Relativism And The Pursuit Of Novelty

"With truly lamentable results, our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race."

- Pope St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already, in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after."

- Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 (RSV Bible)

In today's day and age, it is virtually impossible to go through an entire hour - to say nothing of an entire day - without hearing someone, somewhere, speak of the need for change, whether that change is of a personal, communal, social, political, economic, physical, psychological, or spiritual nature, and everything in between. It has gotten to the point where people speak of change simply for variety's sake. This is unfortunate because change, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. There are indeed many things in the present day that are in dire need of change, particular in the realm of morality. Of course, sometimes the only kind of change necessary is a return to the very things that those who clamored for change steered us away from in the first place.

The desire for change in man is natural. We are all in a naturally restless state that is born from a desire to be reconciled with God. As St. Augustine so succinctly put it: "My heart is restless, O God, until it rests in Thee." Ideally, we orient ourselves towards God throughout the course of our lives as a natural manifestation of our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth; and if there were no other factors to stop us, that is indeed how man would always orient himself. However, there are indeed other factors, all of whom have their root in the same source: namely, the evil one.

How, exactly, does this tie in to the title of this post? Simple: the most effective way that the devil distracts man from his natural inclination towards God is through the spread of heresy. One particularly pernicious heresy, known as Modernism - which has its roots in the philosophical Liberalism that itself was an outgrowth of the virulently anti-religious secular humanism of the Enlightenment - was described by Pope St. Pius X as "the synthesis of all heresies" in his landmark encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis. This description flows from St. Pius' assertion that Modernism embraces every heresy that came before. As such, it is difficult to give a succinct definition of the theory of Modernism. A good place to start is with the very definition of the word, which literally means an exaggerated love for what is modern, for modern ideas, and for the general "spirit of the age." This leads to a tendency to disregard all that has come before (a classic example being the way in which present-day "Catholic" dissenters disregard all that came before Vatican II even as they work to distort the documents of Vatican II itself to conform to modern secular notions), and with that the tendency to "rediscover" centuries-old notions and pass them off as new.

A natural - and highly unfortunate - consequence of such shortsighted thinking is the belief that truth must necessarily conform itself to the "spirit of the age." This is a form of Relativism, which denies the existence of objective, timeless truth - and thus necessarily denies the existence of the Eternal Truth - and which is very possibly the worst consequence of the Modernist heresy.

Which brings us to the point of this post. It is no coincidence that those who are most preoccupied with the pursuit of novelty are the very same who have yet to discover or acknowledge the fact that the most important truths are not subject to majority votes or recent trends in human thought. They seek novelties as a way to fill the void in their lives, to relieve the natural longing they feel but which they are either unwilling or unable to acknowledge. They continue to look for the perpetual quick fix, distracting themselves with things which for them are new. Again, there is nothing new under the sun, but this timeless truth is rejected by Relativists. If it is new to them, then it is new, as for them truth is based on personal experience - an idea very much in keeping with the spirit of the modern age. And as the novelty of one thing wears off, they abandon it to pursue the next new thing. Oscar Wilde - whose pursuit of novelty manifested itself in increasingly vulgar acts of sodomy, resulting in his eventual imprisonment and the ruin of his literary career - cynically quipped that he read St. Augustine's Confessions so he could discover new sins to commit (reading St. Augustine appears to have had some beneficial effect, as Wilde pursued one other "novelty" few other Relativists pursue: a deathbed conversion to Catholicism).

We see the effects that the pursuit of novelty has wrought on modern society. People who pursue cheap thrills find themselves over the course of time having to do more and more for less and less satisfaction. The Howard Sterns of the world - the so-called "shock jocks" - have to commit increasingly more outrageous acts just to maintain the attention of a quickly jaded audience. The pursuit of sex for pleasure's sake results in the dissociation of the unitive (love-giving) meaning from the procreative (life-giving) meaning of sex, and in the process both of these aspects of the sexual gift are severely impaired (one need only see the skyrocketing divorce rates and nearly 50 million aborted babies in the last generation alone to see just how devastating the introduction of the pill and so-called "worry-free sex" has been for modern society); and as the pleasure derived from so-called "recreational sex" becomes less and less satisfying, sex between uncommitted partners has taken on more perverse forms as people try to get more "creative" in order to achieve the same fleeting sense of satisfaction. This because man has become convinced that the most important aspect of the sexual gift is the physical pleasure it gives (the selfish aspect), rather than the emotional bond it creates between a married man and woman and the manifestation this bond takes in the creation of new life (the selfless aspects). Two guesses as to who did the convincing...

What, exactly, does St. Pius refer to when he speaks of the rejection of the legacy of the human race? He refers to the gift of redemption purchased through the Precious Blood of Christ, and the promise of salvation that this gift entails. Rather than pursue the fleeting novelties the devil throws in our path to divert us from our goal, let us pursue the One novelty that is eternal, and never fleeting. Let us pursue the path that leads to reconciliation with God. Let us not waste the most precious of all gifts, purchased for us freely by the One who loves us most. And if we are to pursue any change in our lives, let it be a change that leads to further sanctification, for any other kind of change is of this world, and by definition fleeting. God bless!



In Jesus and Mary,
Gerald