its behalf,—I mean its wide reception. Theology, as I have described it,
is no accident of particular minds, as are certain systems, for instance,
of prophetical interpretation. It is not the sudden birth of a crisis, as
the Lutheran or Wesleyan doctrine. It is not the splendid development of
some uprising philosophy, as the Cartesian or Platonic. It is not the
fashion of a season, as certain medical treatments may be considered. It
has had a place, if not possession, in the intellectual world from time
immemorial; it has been received by minds the most various, and in systems
of religion the most hostile to each other. It has _primâ facie_ claims
upon us, so imposing, that it can only be rejected on the ground of those
claims being nothing more than imposing, that is, being false. As to our
own countries, it occupies our language, it meets us at every turn in our
literature, it is the secret assumption, too axiomatic to be distinctly
professed, of all our writers; nor can we help assuming it ourselves,
except by the most unnatural vigilance. Whoever philosophizes, starts with
it, and introduces it, when he will, without any apology. Bacon, Hooker,
Taylor, Cudworth, Locke, Newton, Clarke, Berkeley, and Butler, and it
would be as easy to find more, as difficult to find greater names among
English authors, inculcate or comment upon it. Men the most opposed, in
creed or cast of mind, Addison and Johnson, Shakespeare and Milton, Lord
Herbert and Baxter, herald it forth. Nor is it an English or a Protestant
notion only; you track it across the Continent, you pursue it into former
ages. When was the world without it? Have the systems of Atheism or
Pantheism, as sciences, prevailed in the literature of nations, or
received a formation or attained a completeness such as Monotheism? We
find it in old Greece, and even in Rome, as well as in Judea and the East.
We find it in popular literature, in philosophy, in poetry, as a positive
and settled teaching, differing not at all in the appearance it presents,
whether in Protestant England, or in schismatical Russia, or in the
Mahometan populations, or in the Catholic Church. If ever there was a
subject of thought, which had earned by prescription to be received among
the studies of a University, and which could not be rejected except on the
score of convicted imposture, as astrology or alchemy; if there be a
science anywhere, which at least could claim not to be ignored, but to be
entertained, and either distinctly accepted or distinctly reprobated, or
rather, which cannot be passed over in a scheme of universal instruction,
without involving a positive denial of its truth, it is this ancient, this
far-spreading philosophy.
10.
And now, Gentlemen, I may bring a somewhat tedious discussion to a close.
It will not take many words to sum up what I have been urging. I say then,
if the various branches of knowledge, which are the matter of teaching in
a University, so hang together, that none can be neglected without
prejudice to the perfection of the rest, and if Theology be a branch of
knowledge, of wide reception, of philosophical structure, of unutterable
importance, and of supreme influence, to what conclusion are we brought
from these two premisses but this? that to withdraw Theology from the
public schools is to impair the completeness and to invalidate the
trustworthiness of all that is actually taught in them.
But I have been insisting simply on Natural Theology, and that, because I
wished to carry along with me those who were not Catholics, and, again, as
being confident, that no one can really set himself to master and to teach
the doctrine of an intelligent Creator in its fulness, without going on a
great deal farther than he at present dreams. I say, then, secondly:—if
this Science, even as human reason may attain to it, has such claims on
the regard, and enters so variously into the objects, of the Professor of
Universal Knowledge, how can any Catholic imagine that it is possible for
him to cultivate Philosophy and Science with due attention to their
ultimate end, which is Truth, supposing that system of revealed facts and
principles, which constitutes the Catholic Faith, which goes so far beyond
nature, and which he knows to be most true, be omitted from among the
subjects of his teaching?
In a word, Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of
general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short, if I may so speak, of
unravelling the web of University Teaching. It is, according to the Greek
proverb, to take the Spring from out of the year; it is to imitate the
preposterous proceeding of those tragedians who represented a drama with
the omission of its principal part.
Discourse IV.
Bearing Of Other Branches Of Knowledge On Theology.
1.
