THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH
When we pass from the Life of Our Lord itself to the formation of the
Church as He founded it and as it was and taught immediately after His
Ascension, we find Mr. Wells (as we might expect) pursuing this same
highly emotional, unintelligent, Modernist method, but with this
difference: that he is now free to attack everything at random. So long
as Our Lord is still present in his pages, the confused but powerful
emotions he inherits from the older and more intelligent doctrinal
Protestant world of his forbears would not give him a free hand. He had
to talk of Our Lord’s “inimitable greatness,” of the “giant measure of
the Kingdom of God,” and so on; but when he has only to deal with the
Apostles and their successors, he is under no such emotional obligation.
We may discover in his way of treating the early Church, its doctrines,
and its organized form, two clear marks, both exactly consonant with
that insufficiently cultured Modernist type of which he is the exponent.
_Firstly_, he is devoted to the old principle: “The Bible only.” He does
not understand the factor of tradition in History, and, as for
documents, he writes as though the sub-apostolic writings did not exist,
which, for him, they probably do not.
_Secondly_, he follows the fashion which became prominent in the
Protestant world over fifty or sixty years ago, and is still powerful,
of ascribing pretty well everything in Catholic doctrine to the
unscrupulous invention of St. Paul. He repeats the German phrase that
“Paul” found the Christian community possessed only of a “way of
living,” and left it with “a belief”: the doctrine of the Atonement, the
Mass, the whole affair, must spring from the unbridled (and strangely
unchallenged!) imagination of a man who never came across Our Lord
during His ministry on earth, who knew intimately those who _had_ been
constantly with Our Lord during that ministry, who (according to this
impossible theory) contradicted all _their_ experience, and yet who
appealed to that experience as the authority for everything he said.
Posterity will smile at this way of getting out of an historical
problem. But it is still so largely followed that Mr. Wells is in no way
inferior to those whom he merely copies, so far as the general thesis is
concerned. He is in very good company. Where he is inferior is in not
appreciating, as the great scholars who are our opponents do, two
points: _Firstly_, that one must never in History state as definite
fact, or present as a picture, something which one has made up out of
one’s head: _Secondly_, that the Catholic side has a body of historical
evidence to present. He makes up pictures in support of his thesis as
though he were writing fiction instead of History, and he leaves out,
presumably because he has not heard of it, the counter evidence with
which he ought to deal.
For instance, he gives us this sentence: “We know very little of the
ideas, or ceremonies or methods of the Christian communities in the
first two centuries.”
If he had said no more, that sentence could have stood; for “very
little” is a vague phrase, and it is true that we have for the second
century few documents compared, say, with the documents of the third
century. We have far more documents than we have for the two centuries
of English history between 400 and 600, but we have less-connected ones
than we have for the two centuries of English history between, say, 700
and 900.
On the other hand, “it is clear” (to use one of Mr. Wells’s own
favourite expressions) that he does not know what the “very little” is.
He does not know the testimony of St. Ignatius, of Justin Martyr, of
Papias, of Irenæus, of the Earlier Apochryphal Gospels (especially the
Proto-Evangelion), of the authentic Clementine, of the inscriptions, of
the Didache, of the Hermas, and so on. If he did, he would know that the
“very little” (and it is very little) is quite conclusive on such
essentials as affirmation by the Church, in that very early time, of the
Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Veneration of Our Lady, and of the
Saints who have passed; of Episcopacy, of a sacramental Priesthood, of
the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, of firm insistence upon
orthodox unity and the excretion of heresy—and so forth.
It is “very little,” but it witnesses to all the essentials. The
evidence is not conclusive of the spiritual value, or the truth, of any
of these things; but it is conclusive upon the fact that they were
believed from the beginning.
St. Ignatius stood to the Apostles and to all those scores and hundreds
of people who had seen Our Lord—and many of whom had talked with Him, in
a highly civilized time, full of continual travel and criticism and
sceptical enquiry—he stands, I say, to that generation _contemporary_
with Jesus Christ as Mr. Wells himself stands to men like Huxley or
Matthew Arnold. St. Ignatius was a lad in his teens when the younger
witnesses, such as St. John, were not more than fifty or so. What he
heard about Our Lord’s teaching and foundation and commands, what he
heard about those miracles which are so incredible to people fed upon
the Daily Press, what he heard of the Resurrection, of the affirmation
of the Incarnation, and the rest, is on a par with what Mr. Wells and I
have heard of Darwin’s publication of the _Origin of Species_, and of
the effect it created.
