MR. WELLS AND THE INCARNATION
As I approach what is much the most important section of Mr. Wells’s
book (for it deals with much the most important subject in all History—I
mean the Incarnation, which he so cheerfully denies), I must, not
without regret, be too brief upon preliminaries, lest I should take up
the space necessary for the larger controversy later on.
Therefore, it is only in a very summary manner that I can deal with the
writer’s presentation of the rise of the Roman power and of the
beginnings of the Empire; that is, with the unity of the European world
as it was prepared by Divine Providence for the advent of the Catholic
Church: the noble antique soil in which was planted, as alone worthy of
it, that institution whereby alone Man can be put in tune, or, even in
temporal matters, a right civilization preserved.
As may be imagined, Mr. Wells on approaching the critical point in the
drama of Human History, allows his anti-Christian enthusiasm more rein
than he has given it hitherto, and the Roman Empire—because it was the
foundation upon which our civilization was built through the action of
our religion—moves him to an excited wrath in which he loses all
historical sense, and curses at random.
It would be wearisome to repeat again the excellences which this
department of the book also presents: its accuracy in date, its lucidity
in expression: but a third excellence, which Mr. Wells usually has,
proportion in statement—the essence of good précis writing, and
therefore of good summarization in History—here fails him. The reason of
this is that he takes up, of the few pages allotted to him, far too much
space in violent abuse. I think I had better give the reader a short
list of these vituperations, in order to make him understand the state
of mind in which our author approaches the majestic origins of Europe.
On page 259 he is reluctantly “forced” to repeat his grave criticism
that the Græco-Roman civilization had no printing press. On page 260 he
expresses his “astonishment” that they did not hand printed copies of
the measures about to be discussed round their assemblies, especially
the Roman Senate. In the same page he points out that the failure of
popular government towards the end of the Republic was due to a lack of
Board Schools. A wholly disproportionate amount of the next few pages is
devoted to diatribes against Cato the Elder. He begins as “a small but
probably very disagreeable child of two.” He is a hypocrite who “poses
as a champion of religion and public morality”; he “carries on a
lifelong war against everything that is young, gracious or pleasant”;
and therefore he was, of course (after much more abuse of the same
sort), “the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome” (p. 265).
Rome, successful in her gigantic battle for life against Carthage, was
“a nation so cowardly that she had to destroy her enemy,” and she is
again “a cowardly victor” on page 268. (Mr. Wells understands so little
of Paganism that he seems to think Carthage would have spared Rome.) She
proceeds to “an ungracious expansion of power abroad,” and the whole
great age of our foundation is one (p. 269) of “general grim baseness.”
The Senate, on page 270, is “a Senatorial gang,” in which Cato (who
occupies an absurdly exaggerated place) especially shows “interest and
natural malice.” On page 271 you get “pitiless greed,” and meanwhile, of
course, “the military efficiency of the Romans had been steadily
declining”—but, indeed, the singular incapacity, not only of the Roman
people, but of all soldiers, for war is one of Mr. Wells’s standing
grievances. The Senate, on the first failure against Carthage, passed
“from a bullying mood to one of extreme panic.” On page 273 we have a
pleasant contrast between the horrid ignorance of the Roman citizens and
the enlightenment of the modern British Trade Union leaders, the latter
of whom have done what no Roman ever thought of doing: to wit, started a
Labour College. On page 273 Rome is “subcivilized.” It is compared to
“Neanderthal man”; its religion “carries us far back beyond the days of
decent gods to the age of Shamanism and magic”; and there is a moving
contrast between the antique leader searching the entrails of animal
victims after a sacrifice for augury, and the more dignified gestures of
a British Lord Chancellor.
On page 274 Rome is again “Neanderthal”; and on page 275 there is yet
another contrast between the gladiatorial shows and our own more humane
sports—though there is no actual mention of either football or golf. It
reminds one a little of the famous remark of the old lady who was seeing
the death of Cleopatra on the stage, and said, “How different from the
home life of our own good Queen Victoria”!
