What Links Disintegration:

What Links Disintegration: Maritain’s Rousseau, Voegelin on Gnosticism, and Prayers That Heal

The truth will not only “make us free” but it is itself free. We all come in fact to know the same truth, otherwise we could not communicate at all with one another. This is why the modern-day denial of truth is, at the same time, a denial of real human communication and, consequently, in place of truth, an exaltation of power.¹

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.²

The first decades of the 21st century can be seen as an unprecedentedly hostile time for Christianity. A varied, collective animus can be viewed in the form of attacks against houses of worship, and those who worship inside them. There have been no less than five hundred such attacks since 2020 in the United States. Of these, only thirty percent resulted in an arrest. Something interesting stands out when one examines this list. “Crucially, while a handful of the attacks have included thefts, the vast majority have only involved property destruction, indicating that the primary motive is not material gain.”³

If material gain is ruled out by the actions of those who destroy but do not steal, what then remains as a motive for such acts? Why this animus for houses of worship whose parishioners are taught to turn the other cheek? Why have communities become so fragmented and self-segregated that a feasible means to disagree with someone is to engage in hateful force?

This essay will show how this societal disintegration can be traced back to the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as discussed in Jacques Maritain’s book, Three Reformers.⁴ Next, a link will be established to Eric Voegelin’s writings on a spiritual source of such destructive alienation.⁵ Lastly, antidotes to this societal and spiritual malady will be proposed by way of Catholic prayers from very different sources. From a Pope, and through young Portuguese children, a singular message is communicated to those experiencing poverty not in a material sense, but in a metaphysical, or spiritual manner.

In February of 2024, a statue of the Virgin Mary was found to have been damaged by a hammer at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.⁶ The statue portrayed Mary in a most tender manner, gently holding the baby Jesus. After this was reported to the authorities, the basilica’s rector, Monsignor Walter Rossi, commented, “Although saddened that acts of this nature take place, I am more concerned about the individuals who perpetrate such activity and pray for their healing.”⁷

The event at the basilica was many centuries removed from the iconoclasm of Constantinople in the Middle Ages, and that of Geneva in the 1500’s. These episodes can be said to have spawned from religious fervor, with such sentiment being largely absent in the 21st century. However, this may not be so. The iconoclasm of the past stemmed from religious fervor based on an external source of inspiration. Modernity upends this by positing an internal source of religious fervor, not logos-centric, but instead anthropocentric. It can be asserted Rousseau is unchallenged in his role of establishing such a worldview.

There are two purported moral innovations which began with Rousseau and subsequently prevail over 21st century thinking. These are perceived by their exponents as innovations, but may eventually be discovered to be reversions to a much older state of human affairs.

First, Rousseau promulgated a focus on fidelity, not to an external source of rectitude, but rather an internal one. This can be viewed as a devotion to the self, what has been called since the middle of the last century, the drive for “authenticity.” No longer was an external source of moral validation needed. Reliance on an external source of moral judgment means human beings are accountable for actions, and must evaluate these next to standards that are not self-made.

Second, stemming from this initial focus on virtue based on the self, was the aspect of recognizing how this focus differed from the perceived to be dominant ethos. Alienation ensues, but in this sentiment, the Rousseauian comes to experience this separation not as a curse, but a blessing. He is not an outcast, but an elite. Following from this, ample rewards can now be measured in terms of societal elevation. Having ascended a vantage point above his fellows, the Rousseauian, in his authenticity and elitism, can now reject what is before him: reality, order, and what the late Fr. James Schall, SJ referred to as, “what is.” The Rousseauian is no longer bound by the logos, for he is the logos.

Maritain began with the first of these major points when he wrote of what stood out, and was emblematic of Rousseau. “What is peculiar to Jean-Jacques, his special privilege, is his resignation to himself. He accepts himself and his worse contradictions as the believer accepts the will of God.”⁸ This does not on the surface appear overtly troubling. Human beings after all have historically manifested contradictory patterns of behavior, from being able to compose a sacred oratorio, to envisioning new ways, as seen in the last two centuries, to make war extend to a civilian population. Yet, what Maritain pointed to was not an overall sense of clashing human dichotomies. Rather, Rousseau was focused solely on his own specialness. So great was Rousseau’s focus, Maritain likened it to a believer’s surrender to God’s will.

