ENTHUSIASM THE SOURCE OF HERESY.
The creed of the Christian is the fruit of exposition; no part of it is
elaborated by processes of abstract reasoning; no part is furnished by
the inventive faculties. To ascertain the true meaning of the words and
phrases used by those who "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,"
is the single aim of the studies of the theologian. Interpretation is
his function. But the work of interpretation, considered as an
intellectual employment, differs essentially from that of the student of
physical or abstract science; for it neither needs nor admits of the
ardor by which those pursuits are animated. Nor has nature furnished the
faculties that are employed in the labor of expounding the terms of
ancient documents with any very vivid susceptibility of pleasurable
excitement. The toils of the lawyer, of the philologist, and of the
theologian, must therefore be sustained by a reference to some
substantial motive of utility; and though there may be a few minds so
peculiarly constituted as to cultivate these studies with enthusiastic
ardor, from the pure impulse of native taste, the ranks of a numerous
body of men can never be filled up by spontaneous laborers of this sort.
Christianity, being as it is, a religion of documents and of
interpretation, must utterly exclude from its precincts the adventurous
spirit of innovation. Theology offers no field to men fond of
intellectual enterprise: the Church has no work for them; or none until
they have renounced the characteristic propensity of their mental
conformation. True religion, unlike human science, was given to mankind
in a finished form, and is to be learned, not improved; and though the
most capacious human mind is nobly employed while concentrating all its
vigor upon the acquirement of this documentary learning, it is very
fruitlessly, and very perniciously occupied in attempting to give it a
single touch of amendment.
The form under which Christianity now presents itself as an object of
study does, in a much greater degree, discourage and prevent speculation
and novelty, than it did in the early ages; and in fact, if all the
varieties of opinion which have appeared during the eighteen centuries
of church history are numbered, a large majority of them will be found
to belong to the first three centuries, and to the _eastern_ church.
That is to say, to the period when doctors of theology, possessing the
rule of faiths in their vernacular tongue, had no other intellectual
employment than that either of inventing novelties of doctrine, or of
refuting them. Other causes may, no doubt, fairly be alleged as having
had influence in quickening that prodigious efflorescence of heretical
doctrine which infected the whole atmosphere of Christianity, in the
east, during the second and third centuries, and at a time when the
western church maintained, in a good degree, the simplicity of
Scriptural faith; but the cause above-mentioned ought not to be ranked
among the least efficient.
But theology in modern times offers an unbounded field of toil to the
student;—the toil of mere acquisition, and of critical research; for a
familiar knowledge of three languages, at least, is indispensable to
every man who would take respectable rank as a teacher of Christianity;
especially to every one who aspires to distinction in his order; and
some acquaintance with two or three other languages, is also an object
of reasonable ambition to the theological student. And moreover, an
accomplished expounder of Scripture must be well versed in profane and
church history; nor may he be entirely ignorant of even the abstract and
physical sciences. These multifarious pursuits, which are to be acquired
compatibly with the discharge of the public duties of the pastoral
office, assuredly furnish employment enough for the most active and the
most industrious mind long beyond the period of college initiation. Nor
are we to consider merely the natural influence produced upon the
intellectual habits by these employments, in preventing that
discursiveness of the inventive faculties which is a principal source of
heresy; for its quality, not less than its quantity, is decidedly
corrective of the propensity to generate novelties of opinion.
Every one who has made the experiment well knows that the toils of
learned acquisition have a direct tendency to impair the freshness and
force of the intellectual constitution, to chill and cloud the
imagination, and to break the elasticity of the inventive faculty; if
not to blunt the keenness of the powers of analysis. Thus they indispose
the mind to the wantonness of speculation, and impart to it rather the
timidity, the acquiescence, the patience, which are proper to the
submissive exposition of an authoritative rule of faith. Biblical
learning, therefore, not only serves directly to dispel errors of
opinion by throwing open the true sense of Scripture; but it contains
within itself what might be termed a _physical_ preventive against
heresy, which, if it be not always efficacious, is perceptibly
operative. Nothing then can be more desirable than that public opinion
should continue, as it now does, to demand erudition from the teachers
of religion.
