divine authority.”
 
“Every divine truth or reality, so far as God has been pleased to reveal it to us, casts its perfect outline and image upon the human intelligence. His own mind, in which dwells all truth in all fullness and in all perfection, so far as He has revealed of His truth, is cast upon the surface of our mind, in the same way as the sun casts its own image upon the surface of the water, and the disc of the sun is perfectly reflected from its surface.”
 
Dogmas or doctrines, in other words, are not in any way to be regarded as weak and humanly fabricated “notions” (the word used by Cardinal Newman for such intellectual formulations), but rather as a powerful divine radiance cast upon our intellectual light, a radiance which finds a natural response in the soul of one who sincerely seeks the truth. This is why, in Cardinal Manning’s words:
 
“If when a divine truth is declared to us, our hearts do not turn to it, as the eye turns to the light; if there be not is us an instinctive yearning, which makes us promptly turn to the sound of the divine voice, the fault is in our hearts; for just in proportion as we know the truth we shall be drawn towards it.”
 
Finally, I cannot resist offering one more marvelous passage taken from Manning’s work, The Four Great
 
Evils of Our Day:
“God, who is the perfect and infinite intelligence – that is, the infinite and perfect reason – created man to His own likeness, and gave him a reasonable intelligence, like His own. As the face in the mirror answers to the face of the beholder, so the intelligence of man answers to the intelligence of God. It is His own likeness.”
 
Cardinal Manning’s words constitute a beautiful elaboration of Our Lord’s simple declaration, “Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice.” (John 18:37). It should be added that the Gospel of John is replete with teachings concerning the nature of Christ as the light of truth, and of man’s response, or lack of response to this light and truth: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” I would highly recommend to all readers that they reread the entire Gospel of St. John with the specific intent of noting all of this imagery concerning the power of the light and truth of Christ which finds a fully natural response in the created intellectual light of man, and a corresponding rejection in those who have of their own free will obscured this light: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” And further:

“For everyone that doth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. But he that doth truth, cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God.” (John 3:20-21).
 
It is no wonder, therefore, that the Gospel of John is a premier object for deconstruction by Modernists. It firmly establishes Dogma and the Divine Deposit of Faith (the “radiance” emanating from Christ) as the absolute and vital foundation of our entire Faith, as being the light of truth which is the very life of the soul, and to which the human soul naturally responds. God’s love is thus fully justified. All the blame for man’s turning away from the light of God’s truth lies within the will of each individual man who does so. As Cardinal Manning said, “the fault is within our hearts.”
 
It must also be added that Christ’s words are for all men at all times. The light of Christ’s truth is not something that must wait upon the growth and maturation of man’s experience and intellectual and religious evolution. It is there to be received and assented to by any human heart, at any time and in any culture, which has not betrayed its own inherent, God-given light.
 
Dogmas, in other words, are not simply abstract formulations which comprise a “notional” faith. They are not merely confessions of Faith designed to bind us together in a unity of belief and worship. They are the very vitality of the entire spiritual life. St. Thomas saw fit to treat of the “Nature of Sacred Doctrine” in the very first Question of his Summa. There, he writes:
 
“On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. Xiv, 1), to this science [Sacred Doctrine] alone belongs that whereby saving faith is begotten, nourished, protected and strengthened.”
 
This begetting, nourishing, protecting, and strengthening of our faith is, of course, intimately incarnated into all our other faculties. Sensations, life experiences, and the imagining and memory faculties all play very important parts. But it is the intellectual light in man which is created with the structure – this structure involving abstraction at its most sublime level – to transform all these experiences into true knowledge of God and of His revealed truth. Here lies the real vitality of man, even of the most simple and unlearned of men, and here is where man “hears” the voice of God.
 
Such is true Catholic epistemology. To undermine it in any way is to enter upon a path of decay involving all things human.