One can surrender to God’s will in bountiful times. However, this act of acquiescence more often occurs during harsh and trying times. In this context, one surrenders power to an entity who is believed to be not only superior in terms of power, but also surpassing human souls in terms of rectitude and virtue. One surrenders, putting faith in an external guarantee of better outcomes. This is akin to His Eminence Cardinal Arinze’s statement on the permanence of the Church, something bad priests and popes, as well as Judas Iscariot himself, could not bring down because of Jesus’s divine guarantee.⁹

In contrast to this, Rousseau’s resignation toward himself provided its own self-proffered benefits. “He acquiesces in being yes and no at the same time; and that he can do, just so far as he acquiesces in falling from the state of reason, and letting the disconnected pieces of his soul vegetate as they are.”¹⁰ Unlike a believer’s surrender to the will of God, Rousseau did not yield to the better course outside himself. Setting aside reason, one is now unfettered, liberated from the choice between yes and no. What exactly is appealing about this liberation? Being free from choosing yes or no, implies one is also free from the consequences that follow.

Aiming solely at the self as a standard, one encounters the difference between accuracy and precision. Multiple arrows aimed at a target can be very precisely grouped close to each other, and yet be quite far from the bullseye. Multiple arrows can be accurately delivered onto a target’s bullseye, without necessarily being precisely close to each other. Accuracy, like the surrender to God’s will, involves an external source from which to judge one’s state of affairs. One’s soul can be ordered well, as it is in conformity with divine will. Separately, a soul can be ordered just as precisely as the person doing the ordering would have it, but be quite far away from an external standard of rectitude.

Maritain then wrote of the culmination of Rousseau’s sincere, precise, and authentic pursuit of being true to himself. “It consists of never meddling with what you find in yourself at each moment of your life, for fear of perverting your being.”¹¹ When the Rousseauian of today resigns himself to himself, accepting his contradictions as the will of God, who due to this act of resignation is absent, only one check on personal accountability remains: the person staring back in a mirror.

Rousseau, in his Confessions, put it thusly. “Nothing now appeared great in my eyes but to be free and virtuous, superior to fortune and opinion, and independent of all exterior circumstances…”¹² What followed from this realization was Rousseau convincing his mistress to again surrender his child, the third, to a hospital for foundlings, with two more children following this bleak path. The survival rate for such children was quite low. When one is only accountable and responsible to oneself, many things, even the most sentimentally arid of actions, are possible.

The second major point of emphasis in Maritain’s writing followed from his account of Rousseau’s preoccupation with the self and authenticity. It is noteworthy to examine this version of Rousseau. “He has made his timidity and his deep natural unsociability the very means of that radiation amongst men for which he had hitherto longed in vain, and he has found a sort of interior balance.”¹³ Maritain dated this radiation of Rousseau to the time after the success of his first Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.¹⁴ From this work, Rousseau manifested a view which mirrored Maritain’s assessment. In a pointed critique of civilized people, Rousseau’s unsociability toward his fellow man was made clear. “Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any.”¹⁵

Maritain wrote that Rousseau finally found a means to self-alienate from others, apparently something he had desired for some time. This means consisted of his own inherent reclusiveness and lack of wanting to live in communion with his fellows. From what did Rousseau feel he ought be alienated from? In his own words, he saw those who dwelt in civilization to be other than him, to be lower than him, in essence, slaves. The currencies chosen by such inferiors, consisting of refinement, softness, and urbanity, were false and inauthentic. How so? Because these currencies possessed the appearance of virtues while being altogether bereft of them. Having issued this judgment, Maritain wrote of Rousseau’s finding inner balance and perhaps harmony.

There exists an odd whisper of Plato’s prisoner in the cave in Rousseau’s work. A whisper and a contradiction. The prisoner frees himself to finally see the world illumined by the sun, instead of a cave lit only by fire. His impulse is to return to the cave and share this boon with his fellows. They were slaves to false images on the cave’s wall who now may be set free. Rousseau’s take was a rejection of such Platonic fellowship. By means of his own, not the sun’s, unsociable self-knowledge, he deemed others to be slaves. These slaves, in their adherence to binding rules of civilized norms, were unworthy of saving due to their own falseness. Rousseau claimed these civilized people pretended at virtues while not possessing them. How would he know this to be true? Was Rousseau pointing at an external source of virtue his fellows fell short of, akin perhaps to an Old Testament prophet? No, instead he set forth a better source of virtue, one fulfilling his desire for authenticity. “How sweet it would be to live among us, if the exterior appearance was always an image of the heart’s tendencies…”¹⁶

Adherence to norms established by a source beyond ourselves was falsity and slavery, according to Rousseau. Instead, virtue rested on the inner feelings of the heart. Again, there was a rejection of the prisoner who saves, and thusly fosters communion with others. Pursuing virtue as one’s heart’s desires differs from person to person. What happens when these inner desires differ and spur conflict between two people? Whose heart’s desires are more virtuous than another’s? Alienation is the result, and an ensuing state of prideful elitism follows.