Nevertheless, when a large class of men is professionally devoted to the
study of theology, there will not be wanting some whose mental
conformation (not to mention motives which are foreign to our subject)
impels them to abandon the modest path of exposition, and to seek,
within the precincts of religion, for the gratifications that accompany
abstruse speculation, discovery, invention, exaggeration, and paradox.
All these pleasures of a morbid or misdirected intellectual activity may
be obtained in the regions of theology, not less than in those of
mathematical and physical science, if once the restraints of a religious
and heartfelt reverence for the authority of the word of God are
discarded. The principal heresies that have disturbed the church, may,
no doubt, fairly be attributed to motives springing from the pride or
perverse dispositions of the human heart; but often a mere intellectual
enthusiasm has been the real source of false doctrine.
Errors generated in this manner possess, commonly, some aspect of beauty
or of greatness, or of philosophical simplicity, to recommend them; for
as they were framed amid a pleasurable excitement of the mind, so they
will have power to convey a kindred delight to others. And such
exorbitances of doctrine, when advanced by men of powerful or richly
furnished minds, conceal their deformity and evil tendency beneath the
attractions of intelligence. But the very same extravagances and showy
paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their
garb, not only of beauty, but of decency, and show themselves in the
unpleasing bareness of error. The mischief of heresy becomes often far
more active and conspicuous in second hands than it was in those of
its authors; and the reason is that it is usually the child of
intellectualists—an inoffensive order of men: but no sooner has it been
brought forth and reared, than it joins itself, as by instinct, to minds
of vulgar quality, and in that society soon learns the dialect of
impiety and licentiousness. The heresiarch, though he may be more
blameworthy, is often much less audacious, and less corrupted, than his
followers; for he, perhaps, is only an enthusiast; they have become
fanatics.
* * * * *
In like manner as the passion for travel impels a man to perambulate the
earth, and then makes him sigh to think that he has not other continents
to explore, so the constitutional enthusiasm of speculation urges its
victims to traverse the entire circuit of opinions: and even then leaves
him insatiate of novelty. It is not caprice, much less is it the
excessive solicitude of an honest mind, always inquiring for truth; but
rather the impetus of a too highly-wrought intellectual activity, which
carries the heretic onward and onward, from system to system, blazing as
he goes, until there remains no form of flagrant error with which he has
not scared the sober world. Then, though reason may have forgotten all
consistency, pride has a better memory; and as this passion forbids his
return to the truths he has so often denounced, and denounced from all
points of his various course, nothing remains for him, when the season
of exhaustion arrives, but to go off into the dark void of infidelity.
The sad story has been often realized. In the conformation of the
heretic by temperament, there is more of intellectual mobility than of
strength: a ready perception of analogies gives him both facility and
felicity in collecting proofs, or rather illustrations in support of
whatever opinion he may adopt. So copious are the materials of
conjectural argument which crowd upon him, and so nice is his tact of
selection, and so quick his skill of arrangement, that ere dull sobriety
has gathered up its weapons, he has reared a most imposing front of
defence. Pleased, and even surprised, with his own work, he now
confidently maintains a position which at first he scarcely thought to
be seriously tenable. Having convinced himself of the certainty of the
new truth, and implicated his vanity in its support, deeper motives
stimulate the activity of the reasoning and inventive faculties; and he
presently piles demonstration upon demonstration, to a most amazing
height, until it becomes, in his honest opinion, sheer infatuation to
doubt. In this state of mind, of what value are the opinions of teachers
and of elders? Of what weight the belief of the catholic church in all
ages? They are nothing to be accounted of; there seems even a glory and
a heroism, as well as a duty, in spurning the fallible authority of man:
modesty, caution, hesitation, are treasons against conscience and heaven!
The young heresiarch, we will suppose to have spent the earliest season
of life, while yet the ingenuousness of youth remained unimpaired, in
the pursuits of literature or science, and to have been ignorant of
Christianity otherwise than as a system of forms and offices. But the
moment of awakening arrives; some appalling accident or piercing sorrow
sets the interests of time in abeyance, and opens upon the soul the vast
objects of immortality. Or the eloquence of a preacher may have effected
the change. In these first moments of a new life, the great and common
doctrines of religion, perceived in the freshness of novelty, afford
scope enough to the ardor of the spirit; and perhaps, also, a new
sentiment of submission quells, in some measure, that ardor: the craving
of the mind does not yet need heresy; truth has stimulus enough; and
even after truth has become somewhat vapid, the restraints of connection
and friendship have force to retain the convert three years, or five, in
the bosom of humility. But the first accidental contact with doctrinal
paradox kindles the constitutional passion, and rouses the slumbering
faculties to the full activity of adult vigor; contention ensues; malign
sentiments, although perhaps foreign to the temper, are engendered, and
these impart gloom to mysticism, and add rancor to extravagance. And
now, no dogma that is obnoxious, terrific, intolerant, schismatical,
fails to be, in its turn, avowed by the delirious bigot, who burns with
ambition to render himself the enemy—not so much of the world, as of the
church.