On page 277 the Roman senators and the great equestrians are “vulgar and
greedy spirits.” But do not imagine that the poorer Romans were any
better; they, in their turn, are “ignorant, unstable, and equally
greedy”; and, once again, on this same page, all these Romans are
“Neanderthals.” On page 278 he is able to answer the question which
puzzled the Ancients in the later days of the Roman Republic. Those
mighty men asked themselves, even while they were founding a world
state, in what they were to blame, confessed their errors, and sought
remedy perpetually. But in _this_ book “we” have the advantage over
them. “We (that is, Mr. Wells) _who can look at the problem with a
larger presentation_ can see what had happened to Rome.” On the same
page there is a doubtful admission that Tiberius Gracchus may have been
“more like an honest man” than the other cowards and mediocrities of the
Roman State. But Gracchus, again, was defective compared with the modern
authors of Outlines of History in that “he did not understand how much
easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns than to
return it.” However, he stands excused; for it seems that even to-day,
in spite of progress, “few people” other than the Author “understand”
this wearisome and age-long truism.
No wonder that, after all this, Mr. Wells is astonished at the voluntary
association of external States with the Roman Empire which began before
the end of the second century B.C.
Among their other defects, we are told, the Romans could not organize
sea power. They foolishly marched their troops, not only because they
were somehow unaccountably ignorant of railways (as was Alexandria, he
bitterly complains, of typewriters) but because they had not the
military sense to see how much easier it is to embark a large army in
small sailing vessels at the mercy of the weather, and disembark them,
than to march them round a not much greater distance by land.
On page 284 even the most superficial student of antiquity will be
astonished to hear that it was the Roman unity which so weakened the
Greek culture of the East as ultimately to subject it to barbarism under
the Turks. He notes on the same page with horror that the Roman of the
Republic had no maps of Germany, Russia, Africa, and Central Asia, and
adds (of men like Cæsar) that “even if they had had maps they would not
have had the intelligence to use them.” Talking of Julius Cæsar, one
might have thought that _his_ really remarkable talents would emerge
from Mr. Wells’s eagle view of the human plain below. But no! That great
head is first presented to us as “bald and middle-aged”—two qualities
which, it seems, destroy capacity. His affair with Cleopatra marks “the
elderly sensualist or sentimentalist” (Mr. Wells remarks with an ascetic
sternness, remarkable and novel in such a novelist, that he was
fifty-four at the time). As for great-mindedness, the unfortunate man
was suffering from “a common man’s megalomania” with “a record of
scheming” which is “silly and shameful.”
It will be seen from these few epithets, chosen at random from a bare
twenty pages, what the effect upon Mr. Wells has been of his first
acquaintance, late in life, with the Eternal City.
There is only one reasonable adjective for such an attitude. It is
ridiculous. Lack of proportion and lack of dignity in historical
writing, when they are pushed to that extreme, are absurd.
There was about the Roman Empire all that we know most offends our
author—majesty, greatness, a connection with our ancient tradition, and
order. Roman letters suggest the education of the gentry, and anything
connected with the gentry is, in itself, enough to rouse our author to
boiling-point. The Roman story is the great story of soldiers—and with
the Soldier goes the Priest, two characters abhorrent to him. But behind
it all, without a doubt, the ultimate source of these ineptitudes is
reaction against the Catholic Church, which not only the name, but the
fact of Rome, suggests to the ill-guided and insufficient pen here at
work.
The odd thing is that Mr. Wells does not hesitate to illustrate his
account, and that his average reader (who, I fancy, looks more at
illustrations than at the text) has, by even such a glimpse of nobility
in architecture and statuary, the whole foolish railing discounted. Had
Mr. Wells’s publishers been able to include and present in popular
illustration to their readers, not only building and bust and statue,
but also that great volume of verse and prose which is the soul of
Rome—but of which Mr. Wells would understand nothing, even if he had
been compelled to study it for years—the effect would be greater still.
But, of course, the reader gets no hint of high verse or monumental
prose, for our author has no idea of them. The reader of Mr. Wells’s
_Outline_ is lucky to get one tiny hint of faces at least, and of
buildings—of the latter very little—taken hastily from the most
hackneyed photographs, but even these will be sufficient to destroy the
folly of the text.
