Folia Theologica 21. (2010)

Barbour Hugh O.Praem.: The Cosmology of Catholic Communications: Postmodern Kerygma? A Reflection by a Disciple of SS. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas

THE COSMOLOGY OF CATHOLIC

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mathematically refinable forces, perceived not by sense by clear and distinct intuitions and pure reason with its internal dialectic. This is a sort of rational equivalent of what we witnessed a few days ago in the United States' National Aeronautics Administration's "bombing of the moon."

Second: The subversion of meaning or the neutralization of consciousness (La subversion du sense ou la neutralisation du conscience): An intellectual Kulturkampf ensued wherein the traditional biblical and liturgical symbols taken from the cosmos as perceived à la misure de l'homme were debunked by a critique of religion which worked in virtue of the breaking of the link between these symbolic referents and their human meaning. A symbol becomes a mere "substitut fictive” without a real relation to its (now non-existent) natural referent. All of religion depends on human imagination after the manner of the critique of Christian orthodoxy offered by Spinoza or Feuerbach, or an attenuation of it as in the case of Malebranche. The union of symbol, now almost completely a mere sign, with its referent which has no transcendent cosmic or metaphysical "scientific" reality is now completely dissolved. To the traditional hermeneutic of sacred symbols there was opposed a demythologizing hermeneutic of subjective "religious consciousness."

Third: The reign of the signifier or the effacement of the symbol

(L' empire du signißcant ou l'effacement du symbole):

Then in the twentieth century, with the reality of the referent and its objective meaning neatly disposed of, the study of the signifier comes into play. It becomes, in its naked nominalistic simplicity the whole content of human culture, not even a scientific study of a demytho- logized world, but the study of structure of human signs themselves, simply as signs without meaning or referent. The human reason far from comprehending anything real or imagined, is simply the effect of the order of signs, which are not the symbols of anything. This is Umberto Eco's world, the world of nuda nomina tenemus, the world of the semiotic name of the rose. It is to this world that the secular use of the media belongs.

Fourth: The semantic principle or the primary evidence of the logos (Le principe sémantique ou Vevidence première du logos):

This dire state of affairs for the human intellect, however, is the occasion of a discovery, namely that the intellect discovers its proper nature as necessarily linked to signs, being itself constituted by them,