But will even the last extravagance of false doctrine allay the diseased
cravings of the brain? Not unless that physical inertness which, towards
the middle period of life, sometimes effects a cure of folly, or perhaps
some motive of secular interest, supervenes. Otherwise a progression
must take place, or a retrogression; and when the heart is sick and
faint from the exhaustion of over-activity, and when the whispers of
conscience have long ceased to be heard, and when the emotions of
genuine piety have become painfully strange to the soul, nothing is so
probable as an almost sudden plunge from the pinnacle of high belief,
into the bottomless gulf of universal scepticism. A lamentable
catastrophe of this kind, and which is only the natural issue of an
intellectual enthusiasm, would, no doubt, much oftener take place than
it does, if slender reasons of worldly prudence were not usually found
to be of firmer texture than all the logic of theology.
* * * * *
A chronic intellectual enthusiasm, when it becomes the source of heresy,
most frequently betakes itself to those exaggerations of Christian
doctrine which pass under the general designation of Antinomianism;—not
the Antinomianism of workshops, which is a corruption of Christianity
concocted by mercenary teachers expressly to give license to the
sensualities of those by whom they are salaried; but the Antinomianism
of the closet, which is a translation into Christian phraseology of the
ancient stoicism. The alleged relationship consists, not so much in the
similar abuse which is made in both systems of the doctrine of
necessity, but in the leading intention of both; which is to inclose the
human mind in a perfect envelop of abstractions, such as may effectively
defend it from the importunate sense of responsibility, or obligation,
and such as shall render him who wears it a passive spectator of his own
destinies. The doctrine of fate was seized upon by ancient sophists, and
is taken up by the Antinomian, because, better than any other principle,
it serves the purposes of this peculiar species of illusory delectation.
Yet the Christian theorist has some signal advantages over his ancestor.
For example: the egregious absurdities of the ancient philosophist met
him on every walk of life, and stood in the way of constant collision
with the common sense of mankind: and thus the sage, in spite of his
gravity and self-command, could hardly pass a day in public without
being put to shame by some glaring proof of practical inconsistency; for
as often as he spoke or acted like other men, as often as he made it
evident that he did not really think himself a statue or a phantom, he
gave the lie direct to the fooleries of his scholastic profession.
But the modern stoic, while, by a _sinister_ inference from his
doctrine, he takes large leave of indulgence to the flesh (an indulgence
which he uses or not, as his temperament may determine) and so borrows
the practical part of Epicureanism, transfers his egregious dogmas to
the unseen world, where they come not at all in contact with common
sense. In the vast unknown of an eternity on both sides of time, he
finds range enough, and immunity, for even the most enormous paradoxes
which ingenuity can devise, or sophistry defend. Besides, the
argumentative resources of the modern are incomparably more copious and
various and tangible than those of the ancient wrangler; for the latter
could only fall back, ever and again, upon the same abstractions; but
the former may take position on any part of a very wide frontier; for
having so large and multifarious a volume as the Scriptures in his hand,
and having multiplied the argumentative value of every sentence it
contains almost indefinitely by adopting the rule of Origen and the
Rabbis, that the whole of Scripture is mystical, and may bear every
sense that can be found in it, he is at once secure from the possibility
of being confuted, and revels in an unbounded opulence of proof and
illustration in support of his positions. To the sober interpreter, the
Bible is one book; but to the Antinomian it is as a hundred volumes.
