Vigilius, Vatican I, and the Specter of Hyperpapalism

How modernity crept into the modern Church's self-understanding

The German clerical author who writes under the name Vigilius recently published an important essay in which he maintains that modernity—in the form of Cartesian epistemology and Hobbesian absolutism—crept into the modern Church’s response to it, taking the form of hyperpapalism.

Long before reading Vigilius’s essay, I was already convinced (and have said in various places) that hyperpapalism is a distinctively modern response to a distinctively modern epistemological crisis: moderns no longer know where to get certainty from (materialism has removed it from physical objects encountered through our senses; psychologism has removed it from our interior states; historicism has removed it from Scripture and other written sources; etc.). So the modern individual is thrown into a world of frightening cognitive anarchy and he is desperately in search of an authoritative spokesman who will always tell him the truth, always be the beacon to guide the ship to port, without fail, without the possibility of failure. And by a neat trick, extrapolating from the ambient ultramontanism, we find that the pope is this spokesman who speaks nothing but the truth, an oracle of the living God.

I’m not claiming that people think all of this explicitly, but rather, imaginatively describing the larger crisis of knowledge from which this “it’s infallibly safe to follow the pope” position gains its seductive appeal—and in which it becomes possible to think that there is, practically speaking, nothing off limits for the pope to change as he wishes. As Michael Hanby writes in “Synodality and the Spirit of Truth“:

The many questions provoked by the unfolding of the synodal process and the political and sociological lexicon of its lay champions boil down to the question of the relationship between auctoritas and potestas, which finally turns on the question of truth. Once historicism and sociologism have annihilated the transcendent basis of truth, reducing “truth” to the sum of antecedent conditions and “what we have the power to effect,” authority becomes just another expression of the will to power. One cannot throw every truth up for grabs—“male and female he created them,” for example—while holding onto the truth of papal primacy from Pastor Aeternus, without treating the pope as a Hobbesian sovereign and basing his authority on his power rather than the reverse. Authority without truth is finally not authority at all. Mere “doctrinal policy” can effect changes in structure; it can even compel obedience, to the cheers of the Sodalitium Franciscanum; but it cannot bring one to believe as true what one knows to be false. Power can compel, but it cannot oblige.

In a private communication to me that I share with his permission, Robert Keim of Poetic Knowledge reacted as follows to Vigilius’s essay, which I had sent to him: