Mike Lewis has been on a righteous crusade to expose the fundamental incompatibility of the activities of Fr. Chad Ripperger, “celebrity exorcist” (two words especially jarring when paired), with the beauty and dignity of Catholicism as religio vera – and with grave reasons as, sadly, time will more and more unfold. For my part, there is far too much of the holy, the wholesome, and the truly glorious falling to neglect to justify time or energy spent in this particular pursuit; I devoted much of last spring to addressing the shock and scandal I experienced over egregious religious fraudulence, but this particular battle was not to be mine, thankfully. With regard to Fr. Ripperger, I do need to address a specific issue, while maintaining all due respect to his sacramental ministry as a priest and keeping the balance of his extremely, distressingly, unspeakably morbid field of work as much at a distance as reality will permit.

I had been averse to reading Mike’s latest on Fr. Ripperger at all, but decided I should do so, if only judiciously given the subject matter. Actually, I first became aware of the article when I saw it in my texts at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, awakened from fitful sleep by the very fire of Gehenna gripping my tonsils. After five years of successful evasion, Covid had finally arrived to give me a proper induction into the contemporary human experience. A clinically mild case, no doubt, but… wow.

I hyperlinked to a text of Fr. Ripperger’s, ambitiously entitled “The Metaphysical Impossibility of Human Evolution.” Now, even the title is problematic: Is the argument to be made that evolution per se is impossible, or is there an objection to a solely material causality underlying the human rational soul (which no one in the Church has ever maintained anyway)? And what is meant by “human evolution”? The term itself would seem to be a coinage. Does it refer to human origins specifically? To progress? To individuals? To humanity as a whole?

The reason why, in spite of myself, I chose to investigate further was a sentence from the document which Mike cited. Even with quite a few brain cells tied behind my back by the virus, it leapt off the screen: “Since one species does not have the existence of the essence in itself to be able to confer it to another species, it cannot be the cause of another species/essence.”

“The existence of the essence”? Is that existence, in turn, to have its own essence – “the essence of the existence of the essence,” thus spawning an infinite regress? Existence and essence are defined only in reference to each other. Actually, that a species could bear the “existence of an essence” as something distinct and separable from just a plain and simple essence, is a metaphysical absurdity – it would amount to one thing having within itself a completely indeterminate and amorphous parcel of pure being. Unformed prime matter is an impossibility for even God, and we encounter a similar a priori impossibility here. The only thing which may explain this construct is confusion with the Platonic usage of “essence,” which is divergent. As the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is reported to have said of a particularly garbled argument: “This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.”

Even making the generous assumption that this is supposed to mean something, to anyone who knows Scholastic philosophy, the very words ring so… off. It is pseudo-Scholastic utter nonsense. As a student of actual metaphysics, it makes me shudder, and it compels me to write, with the awareness that precious few have the expertise to discern sham medieval philosophy, even of such epic proportions – not because metaphysics is inherently that hard, but simply because to most it is foreign. Without even analyzing the claim implicit in the sentence Mike cited, let me say that, as far as I can see, Fr. Ripperger’s sprawling, rambling, terminologically overburdened text is all gibberish. While he cites Bernard Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy and seems to have read Edward Feser, he does not seem to have understood even their work very well, nor to be aware that the approach Feser takes is idiosyncratic in some respects. I do note that Fr. Ripperger salts his texts through with citations from Thomas himself, but I invite readers to look at his text, see if they get more out to it than I do, and rephrase it, if they can. What I am reporting is my good-faith response to his argumentation.

I feel doubly obliged to write, as there is no small possibility that Fr. Ripperger was, at least at some point, a student of Dr. Roger Duncan’s. Roger formed the minds of generations of willing, and often awestruck, seminarians, across orders and dioceses. (The remainder endured his classes with resentment and did what they could to secure a grade, or admitted to avoiding them on the basis of their known difficulty.) Anyone who truly loves metaphysics – who esteems it a wisdom – cherishes the elegance of its simplicity, and longs to convey it to whomever will hold still long enough to catch something of the vision on the wind, as it were. Roger held study groups in restaurants. He turned the conversation to ideas at parties and during the holiday gatherings he hosted at his home (which, shockingly, completely burned to ashes last week, just days after we helped move his thousands and thousands of books). He taught Plato and Aristotle to Montessori school toddlers with the aid of puppet friends.