The consequences were telling. As related earlier, Rousseau gave his five children up at a hospital for foundlings in Paris. It was his justification for doing so that stood out. “I will satisfy myself…that in abandoning my children to public education for want of the means of bringing them up myself; in destining them to become workmen and peasants, rather than adventurers and fortune-hunters, I thought I acted like an honest citizen, and a good father, and considered myself as a member of the republic of Plato.”¹⁷

Citing poverty as a rationale for his actions, actions repeated five times over, Rousseau curiously brought up Plato. He likened himself to the ruling class of the Republic,¹⁸ which assigned a citizen’s education and ultimately his or her fate. The actions of Plato’s rulers had in mind the preservation and well-being of the city state. However, Rousseau’s drive for authenticity and alienation from the falseness of civilized society pointed to a telos apart from the good of the polis. He cloaked his thought with Spartan robes, but his actions resonated with sybaritic escapism from moral responsibility. In stark contrast to the good of Plato’s city, which sought to keep something intact for the benefit of all, Rousseau’s good was purely self-involved, having no concern for the benefit of others, and sadly his children as well.

Rousseau died before, but greatly influenced the French Revolution, which is regarded as the beginning of modernity. Yet, these strains of Rousseau’s thought may have a much earlier origin. To examine this, it is necessary to turn to the writing of Eric Voegelin. According to Voegelin, from the 7th century B.C., there occurred around the Mediterranean and the Near East, a series of rising empires followed by their inevitable collapses. This caused people inhabiting these lands to enter a stage of disorientation, which led to a search for meaning amidst the debris of fallen dominions. Numerous beliefs arose, among them, mystery cults, Manicheanism, and Christianity. Included in this sequence, and perhaps one of the most ostentatious, was gnosticism.

In his Science, Politics and Gnosticism,¹⁹ the German philosopher encapsulated an intriguing worldview held by the adherents of gnosticism. “Of the profusion of gnostic experiences and symbolic expressions, one feature may be singled out…the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin.”²⁰ There appear to be similarities between this feature of gnosticism and the two major “innovations” of Rousseau discussed earlier. First, coming to recognize the world, or “what is,” as an alien destination one has stumbled into, reminds one of Rousseau’s critique of civilized society. With authenticity as a standard, the perceived artifice and falseness of societal mores and norms extends to the desire to radically depart from their source. Second, finding one’s own distinct way back to an otherworldly place of origin, shares with Rousseau’s focus on authenticity an individual odyssey. This journey, unlike Odysseus’s, does not involve bringing one’s fellow seafarers home to Ithaca. What are the consequences of such perception, and the actions that follow?

According to Voegelin, the adherents of gnosticism share with Rousseau’s thought the self-judgment, without an outside reference, of something else as false. Though more severe in its assessment, Voegelin’s view points to a shared inevitable outcome. “The world is no longer the well-ordered, the cosmos, in which Hellenic man felt at home; nor is it the Judaeo-Christian world that God created and found good.”²¹ Rousseau held his own authenticity as the standard by which civilized people were found wanting. The gnostic rejects the Apollonian logos of the Greeks, and the benevolent, creative Logos of the Old Testament. There are echoes of Nietzsche here, with a warning emanating from such a two-fold rejection. Yet, there is a notable difference. Nietzsche found the Apollonian legacy of the Greeks wanting. This was so because he felt Greek thinkers had given short shrift to the Dionysian facet of human nature. It does not appear gnostics applied the same criteria apart from their own self-appointed intelligence. Nevertheless, the outcome is the same. Minus reason and faith, only power and force prevail.

Voegelin continued on this note of gnostic dissatisfaction. “Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos. For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape.”²² With the elevation of the gnostic intellect, the intellect that deduces something awry with Greek reason and Judaeo-Christian faith, there proceeds an act of the will. Spurning the order that was presented before him, the order he played no part in establishing, the gnostic wishes his own individual escape from what is.