It is a singular phenomenon this: the itch to kick against that which
made one: the instinct to destroy the house in which one lives: the
craving towards impiety and unfilial negation. But we Catholics who live
in the anti-Catholic culture are woefully familiar with it.
Mr. Wells himself is entirely the product of Rome; not, perhaps, the
ripest fruit on that great tree, but a fruit none the less. Out of the
Roman Empire come all things that we are—the sour and withered units of
our Commonwealth, as well as the living parts; the noblest and most
traditional, as well as the basest, the most vulgar, and the most
impatient of majesty. Yet a sort of necessity compels men of this sort
to oppose that by which they had their being. You see it in their
disgust with all that is oldest and best in their own narrow community,
in their bewilderment at any European thing which happens to be outside
their parochial experience, in their pitiful astonishment at learning
that the material details of their own lives—tramways and “last
editions” and electric light—were not to be found in the daily life of
classical antiquity. They cannot understand that bad poetry set down on
a typewriter may be of less value than good poetry written on papyrus:
the distinction is incomprehensible to such minds. That the creation of
a busy, contented, rich, united culture from the Grampians to the
Euphrates was an achievement of lasting grandeur escapes them.
Well, we know that such minds exist and have always existed. We know
that they are now being multiplied by the hundred thousand and the
million under the conditions of our great towns and their press.
We also, we of the higher and older culture, we of the Faith, know that
all of this can only end in ruin. But meanwhile let us vigorously stamp
with our own mark the expressions of such vulgarity whenever they come
before us, and label them for what they are; which is rubbish: and
degraded rubbish at that.
But all this raving against the Empire from which we descend, is but a
preface. Its cause is the fact that the high Græco-Roman Culture was the
prelude to, and the setting of, the _Incarnation_.
With this word we come to the supreme interest of mankind: the one
essential question in human History which must always be answered by a
“Yes” or “No”; and according to that answer our whole view, not only of
human society upon earth, but upon the very nature and destiny of Man,
depends.
That question is, whether Jesus Christ, who was certainly Man, was not
also God: two Natures in one Person? Those who answer “Yes, the Dual
Nature was there present,” believe in the Incarnation. Those who answer
“No, Jesus Christ was only a man (or a Myth)” do not believe in the
Incarnation.
Now the reader need hardly be told that Mr. Wells belongs to the later
division. For him as for the great mass of his readers, and, indeed, the
majority of English-speaking people to-day outside the Catholic Church,
Jesus Christ was only Man.
Indeed, if Mr. Wells belonged to the other division, that is, if he
believed in the Incarnation, his book would have had no great popular
sale, however ephemeral.
If that were the main point against Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the
Incarnation, my article might stop here. Belief in the Incarnation is
not a matter of historical proof, it is a matter of Faith. If a man
doesn’t believe it History will not make him do so. Historical truth,
like all other truth, supports Faith; but it does not cause Faith. When,
therefore, we condemn a man’s _history_ in connection with a discussion
upon the Faith, we must keep quite distinct our disagreement with his
_doctrine_ from our exposure of his ignorance or misjudgment of mundane
_fact_.
What we are concerned with in this commentary is Mr. Wells’s failure as
an historian; the insufficiency of his knowledge; his weak judgment; the
confusion in his processes of thought: Not his lack of the divine gift
of Faith, which is not here germane to our subject.
If a man comes to you with the remark that your father, long dead, once
forged a cheque, you say to yourself, “I feel that man is wrong.” But if
he brings forward some testimony to that assertion, you listen to it. If
you _then_ find that he does not know what he is talking about, you are
the more relieved in the matter of your father’s memory. For instance:
Suppose he said that your father forged the cheque in 1914 and that he
remembers the date because it was in the same week as the battle of the
Marne, while to your certain knowledge your father died in 1913, his
history is at fault, and his contention worthless.
