Logos over Ethos

Synonymous with Catholic!

“Protestantism presents, in its various forms, ranging from the strong tendency to the extreme of free speculation, the more or less Christian version of this [will over truth] spirit, and Kant has rightly been called its philosopher. It is a spirit which has step by step abandoned objective religious truth, and has increasingly tended to make conviction a matter of personal judgment, feeling, and experience. In this way truth has fallen from the objective plane to the level of a relative and fluctuating value. As a result, the will has been obliged to assume the leadership. When the believer no longer possesses any fundamental principles, but only an experience of faith as it affects him personally, the one solid and recognizable fact is no longer a body of dogma which can be handed on in tradition, but the right action as a proof of the right spirit. In this connection there can be no talk of spiritual metaphysics in the real sense of the word. And when knowledge has nothing ultimately to seek in the Above, the roots of the will and of feeling are in their turn loosened from their adherence to knowledge. The relation with the supertemporal and eternal order is thereby broken. The believer no longer stands in eternity, but in time, and eternity is merely connected with time through the medium of conviction, but not in a direct manner. Religion becomes increasingly turned towards the world, and cheerfully secular. It develops more and more into a consecration of temporal human existence in its various aspects, into a sanctification of earthly activity, of vocational labor, of communal and family life, and so on. 139-140

“...[S]uch a conception of spiritual life . . . is untrue, and therefore contrary to Nature in the deepest sense of the word. Here is the real source of the terrible misery of our day. It has perverted the sacred order of Nature [by putting the will before knowledge]. It was Goethe who really shook the latter when he made the doubting Faust write, not ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ but ‘In the beginning was the Deed.’ 140-141

"...The will is not required to prove truth, nor is the latter obliged to give an account of itself to the will, but the will has to acknowledge itself as perfectly incompetent before truth. It does not create the latter, but it finds it. The will has to admit that it is blind and needs the light, the leadership, and the organising, formative power of the truth. It must admit as a fundamental principle the primacy of knowledge over the will, of the Logos over the Ethos." 143

Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Sheed and Ward: London, 1930.

N.B. "Nietzsche's father was a clergyman; his two grandfathers were clergymen; his uncles and grand-uncles were clergymen; and therefore (Freud would say 'therefore') he was a rampant and flamboyant atheist! The 'surpressed urges' could no longer be surpressed."

James M. Gillis, False Prophets, MacMillan: New York, 1927, 85.

So, his "God is dead" theology is simply the ramblings of a very bright and tortuous preacher's son.