Nothing is more common in the world at large than to consider the
resistance, made on the part of religious men, especially Catholics, to
the separation of Secular Education from Religion, as a plain token that
there is some real contrariety between human science and Revelation. To
the multitude who draw this inference, it matters not whether the
protesting parties avow their belief in this contrariety or not; it is
borne in upon the many, as if it were self-evident, that religious men
would not thus be jealous and alarmed about Science, did they not feel
instinctively, though they may not recognize it, that knowledge is their
born enemy, and that its progress, if it is not arrested, will be certain
to destroy all that they hold venerable and dear. It looks to the world
like a misgiving on our part similar to that which is imputed to our
refusal to educate by means of the Bible only; why should you dread the
sacred text, men say, if it be not against you? And in like manner, why
should you dread secular education, except that it is against you? Why
impede the circulation of books which take religious views opposite to
your own? Why forbid your children and scholars the free perusal of poems
or tales or essays or other light literature which you fear would unsettle
their minds? Why oblige them to know these persons and to shun those, if
you think that your friends have reason on their side as fully as your
opponents? Truth is bold and unsuspicious; want of self-reliance is the
mark of falsehood.
Now, as far as this objection relates to any supposed opposition between
secular science and divine, which is the subject on which I am at present
engaged, I made a sufficient answer to it in my foregoing Discourse. In it
I said, that, in order to have possession of truth at all, we must have
the whole truth; and no one science, no two sciences, no one family of
sciences, nay, not even all secular science, is the whole truth; that
revealed truth enters to a very great extent into the province of science,
philosophy, and literature, and that to put it on one side, in compliment
to secular science, is simply, under colour of a compliment, to do science
a great damage. I do not say that every science will be equally affected
by the omission; pure mathematics will not suffer at all; chemistry will
suffer less than politics, politics than history, ethics, or metaphysics;
still, that the various branches of science are intimately connected with
each other, and form one whole, which whole is impaired, and to an extent
which it is difficult to limit, by any considerable omission of knowledge,
of whatever kind, and that revealed knowledge is very far indeed from an
inconsiderable department of knowledge, this I consider undeniable. As the
written and unwritten word of God make up Revelation as a whole, and the
written, taken by itself, is but a part of that whole, so in turn
Revelation itself may be viewed as one of the constituent parts of human
knowledge, considered as a whole, and its omission is the omission of one
of those constituent parts. Revealed Religion furnishes facts to the other
sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach; and
it invalidates apparent facts, which, left to themselves, they would
imagine. Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in
Noah’s ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at
without Revelation; and, in the province of physiology and moral
philosophy, our race’s progress and perfectibility is a dream, because
Revelation contradicts it, whatever may be plausibly argued in its behalf
by scientific inquirers. It is not then that Catholics are afraid of human
knowledge, but that they are proud of divine knowledge, and that they
think the omission of any kind of knowledge whatever, human or divine, to
be, as far as it goes, not knowledge, but ignorance.
2.
Thus I anticipated the objection in question last week: now I am going to
make it the introduction to a further view of the relation of secular
knowledge to divine. I observe, then, that, if you drop any science out of
the circle of knowledge, you cannot keep its place vacant for it; that
science is forgotten; the other sciences close up, or, in other words,
they exceed their proper bounds, and intrude where they have no right. For
instance, I suppose, if ethics were sent into banishment, its territory
would soon disappear, under a treaty of partition, as it may be called,
between law, political economy, and physiology; what, again, would become
of the province of experimental science, if made over to the Antiquarian
Society; or of history, if surrendered out and out to Metaphysicians? The
case is the same with the subject-matter of Theology; it would be the prey
of a dozen various sciences, if Theology were put out of possession; and
not only so, but those sciences would be plainly exceeding their rights
and their capacities in seizing upon it. They would be sure to teach
wrongly, where they had no mission to teach at all. The enemies of
Catholicism ought to be the last to deny this:—for they have never been
blind to a like usurpation, as they have called it, on the part of
theologians; those who accuse us of wishing, in accordance with Scripture
language, to make the sun go round the earth, are not the men to deny that
a science which exceeds its limits falls into error.
I neither then am able nor care to deny, rather I assert the fact, and
to-day I am going on to account for it, that any secular science,
cultivated exclusively, may become dangerous to Religion; and I account
for it on this broad principle, that no science whatever, however
comprehensive it may be, but will fall largely into error, if it be
constituted the sole exponent of all things in heaven and earth, and that,
for the simple reason that it is encroaching on territory not its own, and
undertaking problems which it has no instruments to solve. And I set off
thus:
3.