Now that is exactly the position in which the Catholic reader stands in
regard to Mr. Wells’s quite insufficient way of dealing with the
question of the original doctrine of the Incarnation.
That question must be put quite clearly at the outset. We are not
discussing the truth or falsehood of the Incarnation, that is, of
Christ’s Godhead. We are discussing the purely historical point, whether
or no that doctrine is original to the Christian Church and its founder.
_Was the idea of the Incarnation, that is, of the Divinity of Our Lord,
held by those who had seen and known Him; did they claim to have
received it from Himself; did they record His own witness to it?_ Or is
the whole thing a later imposition?
That is the point; and it is a point not of Faith but of History.
A writer is free to call the visions and voices of St. Joan illusions,
and yet to remain a sound historian in the ordinary acceptation of that
term; but if he denies that St. Joan herself and her contemporaries
believed she had had such experiences, then he is an absurd historian.
It is clear, on reading Mr. Wells’s pages, that he has never come across
the historical arguments for regarding belief in the Incarnation as
contemporary with Our Lord and His companions. He does not know of their
existence. He approaches the problem as though all the world would
readily agree with his own cheerfully uninformed conclusions—because he
has never heard of any other. He obviously thinks that those who accept
as historical Christ’s own gradual revelation of the doctrine, and its
acceptation by certain contemporaries, are merely doing so to order. He
thinks they have not read even as much (or as little) as he, and have
only to be enlightened. He has no idea that a convincing body of
evidence exists and has been marshalled by powerful and numerous pens.
Let me begin with the common view which Mr. Wells here repeats.
It is essentially the view of _Modernists_ of a particular type, to wit,
Modernists of the Protestant type, and of the Protestant type which
flourishes chiefly in the world to which Mr. Wells himself belongs. It
is not of the German sort, still less of the French sort; it is of the
sort which you find in the more popular Sunday journals of the London
Press. And here we must define what the Modernist is.
The Modernist is a man who, having lost his faith in whatever Catholic
doctrine he or his may have held, is afraid of facing the consequences
of that loss.
That is an exact definition. A man is not a Modernist who denies all
Catholic doctrine _en bloc_, from the Omnipotence and Personality of God
downwards, and accepts the consequences of such a denial.
A man is a Modernist when he no longer admits a Catholic doctrine with
his intellect and will, but shirks the loss of its benefits.
The fear takes two forms. Sometimes (as with Loisy—a very great
scholar—during his period of Modernism), it is the fear of corporate
surroundings. A man has ceased to believe, but he is afraid of following
out the full consequences of his new intellectual attitude because he
fears what people may say. More often the fear is an inward fear, very
largely unconscious in its working and certainly unintelligent. It is
the fear of losing a certain habit of mind to which the man who has lost
belief is accustomed, which is only intellectually tenable so long as he
believes, but which he blindly clings to when it is no longer
intellectually tenable to him because the loss of the moral habit would
be so painful.
In the Modernist of this type, trying desperately to combine
incompatible things, you will find two marks invariably present. First,
he is muddle-headed; secondly, he does violence to sane judgment upon
testimony.
That is exactly what you shall find in Mr. Wells’s attitude towards the
belief of Our Lord Himself in His Own Divinity and His followers’
corresponding belief. Mr. Wells no longer believes in Our Lord’s
Divinity, _but he wants to go on feeling that He made all the
difference_. In the attempt to straddle between the two his judgment
goes all to pieces, and even his grossly insufficient reading on the
elementary evidence disturbs him. Thus Our Lord “is a great Teacher.” He
comes to “liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and
unchallenged oneness of God and of man’s obligation to God from its old
Jewish narrowness” (pp. 321, 322). (The reader will remember, though Mr.