With a field so wide, and means so inexhaustible, the Christian theorist
lives in a paradise of speculation; and no revolution to which human
nature is liable can be less probable than that which must take place
before he abandons his world of factitious happiness. The dreamer must
feel that sin is a substantial ill, in which himself is fatally
implicated, and not a mere abstraction to be discoursed of; he must
learn that the righteous God deals with mankind not fantastically, but
on terms adapted to the intellectual and moral conformation of that
human nature, of which he is the author; and he must know that salvation
is a deliverance, in which man is an agent, not less than a recipient.
It belongs not at all to our subject to attempt a confutation of this,
the most strange of the many corruptions which Christianity has
undergone; our part is merely to exhibit against the system the charge
of delusion or enthusiasm; and this charge needs no other proof than the
plain statement that, whereas Christianity recognizes the actual
mechanism of human nature, and appeals to the moral sentiments, and
urges motives of every class, and labors to enhance the sense
of responsibility, and authenticates the voice of conscience,
Antinomianism, with indurated arrogance, spurns all such sentiments, and
substitutes nothing in their room but bare speculations; and these
speculations are all of a kind to cherish the selfish deliriums of
luxurious contemplation. But to take a course like this, is, whatever
may be the subject in question, the part of an enthusiast. Whoever, in
any such manner, cuts himself off from the common sympathies of our
nature, and makes idiot sport of the energies of moral action, and has
recourse, either to a jargon of sophistries, or to trivial evasions,
when other men act upon the intuitions of good sense, and rebuts every
idea that does not minister gratification either to fancy or to
appetite, such a man must be called an enthusiast, even though he were
at the same time—if that were possible—a saint.
* * * * *
We have spoken of the enthusiasm of mysticism. But there is also an
enthusiasm of simplification. The lowest intellectual temperature, not
less than the highest, admits extravagance, and sometimes even admits it
more; for warmth and movement are less unnatural in the world of matter
or of mind, than congelation: what so grotesque as the coruscations of
frost? If the reasoning faculty had not its imaginative impulse, the
sciences would never have moved a step in advance of the mechanic arts;
much less would the high theorems of pure mathematics, or the abstruse
principles of metaphysics, have been known to mankind. But if this
natural and useful impulse be irregular and excessive, it becomes the
spring of errors. Yet the perfection of science, and its general
diffusion in modern times, operate so effectually to keep in check that
propensity to absurd speculation of which the elements are always in
existence, that if we are in search of specimens of this species of
intellectual disease, we must expect to meet with them only without the
pale of education, and among the self-taught philosophers of workshops,
who sometimes amuse the hour of stolen leisure in digesting systems of
the universe, other than the one which is demonstrated in our
universities.
Driven from the enclosures where the demonstrable sciences hold empire,
the enthusiasts of speculation turn off upon ground where there is more
scope, more obscurity, more license, and less of the stern and instant
magistracy of right reason. Some give themselves to politics, some to
political economy, and some to theology; and whatever they severally
meet with that is in its nature, or that has become concrete, complex,
or multifariously involved, they seize upon with a hungry avidity. The
disease of the brain has settled upon the faculty of analysis; all
things compound must therefore be severed, and not only be severed but
left in disunion. It cannot but happen that, in these zealous labors of
dissolution, some happy strokes must now and then fall upon errors which
wiser men have either not observed, or have spared: mankind owes
therefore a petty debt of gratitude to such speculatists for having
removed a few excrescences from ancient systems. But these trivial
successes, which are hailed with much applause by the vulgar, who
delight in witnessing any kind of destruction, and by the splenetic, who
believe themselves to gain whatever is torn from others, inspire the
heroes of reform with unbounded hopes of effecting universal
revolutions; and they actually become inflated to so high a degree of
presumption, that, at a time when all the great questions which can
occupy the human mind have been thoroughly discussed, and discussed with
every advantage of liberty, of learning, and of ability, they are not
ashamed to adopt a style of speaking as if they thought themselves
morning stars on the verge of the dark ages, destined to usher in the
tardy splendors of true philosophy upon a benighted world!
—Or of true religion: as if the Christian doctrine, in its most
essential principles, had become extinct, even in the days of the
apostles, and had not merely remained under the bushel of superstition
during the ages of religious despotism, but long after the chains of
that despotism were broken, and after the human mind, with all the vigor
and intensity of renovated intelligence and renovated piety had given
its utmost force, and its utmost diligence to the exposition of the
canon of faith. Of what sort, it might be asked, were this canon, if its
meaning on the most important points might, age after age, be utterly
misunderstood by ninety-nine learned, honest, and unshackled men,
and be perceived only by the one? Yet this is the supposition of
simplificators, who from the impulse of a faulty cerebral conformation,
must needs disbelieve, because theology would otherwise afford them no
intellectual exercise.