Justin Martyr, our next chief witness (giving the earliest surviving
account of the Mass), stood to those contemporaries as a man just old
enough to have fought in the Great War stands to those who had fought as
subalterns in the Crimea or as a young American of to-day stands to
Lincoln. St. Irenæus, with his explicit witness to St. John and to
orthodoxy, stood to that generation of eye-witnesses much as a child
born in the last year or two will stand to the mid Victorians.
That is the kind of thing which the school Mr. Wells follows has got to
get over. Such proximity may not be evidence as to the _truth_ of what
the contemporaries of Our Lord said they had heard from His Own lips,
but it is excellent evidence that they _heard_ it. You may ridicule the
story that Peary reached the North Pole, but if you deny that he said he
did and that companions of his believed him it is yourself you are
making ridiculous.
The great anti-Christian scholars of a past generation knew all that.
Mr. Wells doesn’t. He follows them simply, in the innocence of his
heart, because he thinks it is all plain sailing with no snags. He knows
no better. But the more a serious student appreciates the character of
the Roman Empire in the first century, and the actual limits of time
involved, the more certain he becomes that the main Christian dogmas,
true or false, belong to the very origins. The idea of a complete change
in doctrine and method and tone within the known dates of the process
becomes impossible to him in proportion to his historical knowledge.
This argument applies, of course, with special strength to the tottering
tale that St. Paul invented the Church.
If you accept even some main part of what are traditionally St. Paul’s
writings as authentic, you can discover him insisting to distant
converts that he is adding nothing, that he has imagined nothing, that
he is but conveying and spreading a doctrine which he had received.
Again—to develop a point I have but mentioned—if St. Paul was making up
a fantastic new scheme of his own, why was there no resistance? Why is
there no hint or tradition or echo of universal indignation against such
monstrous innovations?
It is no good saying that the evidence for any such resistance has been
destroyed. In the first place, it could not in the nature of things have
wholly disappeared. There would have been a violent quarrel affecting
the whole story of the early Church. And in the next place the most
emphatic testimony is allowed to survive of a very grave difference of
opinion—to wit, whether the Church should include Gentiles or not,
whether the converts should conform to Judaic ceremonial laws.
Mr. Wells suggests that the doctrine of the Atonement, of a Victim
offered to God, was due to St. Paul’s previous attachment to the
mysteries of Mithras. He does not here actually descend to mere fiction,
as he is too fond of doing (for instance, when he follows the high
authority of Miss Marie Corelli upon the motives of Judas), but he does
in that sentence on Mithras show that he is away back in the dear old
Renan Period of his youth, and that he prefers an utterly unsupported
guess to known fact.
The mysteries of Mithras do not turn on a human victim: contrariwise,
the victim is a bull. The man gets much the best of it—with a knife.
The idea that Mithraism was ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church
is an old-fashioned piece of guesswork, which every succeeding year of
research has done more and more to discredit.
Mithraism was in no way universal. It was mainly a soldiers’
superstition, its relics are not numerous as are those of the main
popular deities.
There is not a shred of evidence, nor of anything that can be twisted
into an implication of evidence, that St. Paul had ever heard of
Mithras. To suggest that St. Paul got the dogma of the Atonement from
the mysteries of Mithras is as though I were to suggest that Mr. Wells
got his doctrine of Natural Selection from the Contrat Social; for (1) I
have no proof that he has ever heard of the Contrat Social; he probably
never has. And (2) the Contrat Social has nothing to do with Natural
Selection.
As for the added remark that the idea of a human victim offered for the
whole human race to God as a complete propitiation “haunted the
black-white races” (which is Wellsian for the Italians and Greeks), that
again is historically nonsense. We have individual sacrifice, of course,
but no universal one. The Mediterranean peoples other than the Semites
were singularly free from such ideas. We seem to have some hint of them
in the barbaric North, but very vague.
As to the pivot point of the Resurrection, Mr. Wells cannot, of course,
lay the burden of that corruption upon the shoulders of St. Paul; and
for this we should be grateful. But his handling of the subject is very
poor. Here it is: “Then presently came a whisper among them and stories,
rather discrepant stories, that the Body of Jesus was not in the tomb in
which it had been placed, and that one, then another, had seen Him
alive. Soon they were consoling themselves with the conviction that He
had risen from the dead and shown Himself to many.”
There is a very good example of the woolly way of writing which carries
conviction to the man who is already convinced. Legends and falsehoods
arise continually in History, but they do not arise like that. You may
say of such a story that you disbelieve it: then it will have arisen by
any one of the four known ways in which _false_ stories of the
marvellous do proceed. (1) Hearsay, with no witnesses available. (2)
Conspiracy and falsehood. (3) The substitution (in a considerable lapse
of time) of affirmation for what was originally metaphor, and definite
statement for what was originally poetic expression. (4) Hallucination,
individual or collective. But the idea that “stories getting about”
transform themselves into a group of living and contemporary _sincere_
witnesses is psychologically impossible.