Wells has forgotten it, that, a few pages back, God was appearing in the
_Outline of History_ as a human phantasy, and a nasty one: proceeding
from the “Old Man.” It is a fine example of inchoate thinking!) Our Lord
is, in phrase after phrase, a subject for awestruck wonder and
admiration. Yet He does not Himself quite know what He is about. Our
Lord, according to Mr. Wells, does no more than talk very vaguely on
general duties, and allude still more vaguely to some undefined,
incomprehensible “kingdom.” Our Lord has no intention of definite
organized action upon Mankind; indeed, He is clearly incapable of it. He
never said anything about His divine commission, nor confirmed it with
marvels, nor established rules of conduct, nor (of course) said a word
about any Institution designed to perpetuate His memory, to enforce His
teaching and continue His effect on earth. Those who heard Him and knew
Him had no experience of His saying any such things; wherefore Mr. Wells
adopts the old tag of Our Lord being “the seed rather than the founder.”
And so on.
All that is essentially Modernist—and already belated. In a few years it
will look grotesque.
The intelligent, straightforward and courageous thing to do if you are a
clear-headed man and have ceased to believe, is to say that the whole
Christian affair is an imposture and an irritating imposture at that.
That is the German non-Christian attitude; the German non-Christian
boldly talks of “The Jesus Fairy Tale” and asks us to be well rid of it.
That is the French and Italian non-Christian attitude: a determination
to have done with the tradition of Christian morals, and to root them
out of the State.
That is the attitude of the old and robust English Atheism which was far
more respectable intellectually and morally than the Modernist
sentimentality of our day.
Granted the premises of men like our author, the Christian spirit
proceeds from a fraud or an illusion and should be abandoned. It
interferes with many of the pleasures of human life. It prevents an easy
natural way of going on. It introduces authority in moral affairs (and
that is always irksome). Unless you believe that you hear the voice of
the Creator imposing such things, there is no sort of reason why you
should accept them.
Since Mr. Wells will not give up the emotional side of his ancestral
religion, though abandoning the intellectual side, he necessarily falls
into bad history: the bad history of that sort which we have heard
repeated so often that we almost take it for granted as a necessary part
of the world around us, but which is just as bad history to-day as when
it first startled the audiences of a hundred years ago.
The fundamental _historical_ error in such contradictory talk is this:
That the doctrine of the Incarnation was not held by those who heard Our
Lord nor inculcated by Our Lord Himself. There is a mass of proof that
it was.
There are the texts of the New Testament. There are the unbroken
traditions. There is the fact that all the divisions, quarrels, and
heresies of the very earliest years turned _not_ on the denial of
Godhead, but on the attempt to rationalize its presence one way or the
other, either by saying that the Godhead was separate from, though in
some way accompanying, the Man Jesus: or by saying that the Godhead only
was present and the Humanity an illusion. There is the Johannine and
Ignatian documentary evidence. There is the Pauline. And there is
nothing on the other side.
It is no answer to say (wrongly) that the Johannine evidence _may_ not
be, or (rightly) that the Pauline _is_ not that of an apostle who heard
Our Lord. It is no answer to say that the first Christians were
following a misguided enthusiast who suffered from illusions. (Mr. Wells
is afraid to say that.) The point is that these first writers wrote for
people who had met and known scores of witnesses, and that these
evidently took the doctrine of Our Lord’s Divine Origin for granted.
Before critical examination grew detailed men could say vaguely that the
Gospels were of very late fabrication, and that there had been plenty of
time between the Crucifixion and the first documents for legends to grow
up and for living memory to die out. They cannot say that to-day.
They could, till recently, pretend that the Ebionites were not the
heresy of one Ebion, but the original Christian Church. They cannot say
that now. Historical Science is against them. They are free to say that
the doctrine of Divine Origin was a folly and an illusion in its
Propounder and His apostles. They cannot say it was not held by them. To
say _that_ is simply bad History. It is bad History also to admit the
contemporary character of a document, such as a gospel, and then to
discard at will and call an “interpolation” or “corruption” any part of
such document as does not fit your theory.
In that connection (the arbitrary and contradictory rejection of all
inconvenient evidence in documents the general authenticity of which is
admitted) let me turn to another of Mr. Wells’s unhistorical lapses: the
strange idea that the assertion of Our Lord’s Divinity did not much
matter, anyhow, and that the violent opposition aroused from the very
origin by Our Lord Himself and by the Catholic Church which He founded,
was due to His bidding men to love one another and recognize the
Fatherhood of God: to the very vaguest and most general precepts out of
all that vast and consistent body of morals and doctrine, most of it
highly particular, for which the Faith stands.
