Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian
solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality.
Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual
streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already
influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and
social permanence.
It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive
Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after
death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the
proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a
belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the
same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which
was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of
tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel;
and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an
orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the
Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all
that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the
clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the
dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into
Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be
understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the
Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste
of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the
kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter,
verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus
to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise
again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves,
questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean."
And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and
_raison d'être_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt.
xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29;
vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that
passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of
Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."
And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was
born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised
him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not
presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense
(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
But more of this later.
Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual
streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on
its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a
definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another
life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in
a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all
their spiritual history.
Jahwé, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the
God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest
on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the
Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a
metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of
social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return
later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming
more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more
universal. He is the Jahwé who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).
And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it
faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had
already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.
Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the
continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek
philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and
intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a
Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in
virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force
in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief"
(Rohde, _op. cit._).
Recall the _Phædo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them
the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning
which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the
Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes
(_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896),
"no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in
the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people
changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism
which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and
neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous
and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as
a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana
is an Hellenic idea.
Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery
of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the
entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of
life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The
discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the
perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the
death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.
Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic
and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian
discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus,
the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus,
and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology
of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For
him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for
the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsäcker (_Das
apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).
He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus
he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and
unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for
the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The
important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died
and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical
work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And
he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached
that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead,
then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our
preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are
fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope
in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).
And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe
in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be
specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that
"all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even
though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates
and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is
to say a witness--of Christianity? No.
And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of
the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the
resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of
Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order
that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal.
And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily
anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for
man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances
due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save
us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies
death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of
us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His
creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_
Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_
man had fallen.
After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity
wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to
safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the
Council of Nicæa came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.
Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above
all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he
opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of
that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a
teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee
that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that
Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his
Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.
"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He
was first God and then became man in order that He might the better
deify us (_theopoiêsê_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of
the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and
revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ,
is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is
the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of
this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is
essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the
divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
myth or in a social atom?
This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really
historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing
the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.
And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting
things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists
in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of
contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes,
so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever
of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the
contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is
contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements
of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.
At Nicæa, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the
idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological
sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the
representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the
spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say,
and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.
_Quid ad æternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends
with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
sæculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
tombstone on which this verse is carved:
_Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos,
en Ti, Señor, nuestra esperanza fía,
que tornaremos a vivir vestidos
con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16]
"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.
So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of
the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.
They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the
Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament
springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the
soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in
whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they
are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their
own bodies."
And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ
corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic
piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of
Christ, which is the bread of immortality.
This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would
say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is
the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is
substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.
Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible
respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the
phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding
upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was
communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year
of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the
Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another
sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of
Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how
much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that
the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole
and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling
another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one
difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of
this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is
the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing
body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.
For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not
justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.
It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of
him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely,
that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in
Catholicism.
The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at
any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish,
among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And
there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants
the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as
something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by
baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is
transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore,
in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving
due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed
in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its
religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else,
ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons
the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious
individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated
little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in
spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its
earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious
coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in
the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklärung_, and which pietism,
infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely
succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of
Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_,
in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "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,[18] 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![19] 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.
And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps
knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the
social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and
hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly
eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is
a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element
preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism,
is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual
soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of
virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to
perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is
important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not
necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather
rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--
_No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]
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 Spain, that to be
a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief,
or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose
infallibility protects us from reason.
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 Darwin, and it did right, for
Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal,
created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first
Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable
with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.
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."[21] 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."[22] 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,[23]
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; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will
know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It
was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted,
that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of
river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of
the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii.
3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian
people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to
those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian
formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly
impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the
Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was
presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more
deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of
the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.
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."[24]
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 France
and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery
to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd
doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in
those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to
believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here
is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the
terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with
the reason and not with life.
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.