* * * * *
It is a common notion, incessantly repeated, and seldom sifted, that
diversity of opinion, on even the cardinal points of Christian faith, is
an inevitable and a permanent evil, springing, and always to spring,
from the diversity of men's dispositions and intellectual faculties.
Certainly no other expectation could be entertained if Christian
theology were what moral philosophy was among the sophists of ancient
Athens—a system of abstractions, owning subjection to no authority. But
this is not the fact; and though hitherto the ultimate authority has
been much abused or spurned, the re-establishment of its power on fixed
and well understood principles seems to be far from an improbable event.
We say more, that an actual progression towards so happy a revolution is
perceptible in our own times. We do not for a moment forget that a
heartfelt acquiescence in the doctrines of Scripture must ever be the
result of a divine influence, and is not to be effected by the same
means which produce uniformity of opinion on matters of science. But
while we anticipate, on grounds of strong hope, a time of refreshing
from above, which shall subdue the depraved repugnances of the human
mind, we may also anticipate, on grounds of common reasoning, a natural
process of reform in theology—considered as a science, which shall place
the intrinsic incoherence of heresy in the broad light of day,
henceforward to be contemned and avoided.
The fields of error have been fully reaped and gleaned; nor shall aught
that is new spring up on that field, the whole botany of which is
already known and classified. It is only of late that a fair, competent,
and elaborate discussion of all the principal questions of theology has
taken place; and the result of this discussion waits now to be
manifested by some new movement of the human mind. Great and happy
revolutions usually stand ready and latent for a time until accident
brings them forward. Such a change and renovation we believe to be at
the door of the Christian Church. The ground of controversy has
contracted itself daily during the last half century; the grotesque and
many-colored forms of ancient heresy have disappeared, and the existing
differences of opinion (some of which are indeed of vital consequence)
all draw round a single controversy, the final decision of which it is
hard to believe shall long be deferred; for the minds of men are
pressing towards it with an unusual intentness. This great question
relates to the authority of Holy Scripture; and the professedly
Christian world is divided upon it into three parties, comprehending all
smaller varieties of opinion.
The first of these parties, constituted of the Romish Church, and its
disguised favorers, affirms the subordination of the authority of
Scripture to that of tradition and the Church. This is a doctrine of
slavery and of ignorance, which the mere progress of knowledge and of
civil liberty must overthrow, if it be not first exploded by other
means. The second party comprises the sceptical sects of the Protestant
world, which agree in affirming the subordination of Scripture to the
dogmas of natural theology; in other words to every man's notion of what
religion _ought_ to be. These sects, having no barrier between
themselves and pure deism, are continually dwindling by desertions to
infidelity; nor will they be able to hold their slippery footing on the
edge of Christianity a day after a general revival of serious piety has
taken place.
The third party, comprehending the great majority of the Protestant
body, bows reverently, and implicitly, and with intelligent conviction,
to the absolute authority of the word of God, and knows of nothing in
theology that is not affirmed, or fairly implied, therein. The
differences existing within this party, how much soever they may be
exaggerated by bigots, will vanish as the mists of the morning under the
brightness of the sun, whenever a refreshment of pious feeling descends
upon the Church. They consist, in part, of mere misunderstandings of
abstract phrases, unknown to the language of Scripture; in part they
hinge upon political constitutions, of which so much as is substantially
evil is by no means of desperate inveteracy: in part these differences
are constituted of nothing better than the lumber of antiquity, the
worthless relics of forgotten janglings handed down from father to son,
but now, by so many transmissions, worn away to an extreme slenderness,
and quite ready to crumble into the dust of everlasting forgetfulness.
Surely men are not always so to remain children in understanding, that
the less shall be preferred to the greater; nor shall it always be that
the substantial evils of schism are perpetuated and vindicated on the
ground of obscure historical questions, fit only to amuse the idle hours
of the antiquary. This trifling with things sacred must come to its end,
and the great law of love must triumph, and the Christian Church
henceforward have "one Lord, one faith, one baptism."