Historically that assertion is ignorant, and, indeed, any man with a
reasonable sense of values might see that it could not but be nonsense.
Why should anyone get very angry with a man for saying that people ought
to love one another? Or for telling them to lead kindly lives? Or for
telling them to acknowledge a righteous Creator? In point of fact, if we
are to reject tradition and only trust the fragmentary records of the
four Canonical Gospels (as Mr. Wells does in everything which is not (a)
supernatural, or (b) favourable to Our Lady), we know that Jesus Christ
was put to death for _Blasphemy_. He was declared guilty of a specific
crime meriting death, and that crime was refusing to deny that He was
the Son of God: “We have a law,” said the Jewish authorities who
demanded His execution, “and by that law He must die.”
We also know, according to the same record, that the Roman authorities
were reluctant to allow Him to be put to death. They yielded to the
intense demand of the Jewish authorities, which demand turned wholly
upon what they regarded as His blasphemy in calling Himself Divine. But
so strong is the power of imagination in your Modernist that he can get
himself to prefer some visionary thing of which he has no record at all
against the plain statement of a text, even when he himself accepts that
text.
Again, the persecution to which the Catholic Church has been subject
from its origins, has _not_ been a persecution directed against such
general doctrines as those of a beneficent Creator, of charity, etc. How
could it be? It has been a persecution directed against a definite,
organized Religion, packed with mystery and affirmation, which Religion
clashed and clashes with non-Catholic Religion and social ideas outside
of itself.
No one persecuted the Jews for believing in one God and refusing to
accept Pagan gods. But then, they did not say that their religion had
universal authority: the Catholic Church and its Founder did say that of
theirs—and do so still. It is simply silly to think that anyone would
have persecuted anyone else for telling people to be gracious and to
look to happiness from a good life: yet in order to fit facts in with
his theory, the Modernist has to descend to that silliness.
The Catholic Church was persecuted because it proposed and practised a
ritual, doctrinal, particular, mystery religion claiming universal and
Divine authority, and therefore antagonistic to the official religion of
the Empire; and the heart of that mystery religion, the pivot on which
it all turned, was, from the very beginning, a belief, right or wrong,
in the Incarnation: that Christ was God. Ignorance of that historical
fact is, I say, a piece of first-class historical ignorance on Mr.
Wells’s part.
Next in importance, though still very important, is what I have already
alluded to, his quite unhistorical way of looking at the Gospels. Here I
must warn the reader that I take up an attitude which would have been
that of but a small minority fifty years ago (when the ideas Mr. Wells
still retails were in their hey-day), and which is still that of a
minority, but a rapidly growing minority to-day. I think the
old-fashioned criticism of the Gospel text has failed. Anyhow, Mr. Wells
takes the Gospels—or what Modernists chose to retain of them—as
contemporary records. In that he is right. He says that they have
miraculous and incredible “additions,” and he only accepts the documents
subject to his right to reject anything in them to which he is
unaccustomed. I know that in this attitude he is only copying what he
finds in a hundred textbooks of our time. But unhistorical such a method
is and unhistorical it remains no matter how widely it is used.
Mr. Wells is careful to say, as all the swarm of his sort continually
repeat, that he is treating the Gospels only as he would treat any other
book. But the historian, when he comes across a book crammed with
statements which he is certain are false, ceases to depend upon that
book. You may indeed say that the man who wrote such and such a document
credulously accepted a lot of nonsense, or got himself to believe what
he was saying or was simply telling lies; but then, by every standard of
historical criticism, documents packed full of falsehood are worthless.