Fr. Ripperger does not seem to have anything of the same impulse to share the Church’s philosophical tradition. Rather, he makes constant recourse to quantities of undefined or ill-defined jargon, jammed together at all angles; he employs loose, verbose grammar – for example: “There are some principles which follow from other principles but those principles which are first are those which do not come from another principle and which have no prior principles in their own series.” Once one untangles the thicket of words, one would appear to be left with a tautology: First principles are those principles which are first.

Worse still, there are strong indicators that Father does not understand himself what he is saying. Staying with this particular example, his subsequent words indicate that he is conflating first principles with the first principle (as Thomas uses it in Question 45 of the Summa) – that is to say, conflating principles and causes. Father writes the following, over two sentences, which is internally contradictory: “Reason is always right when it grasps the first principles. However… [man] does not understand them.” There is no way that someone can know what is meant by an axiomatic and irreducibly self-evident truth (which is what a first principle is) and hold that a failure of understanding can then obtain.

Oddly, he omits any reference to St. Thomas’s account of the six days of creation in ST I, 67-74, which would have seemed to be the most natural approach to his position. He also disparages as “absurd” the idea that God would “destroy” an animal soul in a body and replace it with a human rational soul – an idea not so “absurd” to St. Thomas, as it is a key element in his theory of ensoulment in the process of human gestation, as we have recently discussed elsewhere. My point in bringing up this specific issue is not to defend Thomas’s problematic position here, but to note that Father is claiming Thomistic fundamentalism (not that such is tenable), without having sufficient knowledge to realize that he is directly disparaging Thomas himself.

My intent is not to impugn Father’s character. However, taken neutrally as text qua text, his work would seem to be written, not to instruct the ignorant, but to impress the impressionable. No field, including the hard sciences, is invulnerable to obfuscatory and inscrutable work, although to present such work in the name of God would be particularly offensive. The peculiar obscurantism which would overwhelm its audience with verbiage and a dazzling veneer of technical complexity is not only antithetical to the perennial tradition; it is a mockery. Indeed, it is a lie. Josef Pieper, among the finest of neo-Thomists, calls such out in his essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power“ (the name says it all already):

A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication – these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself.

It would be as if I turned up the elocution (which I can really, really do) and declaimed, “The 47.3° tilt of the axis, observed by parallax during elliptical perigee, confirms the equation f(x)/a+b minus the inverse reciprocal, which is the calculus…” and carried on in that vein over eight thousand words.

Father’s talk (drawn from his self-published magnum opus on the subject) reads as if someone fed a glossary of Scholastic terms to a legacy AI from the last decade. Even more, it is as if the SparkNotes to the entirety of Gardeil’s classic metaphysics primers (no, there isn’t really such a thing) had been poorly absorbed and reconstructed from memory. Almost every topic on which one might be called to hold forth in a comprehensive oral exam is alluded to in this impossible compression, but it is unfocused and extraneous to the alleged thesis. Almost every line is in error – for example, God is not a substance, as Father maintains. Look at the Thomas: “Thus it is clear that God is not in the genus of substance.” (ST I, 3)

Nor does the agent intellect prescind the intelligible in the way that Father claims:

“The human intellect is a mirror image of the ontological order. The ontological order starts first with existence of some thing (essence) in which adhere accidents (existence-essence-accidents), whereas the human cognitive powers first know the accidents, then the essence, then the existence.”

This is wrong in every particular, at least if Thomas is the measure. (Besides, accidents “inhere,” they don’t “adhere.”)

Look, again, at the Thomas: “For what falls first under the apprehension of the intellect is being [existence].” (ST I, 12)

I could go on and on, but you get the point without my having to belabor it. While sophistries are likely available to address any and all particulars (I can probably anticipate certain of the patch-overs), the text taken as a whole is an irrational assembly of words with no meaning; it is mind-tilting, to borrow a phrase which, ironically, I picked up in class from Roger. (I wish I could get his take, but I can just hear him, with that little bit of Yonkers that never left his voice for all his Ivy League education and high culture: “Kid, you disturbed my rest for this?”) Certainly, it will not submit to any syllogistic mapping, so any more time investment would be misplaced. Not to mention, my WPI colleague Paul Chu has also taught seminary metaphysics. An ill-prepared and confused student isn’t too difficult to identify.

