Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
One of the most difficult things for traditional Catholics to accept is the reality that modernism did not suddenly take over Catholic institutions after Vatican II but gradually eroded the faith of Catholic intellectuals over a period of more than 250 years. One of the Catholic intellectuals who did the most to subvert the traditional faith and piety of Catholic intellectuals in Europe was Rene’ Descartes (1596-1650) whose uniformitarian naturalism set the stage for the widespread acceptance of Lyellian geology, Darwinian biology, and Big Bang cosmology and the denial of Scriptural inerrancy except in matters of faith or morals. From time to time, we receive criticism from traditional Catholics who believe that we have gone overboard in our characterization of Descartes as an instrument of the demonic forces. In this newsletter we will defend that characterization and offer an illuminating analysis of the “mystical dreams” which Descartes himself identified as the occasion of his having been “possessed” by “the Spirit of Truth.”
Descartes’ Dreams
The following account of Descartes’ three mystical dreams, requires careful analysis. I invite you to read it carefully, paying special attention to the parts I have bolded or underlined:
On 10 November 1619, at Neubourg, in Saxe-Wurtemberg, on the banks of the Danube, [Bavaria] it is a bitterly cold evening. Freezing rain, driven by a violent wind, smashes against the window-panes. Trees are torn up, draughts rush down chimneys, and swinging metal signs creak loudly.
Inside an over-heated bedroom, curled up in an armchair at a table, next to a big, earthenware stove, is a young man of twenty-three. Oblivious to the weather outside, he is reading by the bright light of a candelabrum.
The young man does not come from Neubourg. He is a soldier of the Duke of Bavaria, whose armies have just taken up their Winter quarters. Like his army colleagues, he is lodged with a town inhabitant, and is living a gentle, comfortable life while waiting to leave, in Spring, to fight the Protestant troops of the Palatine Elector Frederic V.
The young soldier rarely leaves the house where he is billeted. Tonight, he is reading a treatise on music. But, perhaps due to the excessive heat of the stove, he keeps nodding off. So, he puts away the book, undresses, blows out the candles, and goes to bed. And, in spite of the tempest which continues to rattle the house, blowing away weather-vanes and whistling through the roof, the young soldier quickly goes to sleep.
He immediately has a strange dream: he is walking in an unknown street, when suddenly ghosts appear in front of him. Terrified, he wants to flee, but he feels a great weakness on his right side, and he is obliged to lean on his left to be able to advance. Ashamed of walking in this grotesque position, he makes an immense effort to stand upright, but an impetuous wind suddenly makes him spin three or four times on his left foot, like a top.
Then, he stops spinning and forces himself to continue to advance. But his body’s position makes walking difficult, and he thinks that he is going to fall with each step that he takes. A college, whose door is open, then appears in his path. He enters it, thinking to find refuge there, and perhaps a remedy for what is ailing him. Then he sees the college church and wants to go there to pray, but he notices that he has passed a man whom he knows, without greeting him. So, he wants to turn back to say something agreeable to him. But he is violently pushed back by the wind which is blowing against the church and stopping him from advancing. At the same time, he sees, in the middle of the college courtyard, another person who calls him by his name and says to him:
“Would you be kind enough to carry something to one of our friends?”
The young man asks what he is to carry. He receives no answer, but imagines, we don’t know why, that it is a melon brought from some foreign country.
He continues walking, dragging himself along and tottering, while the people whom he meets are walking firmly on their feet, and the wind has dropped. He is so unhappy that he wakes up.
The dream, from which he emerges with difficulty, has anguished him so much that he thinks that a bad genie has come to torment him. So, he makes a long prayer to secure himself against the bad effects of his vision.
After two hours of unhappy thoughts, he goes back to sleep. He is immediately transported into another dream where he hears a sharp, explosive noise, which he takes for thunder. Fear wakes him. Opening his eyes, he sees sparks from the fire scattered in his bedroom. But this doesn’t worry him, for it has happened several times before. On some nights, the sparks are so bright that they allow him to see the objects around him.
After a short time, he goes back to sleep once more, and finds himself in a third dream. In front of him, on a table, is a book. Having opened it, he sees that it is a dictionary. Then he notices a second book. This one is a poetry anthology. He flicks through it and immediately comes upon the latin verse: “Quod vitae sectabor iter?”: “Which path in life will I choose?”.
At the same time, an unknown man appears and presents him with a poem which starts with Est et non (what is and is not). He adds that it is an excellent work. The young soldier says:
“I know. It is in this book of poems. Look!”
But he flicks through the anthology in vain. He can’t find the poem. So, he takes up the dictionary and notices that some of the pages are missing. He is exchanging a few more words with the stranger when, suddenly, the books and the man disappear.
When he wakes up, the young soldier, very troubled by these three dreams, thinks that they have been sent to him by Heaven and starts to try to find out what they mean . . .
As soon as he awakes, the young soldier, Rene Descartes, starts looking for the interpretation of his three dreams. The verse Quod vitae sectabor iter? (Which path in life will I choose?) clearly indicates to him that he is at a capital moment of his existence. The poem Est et non (What is and is not) signifies that he must separate the true from the false in human knowledge. Knowledge, which is represented by the dictionary. All this seems so clear that he is persuaded that the Spirit of Truth wanted to open up the treasures of all of the sciences by this dream, and he exults.
Then he goes to the interpretation of the first two dreams. These, too, seem evident to him. The wind which pushed him towards the college church seems to him to be nothing more than a bad genie. He thinks:
“That is why God did not allow me to be blown away, even towards a holy place, by this demon spirit.”