You may say that the Gospels _may_ have behind them some tiny, ultimate
nucleus of fact, but that is all you can say: And you have no right
whatever to single out what you choose to regard as true from what you
choose to regard as false, simply upon the plea of probability. You can
say, “In these stories there does appear a certain human figure: he may
have existed: he probably did. But as he perpetually claims and
exercises miraculous powers, and, as these are incredible, there is no
certitude to be based on such documents.” But you have no sort of right
to say, “He certainly said this. He certainly did not say that,” on the
strength of such documents. Least of all can you exclude matter which is
in no way marvellous or unusual but simply out of gear with some
imagined theory, e.g. the Petrine texts, the intensely vivid touches
concerning Our Lady, Her rhapsody, Her Visitation, Her warning of
tragedy (such things are said to mothers every day), Our Lord’s
recommendation of her to St. John from the Cross, etc. None of these
things are miraculous: they are called “unauthentic” simply because they
support Our Lady and St. Peter—whom the critics don’t like. If the
Gospels had not about them the traditional appeal to the heart and to
the ancestral memories which the Modernist is too weak to strip off, our
author would throw over the _whole_ of them. If they came to him as
documents from another tradition he would certainly do so. Belonging as
they do to his past, he cannot bear to part with them altogether, and so
picks out a few words to retain for his consolation.
Similarly, it is grossly unhistorical to imagine impossible motives at
work in the composition of the Gospels. Suppose the Gospels to be
contemporary, but the work either of people too daft to judge reality or
of people who were telling lies. Then the historical way of attacking
them is to say: “They are contemporary; but they, being written under
such and such a motive consonant to the time, tell such and such
falsehoods, or are subject to such and such illusions for which the
character of the time will account.”
That is how critics with good historical knowledge, but of sceptical
temper, deal with, say, the marvels in The Venerable Bede’s
_Ecclesiastical History_, or in _The Life of St. Martin_. But if you do
not know the motives consonant to the time, you will make a muddle of
it—and Mr. Wells, not knowing the time, has made a muddle of it.
A very good example of his attempt at understanding something which he
has insufficiently studied is his comment on the double lineage given
for Our Lord through His Foster-Father, St. Joseph, and through His
Blessed Mother, “both leading to David.” Mr. Wells remarks: “As if it
were any honour to descend from such a man.”
It is a remark which presupposes that a first-century Jew would present
Our Lord’s descent from David merely as a social distinction. What an
extraordinarily ignorant idea! Yet even Mr. Wells must have heard that
the Jews expected their Messiah to be descended from David, and further,
that lineage was counted among the Jews, not only through a natural
father, but also through an adopted or legal father.
As another example (out of dozens) of the unhistorical character of the
whole thing, you have those descriptions made up entirely out of his
head, in which Mr. Wells excels as a writer of fiction, but which are
hopeless in History. It is admirable to attach imagination to History
for the purpose of giving life to known facts, but it is ridiculous to
try to make History live by inventing facts. How, for instance, does Mr.
Wells know that Our Lord was “lean,” was “strenuous,” or that He was
unkempt? Or that He was “very human”—I mean, with the modern connotation
of weakness in those unfortunate words?
I have said that the consequences between this attempt to “straddle”
between belief and unbelief leads one into muddle-headedness, and we get
muddle-headedness in these pages to the _n_th. Thus our author tells us
that his concern is not with the “spiritual or theological significance
of Jesus Christ”—whereupon he proceeds to spout theology page after
page. He makes certain that the texts in which Our Lord admits Godhead
are spurious; that the cry on the Cross is proof of an only human nature
in Christ; that the supernatural is “incredible”; that the Resurrection
was a false story, which began to be whispered and then talked, and at
last apparently foisted upon people. The whole thing is a theological
tract from beginning to end.
It is the theology of the evangelistic Protestant turned Modernist. The
old evangelical, Bible Christian theology is as deeply impressed upon
Mr. Wells’s work as Catholic theology is impressed upon, say, the poetry
of Claudel. It has all the consequences of that theology, especially in
the very unmistakable rhetoric. We have “The White Blaze of this Kingdom
of His” and the inevitable Oleograph of “Three Crosses on the Red
Evening Twilight.” It is as though all of this had been written as part
of a revivalist address; but revivalist language in the mouth of a man
who has ceased to believe is muddle-headedness gone mad.