And who were these witnesses?—according to the only accounts we have,
they were Peter, the authority for Mark; John; later all the Apostles.
One can say the story is late, or madness, or a lie, and each hypothesis
is arguable. But Mr. Wells’s hypothesis that the witnesses did _not_
witness a highly definite, most extraordinary event repeated over many
days, and then were persuaded they _did_ witness it, is not worth
arguing; he only puts it in from a Modernist fear of shocking himself or
his readers by ridiculing venerated names.
The best example we have of a false legend in our time is that of the
Russians in England during the early part of the War. You can get
myriads to say that they were heard of, but I (who received sheaves of
letters written to me at the time by people who believed in the story)
have never met a single individual who said he had _himself_ seen them.
Indeed, I have only heard of one such, and he turned out to be a
practical joker.
Had Mr. Wells not been fettered by his Modernist necessity of treating
the story of Our Lord with a veneration due only to His Divinity, he
would boldly have said what the stronger and more intellectual sceptics
have always said: that the story of the Resurrection is either
contemporary falsehood or a piece of hallucination or a later legend; he
would not have tried to rationalize it in this ludicrously insufficient
fashion.
I have no space to make a full catalogue of Mr. Wells’s lack of
sufficient reading for his purpose. It needed no great amount. Even a
few days among those Encyclopædias with which he is acquainted (and the
articles in which are as anti-Catholic as he could wish) would have
enlightened him. But he never spent those few days. He has copied the
conclusions of the more commonly known anti-Christian writers of his
youth as those conclusions have been presented in popular rationalist
tracts, but he does not know how those scholars worked nor what has been
said since their time.
He brings in the old tag from Gibbon of the contrast between Mass at St.
Peter’s and the state of mind of St. Peter himself. He brings in the
fifth-century sneer against Our Lady, identifying her with Isis (and
here there is clearly no knowledge of documents illustrating the
veneration of our Lady as Mother of God and going back to at least the
second century). He has the old error which, I suppose, one may still
find surviving in certain remote conventicles—that sundry minor Catholic
practices, such as the offering of candles, take the place with us of
spiritual action. He even seems in one place to be under the
extraordinary delusion—it may be no more than confused writing—that we
sprinkle ourselves not with holy water but with blood! (Where on earth
did he get that?) He knows nothing of the way in which the early morning
Sunday Mass at dawn followed naturally on the Jewish Sabbath, and of
which there is evidence as late as St. Ambrose; instead of appreciating
that concrete piece of historical evidence, he makes a vague guess at
the “Sunday” of Mithras: for Mithras is his King Charles’s head.
He ends up by the wildly unhistorical statement that the idea of
orthodox unity was imposed by Constantine in A.D. 325, imagining it to
be unknown to the whole body of the first three centuries!
I marvel that those to whom he went for information did not warn him.
There is—to quote from memory, at random, only the instances known to
all men of average culture—St. John’s attitude towards Cerinthus (_c._
70–90). The Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians (_c._ 90). The whole
story of Marcion (_c._ 150–160). The Montanists a lifetime later. The
tremendous _De Unitate_ of St. Cyprian (A.D. 251).
The whole note of those three centuries _before_ Constantine is a story
of the expelling of heresy and the maintaining of unity. Yet Mr. Wells
thinks Constantine invented such things! Moreover, he calls such unity
“the stamping out of all _thought_” (my italics).
But I think the most revealing piece of ignorance is what he says about
the Arian creed of the late federate troops of barbarian extraction.
He thinks they were Arian “because their simple minds found the
Trinitarian position incomprehensible.” He thinks Arianism to have been
a mere affirmation that Our Lord was only a man; and he has no knowledge
of the plain, historical fact that most of the federate Roman troops,
other than the Franks, got their complicated and highly metaphysical
heresy from heretical missionaries at a moment when the official powers
at Constantinople favoured heresy. He has no grasp of the peculiarly
subtle—indeed, over-subtle—Arian position.
How surprised Mr. Wells would be if someone were to take him through the
outline of that affair: “The Conditioned Procession of the Logos,” “The
All-creative no part of the Ingenerate,” etc. Talk of simplicity! You
might as well say that the London Sunday newspapers boomed the Einstein
theory in its day because it was “so simple.”
But what a revelation of this writer’s ideas on the Faith in
antiquity—and how typical of the second-hand, the popular, the
half-educated attitude towards the ancient and enduring religion of
Europe.