The melon that someone wanted to give him seems to him to represent “the charms of solitude.” As for the thunder that he heard, it represents the sign of the Spirit of Truth which had just descended into him to possess him…
A Commentary on Descartes’ Dreams
Rationalist, materialist academics cannot possibly appreciate the spiritual subtleties of Descartes’ account of his mystical dreams. When read in the light of the principles of Catholic spiritual theology, it is apparent that Descartes had an encounter with an evil spirit, and NOT with the Spirit of Truth. In the first place, according to his biographers, prior to having these dreams Descartes had had affairs with women and was not living a devout Catholic life. In the first dream, “ghosts” appear to him; he experiences a kind of fear which never accompanies a visitation from Heaven; his dream fills him with anguish; he thinks that “a bad genie” has come to torment him. He makes a long prayer to be “delivered” from the evil effects of the dream. After two hours of “unhappy thoughts,” he goes back to sleep.
From his second dream “fear” wakes him and he sees “sparks of fire.” After he wakes up from his third dream—which has no redeeming content whatsoever—he:
goes to the interpretation of the first two dreams. These, too, seem evident to him. The wind which pushed him towards the college church seems to him to be nothing more than a bad genie. He thinks:
“That is why God did not allow me to be blown away, even towards a holy place, by this demon spirit.”
Here Descartes betrays his diabolical disorientation when he reveals that he believes that it was a demon that tried to move him toward the church, a holy place. He concludes that God did not want him to enter the church, the holy place, although such a thing could never be true of the living God. Finally, Descartes says that:
The melon that someone wanted to give him seems to him to represent “the charms of solitude.” As for the thunder that he heard, it represents the sign of the Spirit of Truth which had just descended into him to possess him…
Descartes’ statement that the Spirit of Truth had “descended into him to possess him” is reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin’s encounter with “the Thing,” an evil spirit, which he mistook for the Spirit of God. In authentic Catholic mysticism, the Holy Spirit does not “descend into souls to possess them.” Souls may ask the Holy Spirit to possess them, but He does not, as in Descartes’ dream, “descend into them to possess them” uninvited. Nor does His presence inspire fear, anguish, unhappy thoughts, and prayers for deliverance.
According to Descartes’ Dream, Descartes “vowed he would put his life under the protection of the Blessed Virgin and go on a pilgrimage from Venice to Notre Dame de Lorette, traveling by foot and wearing the humblest-looking clothes he could find.” (Descartes' Dream, by Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsh). But unless this pilgrimage was accompanied by a sincere conversion and humble practice of the Catholic Faith, it would only confirm Descartes in his deception, leading him to believe that his “possession by an evil spirit” was possession by the Spirit of God.
An Encyclopedia Britannica article on Descartes includes the following information:
[Reasons why Descartes left France] Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In the same time-frame as his mystical dreams, the article says that Descartes:
investigated reports of esoteric knowledge, such as the claims of the practitioners of theosophy to be able to command nature.
After saying that Descartes sought out but did not connect with Rosicrucians, the article goes on to say that:
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits. Like the Rosicrucians, he lived alone and in seclusion, changed his residence often (during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places), practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase human longevity, and took an optimistic view of the capacity of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Despite these affinities, Descartes rejected the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs. For him, this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science.
In Catholic spiritual theology, it is always considered sinful and extremely dangerous to pursue or “investigate reports of esoteric knowledge” and many instances of demonic possession are linked to this kind of unhealthy curiosity.
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes’ embrace of Copernicanism underscores his contempt for the authority of the Church. That he would make a position condemned by the Magisterium “central to his cosmology and physics” reveals how utterly he exalted his own wisdom above the Word of God as understood in the Church from the beginning.
In light of all of the above, consider that after his three mystical dreams and his “possession” by the Spirit of Truth, Descartes:
- denied Original Sin and the necessity of grace for salvation
- denied that God intervenes in nature in answer to prayers
- asserted that it was more reasonable to explain the origins of things in nature naturalistically than to accept God’s revelation of fiat creation in Genesis
- had a child out of wedlock by a servant woman.
- Embraced Copernicanism in defiance of the Magisterium
- Rejected Aristotelianism and, with it, almost certainly rejected Transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist
- entrusted his financial affairs in France to Fr. Picot, known as “the atheist priest”
- entrusted his financial affairs in Holland to his close friend Corneille van Hogelande, a Rosicrucian physician
What sincere Catholic or friend of Our Lord Jesus Christ would choose as his executors men who, on the one hand, scandalously desecrated the priesthood and, on the other hand, dabbled in the occult?
If the “tree should be judged by its fruits,” these “fruits” confirm that the Spirit of Truth that Descartes encountered in his three mystical dreams was actually none other than the Father of Lies or one of his minions. The widespread approval and even adulation accorded to Descartes by Catholic intellectuals in modern times represents a shocking sign of the “diabolical disorientation” spoken of by Sister Lucia of Fatima.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of St. Joseph, Terror of Demons, and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. On Thursday, March 27, I will give a presentation to home-schooling families at the Apostolate for Family Consecration headquarters in Bloomingdale, Ohio. On Saturday, March 29, Fr. Chad Ripperger, Dr. Robert Sungenis, Ademar Rakowsky and I will hold a “Restore Truth” conference at the Ingleside Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the “Restore Truth” conference I will drive to North Carolina and then on to Alabama to give some additional seminars. If anyone reading this newsletter would be willing and able to organize a venue for me anywhere between Wisconsin and Alabama during the first week in April, please contact me at howen@shentel.net as soon as possible.
