IV
THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM
…:"Catholicism produced
heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy, wealthy,
free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of any great action,
because their religion has begun by destroying in the heart of man all that
made him capable of daring and noble self-sacrifice."
Take any of the dogmatic
systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolvent analysis—that
of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example—and note the
extent to which eschatology is reduced. And his master, Albrecht Ritschl,
himself says: "The question regarding the necessity of justification or
forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and
aim of that divine operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely
to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all
experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind. Hopes
and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any
the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the
completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and completeness of idea,
however, are the conditions of comprehending anything—i.e., of
understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing,
and between the thing and its given presuppositions. The Evangelical article of
belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it
assurance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this
purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is
possible now" (Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. iii., chap.
vii., 52). All this is very rational, but ...
In the first edition of Melanchthon's Loci Communes,
that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all
Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology.
And Dr. Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's
commerce with God (Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott)—a book the first
chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian
religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most perfect Lutheran
manual—tells us in another place, referring
to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that
"the effective knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith
lives, is something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in
Christian doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to
obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that time—that is to
say, until Luther—the Church had accepted much as doctrina sacra which
cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty of heart and
tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of
a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their
perdurability after death. "The desire for the soul's salvation,"
Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the knowledge and
understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And in his book on
the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran doctor is continually
discoursing upon trust in God, peace of conscience, and an assurance of
salvation that is not strictly and precisely certainty of everlasting life, but
rather certainty of the forgiveness of sins.
And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst
Troeltsch, that in the conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest
reach in music, in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic
expression. This, then, is what Protestantism dissolves into—celestial music! On
the other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism,
or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible,
and permanent—for the vehicle of sounds is air—in sculpture and painting, in
the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes
dying, in order that he may give us life.
No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,
and the rest that follows.
The real sin—perhaps it is
the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission—is the sin
of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying
has been heard before now, here in
And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of
the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is
infallible—the Bible, or a society of men—the Church, or a single man? Does it
make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the
infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that
of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to be posited.
It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert
itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete
dogmatic structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against
Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood up
against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and
until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to
shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It
opposed
Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbé, said: "I say simply this,
that the Church and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific
movement, and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their
power, they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not
associated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement. Theology has conducted
itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of
history, together with that general philosophy of nature and history which
results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that the
domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even as
defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice. Everything
proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn from modern science,
natural or historical, and as if by itself it had the power and the right to
exercise a direct and absolute control over all the activities of the human
mind" (Autour d'un Petit Livre, 1903, p. 211).
And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's
attitude in its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and
leading exponent.
The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism
is a struggle for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks
assurance of survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should
affirm that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical
order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone? Read,
moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the resurrection of
Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, Dogme et Critique, and tell
me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build on. Do not the Modernists
see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of
Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness,
as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection of body as well as
soul? This new psychological apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we,
like the Jews, seek for a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all
the powers of the soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands
and the feet and the mouth, if it be possible.
But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith,
which does not feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it.
And hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of consciousness. We need
security, certainty, signs, and they give us motiva credibilitatis—motives
of credibility—upon which to establish the rationale obsequium, and
although faith precedes reason (fides præcedit rationem), according to
St. Augustine, this same learned doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to
understanding (per fidem ad intellectum), and to believe in order to
understand (credo ut intelligam). How far is this from that superb
expression of Tertullian—et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile
est!—"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is
impossible!" and his sublime credo quia absurdum!—the scandal
of the rationalists. How far from the il faut s'abêtir of
Pascal and from the "human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso
Cortés, which he must have learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!
And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of
tradition and the revelation of the word of God, and the principle of unanimous
consent was arrived at. Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est
erratum, sed traditum, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries
later, that "certitude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is, if
I may be allowed the expression, a social product." But
here, as in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great
Catholic, whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de
Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a
single opinion of universal utility that is not true." Here
you have the Catholic hall-mark—the deduction of the truth of a principle from
its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more
sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is uncertain,
either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the
Dominican, implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love,
and when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love,"
Seuse replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning
soul." Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with
tradition, nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.
And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its
handmaiden—ancilla theologiæ—scholastic philosophy, and this handmaiden
turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent cathedral, in which
all the problems of architectonic mechanism were resolved for future ages, but
a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks, gave place little by little to what
is called natural theology and is merely Christianity depotentialized. The
attempt was even made, where it was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to
show at least that if they were indeed super-rational they were not
contra-rational, and they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of
Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism
recommended by Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of
dogma but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is not
enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive the body
and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all those
difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from accidents, and
so break with the whole of the modern rational conception of substantiality.
But for this, implicit faith suffices—the faith of the
coalheaver, the
faith of those who, like St. Teresa (Vida, cap. xxv. 2), do not wish to
avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason
of that, for I am ignorant;
And why was this? Because faith—that is, Life—no longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought to establish its foundation—not, indeed, over against reason, where it really is, but upon reason—that is to say, within reason—itself. The nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus—that which maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as upon the free and inscrutable will of God—by accentuating its supreme irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."
The truth is, Catholicism
oscillates between mysticism, which is the inward experience of the living God
in Christ, an intransmittible experience, the danger of which, however, is that
it absorbs our own personality in God, and so does not save our vital
longing—between mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see
Weizsäcker, op. cit.); it oscillates between religionized science
and scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by
little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into the
background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting
faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact
with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason
allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma
became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The
Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and
divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with
free will, free will with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps
true, as Hermann says (loc. cit.), that "as soon as we develop
religious thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with
other ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is
that gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?
At the
cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental exigencies of
those believers in possession of an adult reason. It demands from them that
they shall believe all or nothing, that they shall accept the complete totality
of dogma or that they shall forfeit all merit if the least part of it be
rejected. And hence the result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing
pointed out,[25] that
in
The Catholic solution of our
problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and
eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore
satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology
fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as
those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as
super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it
any good wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers.
Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic
category.
Let us now consider the
rationalist or scientific solution—or, more properly, dissolution—of our
problem.
V
THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION
The great master of
rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay "On the
Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It appears
difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The
arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or
physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that
has brought to light life and immortality." Which is equivalent to denying
the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
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