Years ago, there was an AI-generated recipe which the machine named, inscrutably, ”Stewart’s For-Life Spaghetti.” I reproduce it in full:

Leftovers: Tangerines, mulled wine, toffee

Steps: Combine noodles and next ingredients to toffee, blending well, then pour over spaghetti. Continue layering peppered mushrooms with 1/2 cup of cheese. Top with cooked chicken. Bake at 450 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes. Remove from oven.

This is the only way I can begin to make myself understood on what Fr. Ripperger’s writings look like to a trained eye. The recipe resembles a cookbook entry, but is yet fully alien to any organism having an appetite and a palate. And wait, where did the peppered mushrooms, or the cheese, or the chicken, come in? Any embodied subject would know the middle-of-the-night misery, which even in doubt and aridity drives one to ardent prayer, implicit in this highly-flavored mélange of noodles dissolving in the acid of wine and citrus, redolent with cinnamon and allspice, buttery-slick and coated with sugar candy, all baked up in a casserole with various savories. You know that the machine doesn’t get it… and this, my friends, is self-evident.

Now let us, at last, get back to the claim which Mike highlighted. Even were that construction to have originated in Aristotle or Thomas, its application demonstrates either a total lack of understanding or a very intentional strawman take-down of evolutionary theory: It’s not like a trilobite suddenly births a tadpole, the primitive arthropod having contained within itself “the existence of the essence” of the falsely postulated evolutionary product, i.e., the new species.

As for evolution in real time, look to… well, Covid. Through necessarily imperfect self-replication, selective pressure and adaptation result in favorable mutations gaining dominance. The mutation passed forward was therefore already contained in the parent organism. Further, any substantial change, as is generation – any reduction of a terminus a quo to a terminus ad quem if you want to be all technical about it – involves a potentiality, or orientation, towards the new reality; if the antecedent already contained the result, there couldn’t be change.

My point is not to enter into conflict with Fr. Ripperger, or to manifest disrespect for his office, or even to treat of evolution proper, although I do intend to write about this at a later time; as Mike’s article cites Pope Benedict XVI: “This clash [between creationism and evolution] is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

Would it be possible to construct an argument against evolution from metaphysics with legitimacy? I do not know, but I doubt it. Metaphysics gets you to the necessity of a first cause, but this is not a point of dispute for anyone. Thomas himself cannot even prove to his own satisfaction that the cosmos is not coeternal with God, so for anyone to make more fine-grained claims on the origins of time and the universe is dubious. Metaphysically speaking, there must be something to account for the appearance of constant novelty within the cosmos. Absent such a mediation, a fixed-duration creation proves problematic. In dealing with this, Augustine leaned into the concept of the rationes seminales. In this article, Fr. Mariusz Tabaczek, Dominican of the Angelicum in Rome, explains the fairly modest adjustments to Aristotle’s hylomorphism that need to be made to bring Augustine’s approach to the rationes seminales into accord with the results of scientific best practices, that is to say, in the words of Ratzinger, “to grasp anew the inner unity of creation and evolution, and of faith and reason.”

The Aristotelian-Thomistic system is so cogent and lucid, and so tightly woven together in its logic. My aim in this essay, as in so much of what I have written, is to defend its beauty, its grandeur and its relevance. If its inner intelligibility is to be gutted, if people are to be locked out as it is transposed to mystification, then I am constrained to speak.

Now, about that Covid infection. It was everything that simply couldn’t happen. I have brain and cardiac and pancreatic and lung function to protect, in support of a spiritual and artistic mission which every day demands the work of ten horses. Now that it has arrived, it’s probably the best thing that could have happened to me. These days have been, I admit, literally painful and a little scary – particularly the one day last week where I could do no more than lie flat on the couch, racked and burning up, with, yes, a bag of frozen corn on my forehead. But this time has been deeply, incredibly joyous. I realize the great grace in having some least part in solidarity with our suffering Holy Father; his daily improving health is a boon to the world. The texts and good wishes and little check-ins I’ve received have made me as happy as I’ve ever been – reminders of people and communities who have become precious to me. From his hospital bed, Francis wrote, “Think of the Covid pandemic: we have, so to speak, ‘squandered’ it; we could have worked more deeply in transformation…” Yet I can live personally, here and now, what was lost at macro scale. As Lent begins, as we get to break up with winter, this enforced rest – as every setback – can be, with God’s help, a moment of transformation, a flourishing, a move into greater conversion, more gratitude, fuller and more enthusiastic hope into the future.