There are two paths available for this effort of emancipation. First, Voegelin wrote that ancient gnostics held an evil God had established this torture of a world, one who resembles God as He is known in the Old Testament. In answer to this, faith was placed in a “hidden” God who sent humanity emissaries, and aided them in escaping the order established by Yahweh. If this sounds a bit like the temptation in the Garden of Eden, perhaps this is not coincidental. Second, Voegelin related how this paradigm changed with the onset of modernity. Instead of a hidden God, there is an emergent spirit, the product of a dialectic both in ideas or material processes, “…or through the assumption of a will of nature which transforms man into superman.”²³ Here, Voegelin described a process-built spirit, from Hegel through Marx and onto Nietzsche, paralleling in its telos the ancient gnostics’ hidden God. Whatever forms they took across the centuries, the end goal is the same. “However the phases of salvation are represented in the different sects and systems…from libertinism through indifferentism to the world to the strictest asceticism—the aim always is destruction of the old world and passage to the new.”²⁴

Key to this purported gnostic salvation is its individualistic nature, one without a care towards other human beings and their own plights through this vale of tears. The gnostic sees this world as irredeemable, and chooses to escape it via its dissolution. Other human beings are part of this world and what is. Yet, to the gnostic, they are of lesser importance to his own individual emancipatory and salvific journey. Earlier, a parallel was drawn connecting putting faith in a hidden God and the temptation in Eden. Here, the salvation of the gnostic is diametrically opposed to Christ entering the world, and lovingly taking the burden of humanity’s sins in order to save others.

Rousseau came before this transition to a modern gnosticism as related by Voegelin. In this, he served as a transitional figure making less evident, and more opaque to the rational Enlightenment mind, the damage inherent in the selfishness of gnosticism. By sanctifying self-authenticity and the desire to correct a flawed world, he spread the seeds for the 21st century manifestation of an old spirit, the ancient, hidden, but false God, that has ever willed the destruction of the truly divine.

What then stand as remedies to this ancient error with a modern face? Humility here is key. Believing we can with human minds and hands defeat evil, opens the door to the evil of pride. Two prayers best represent the renunciation of human pride.

As Pope in the waning decades of the 19th century, Leo XIII was reported to have experienced a grave vision at the end of his celebration of the Mass. Various accounts of the vision followed, with the most common centering around the Devil’s boast to God of being able to destroy the Church if given a century to work with. A witness to Pope Leo’s fainting following the vision, Fr. Domenico Pechenino, spoke of the former’s horrified expression after coming to consciousness.²⁵ The Pope acted on his vision, composing and installing the Prayer to Saint Michael to be said worldwide.

It is a prayer which acknowledges the presence of spiritual warfare permeating one’s mortal life. “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”²⁶

Like Rousseau and the gnostics, the person who says this prayer acknowledges there is conflict in the world. Unlike Rousseau and the gnostics, who view themselves as innocent and beyond blame for their own predicament and resentfulness, the believer does not condemn the world, but rather gathers the resolve to confront evil in it. This cannot be done via the arcane methods crafted by gnostics ancient and modern. Only divine help has the hope of carrying the day. The last portion of the prayer is perhaps the most telling. Not only is the person reciting the prayer asking for help, but this help is asked for others. Evil spirits are believed to not only seek the ruin of one’s soul, but of the rest of humanity’s as well. Care is extended to others in prayer, and by doing so, true fellowship is established.

Within two decades of Pope Leo XIII’s passing, a vision of the Virgin Mary was witnessed by three poor children in the month of May in Fatima, Portugal. Brighter than the sun, and resplendently beautiful, this vision would recur on the 13th of each month up to October of 1917.²⁷ The children, Francisco, Jacinta, and Lucia, were given a prayer to recite and add to the end of a rosary’s decade.

Though quite different in form from the Prayer to Saint Michael, the Fatima Prayer shares one great similarity. “Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.”²⁸

Like Rousseau and the gnostics, the Fatima Prayer envisions an earthly world capable of deception, possibly waylaying those traversing the leafy, autumnal roads of one’s life. Unlike Rousseau and the gnostics, the Fatima Prayer calls on those who recite it to not blaze their own individual trail at the expense of what is and other people, but to navigate back to their true home together. In this, they are to pray for others to also find this way, seeking salvation not only for themselves, but, like the Prayer to Saint Michael, for their fellow human beings as well. The person reciting the prayer is kept humble by the knowledge that those in need of mercy also includes oneself. Here, even the freed prisoner of Plato’s cave avoids the temptation of pride due to his being elevated by human reason above his fellows.

To Rousseau, the ultimate fate of his abandoned children is not a matter of burdening guilt. For Marx, a modern gnostic according to Voegelin, the untold lives lost via permanent revolution, his material envisioning of Hegel’s dialectic, are a means to an end. Those who descend from Rousseau and the gnostics, by their alienation, resentment, and drive for self-deification, view especially the peaceful statue of our Lady on holy ground as one views a mortal foe. Ultimately, the Prayer to Saint Michael and the Fatima Prayer remind us of what we face, powers and principalities, and that we are indeed our brother’s keeper.

An Essay by Jose Maria J. Yulo, Ed.D.

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