Maritain, though a former friend of Paul VI, had the courage to raise his still powerful voice in a “Memorandum” to the Pope:
We need to raise the attention to an error of translation, which is not only an inexact statement more or less serious but an error purely and clearly unacceptable… Under pretense that the word “substance” and, a fortiori, the word “consubstantial” are today impossible to use, the French version of the Mass obliges the faithful to recite, in the Creed, a formula which is erroneous in itself and even, strictly speaking, heretical. It makes us say, in fact, that the Son, begotten, not created, is “of the same nature as the Father”, which corresponds exactly to the homoiousios of the Arians or semi-Arians, by opposition to the homoousios(consubstantialis) of the Council of Nicea…
It is evident that, to express an absolutely single reality, one needs a single word… If, by uttering the word consubstantial, the people do not understand what this means, we may expect that they would ask their clergy, who will remind them of their catechism and the proper meaning of the dogma. But, if these people say in the Creed that the Son is of the same nature as the Father, they would never be preoccupied to ask for its explanation, precisely because the words chosen present no difficulty to their mind, words which they understand as easily as when one says, speaking to someone else, that one bird is of the same nature as another bird.
Moreover, the controversy has been rekindled lately by the French daily La Croix ( November 13), which complains about having to re-instate the term “consubstantial”, under the pretext that the word substance would now present another sense, which would dethrone the term “transubstantiation” too. Why? The term has been forged by the philosophy of Aristotle at the time of St. Thomas Aquinas and, although true, renders the term incomprehensible and lifeless today.
These are comments of the greatest interest as the New Liturgical Year is introducing the term back into the re-reformed Novus Ordo missal.
The very fact that Rome is going back to the original version is a silent avowal that something was amiss. It took 40 years before the forced mouth feeding of an unclear statement was taken away from the Creed, which is the foundation of our faith!
Maritain is very acute in pointing out that the desire for clarifying a mystery leads to misrepresentations which can be revoked only by a theologian. Indeed to speak of “the same nature” may refer to two different beings (two birds) which, applied to God, would induce the simple folks in denying the unity of God. Theologians however would argue that there are no pure spirits who share the same nature and so, to say that the Son is “of the same nature as the Father” is to affirm that He is one with Him.
Perhaps some (even presumptuously so) would argue that Maritain is exaggerating here and missing the point of the controversy. At that time, the question was not so much the unity or division of God as the equality or subordination of the Son and Father. The opposition was between the semi-Arians who held that Christ was “of a similar nature” (homoiousios) and not “of the same substance” of the Antisubordinationists. It is the difference between margarine and butter which have a similar nature but are not quite the same really. Besides, the term ousia of homoousiosmeans being, substance, essence and, therefore, it may not wrongly be translated nature.
In Church history, the progress in the enunciation of the dogma goes always from the obscure to the clear, from the broad to the precise. Consubstantial obviously cuts short any heretical fiddling as it defends the equality of nature as well as the singleness of being between the Son and the Father. So, to return to a less clear statement as the modernists do, is to muddle the clear doctrine of the Faith, and to return to the Iron Age. Are they Modernists or Homoids?
No doubt, the neo-modernists frown upon the return of the “barbarian” Scholastic terminology. As the French episcopal directory explained in 1966, such words had today another meaning for the “philosophical spirit of the day”. For a philosophical spirit! Yet, for just about everybody, such terms have never changed and, whether Thomist or Aristotelian or else, substance and accidents, nature and person have always meant the same thing for 99.99% of the people on earth. The .01% refers to the population animated by the “philosophical spirit of the day” and the snob intellectuals of the Catholic universities, all modernists, all Kantians.
Maritain, just around Vatican II, had warned of the “immanent apostasy” grounded on the modern philosophies which are ideologies bound for nihilism. Earlier on, Chesterton had said nothing different: “Today, the most dangerous of all criminals today is the modern philosopher, liberated from all laws.”
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