One of the first acts of the human mind is to take hold of and appropriate
what meets the senses, and herein lies a chief distinction between man’s
and a brute’s use of them. Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by
sounds; and what they see and what they hear are mainly sights and sounds
only. The intellect of man, on the contrary, energizes as well as his eye
or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It
seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what
need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It
discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is
not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. It gathers up
a succession of notes into the expression of a whole, and calls it a
melody; it has a keen sensibility towards angles and curves, lights and
shadows, tints and contours. It distinguishes between rule and exception,
between accident and design. It assigns phenomena to a general law,
qualities to a subject, acts to a principle, and effects to a cause. In a
word, it philosophizes; for I suppose Science and Philosophy, in their
elementary idea, are nothing else but this habit of _viewing_, as it may
be called, the objects which sense conveys to the mind, of throwing them
into system, and uniting and stamping them with one form.
This method is so natural to us, as I have said, as to be almost
spontaneous; and we are impatient when we cannot exercise it, and in
consequence we do not always wait to have the means of exercising it
aright, but we often put up with insufficient or absurd views or
interpretations of what we meet with, rather than have none at all. We
refer the various matters which are brought home to us, material or moral,
to causes which we happen to know of, or to such as are simply imaginary,
sooner than refer them to nothing; and according to the activity of our
intellect do we feel a pain and begin to fret, if we are not able to do
so. Here we have an explanation of the multitude of off-hand sayings,
flippant judgments, and shallow generalizations, with which the world
abounds. Not from self-will only, nor from malevolence, but from the
irritation which suspense occasions, is the mind forced on to pronounce,
without sufficient data for pronouncing. Who does not form some view or
other, for instance, of any public man, or any public event, nay, even so
far in some cases as to reach the mental delineation of his appearance or
of its scene? yet how few have a right to form any view. Hence the
misconceptions of character, hence the false impressions and reports of
words or deeds, which are the rule, rather than the exception, in the
world at large; hence the extravagances of undisciplined talent, and the
narrowness of conceited ignorance; because, though it is no easy matter to
view things correctly, nevertheless the busy mind will ever be viewing. We
cannot do without a view, and we put up with an illusion, when we cannot
get a truth.
4.
Now, observe how this impatience acts in matters of research and
speculation. What happens to the ignorant and hotheaded, will take place
in the case of every person whose education or pursuits are contracted,
whether they be merely professional, merely scientific, or of whatever
other peculiar complexion. Men, whose life lies in the cultivation of one
science, or the exercise of one method of thought, have no more right,
though they have often more ambition, to generalize upon the basis of
their own pursuit but beyond its range, than the schoolboy or the
ploughman to judge of a Prime Minister. But they must have something to
say on every subject; habit, fashion, the public require it of them: and,
if so, they can only give sentence according to their knowledge. You might
think this ought to make such a person modest in his enunciations; not so:
too often it happens that, in proportion to the narrowness of his
knowledge, is, not his distrust of it, but the deep hold it has upon him,
his absolute conviction of his own conclusions, and his positiveness in
maintaining them. He has the obstinacy of the bigot, whom he scorns,
without the bigot’s apology, that he has been taught, as he thinks, his
doctrine from heaven. Thus he becomes, what is commonly called, a man of
one idea; which properly means a man of one science, and of the view,
partly true, but subordinate, partly false, which is all that can proceed
out of any thing so partial. Hence it is that we have the principles of
utility, of combination, of progress, of philanthropy, or, in material
sciences, comparative anatomy, phrenology, electricity, exalted into
leading ideas, and keys, if not of all knowledge, at least of many things
more than belong to them,—principles, all of them true to a certain point,
yet all degenerating into error and quackery, because they are carried to
excess, viz. at the point where they require interpretation and restraint
from other quarters, and because they are employed to do what is simply
too much for them, inasmuch as a little science is not deep philosophy.
Lord Bacon has set down the abuse, of which I am speaking, among the
impediments to the Advancement of the Sciences, when he observes that “men
have used to infect their meditations, opinions, and doctrines, with some
conceits which they have most admired, or _some Sciences which they have
most applied_; and give all things else a _tincture_ according to them
_utterly untrue and improper_.…” So have the alchemists made a philosophy
out of a few experiments of the furnace; and Gilbertus, our countryman,
hath made a philosophy out of the observations of a lodestone. So Cicero,
when, reciting the several opinions of the nature of the soul, he found a
musician that held the soul was but a harmony, saith pleasantly, “hic ab
arte suâ non recessit,” “he was true to his art.” But of these conceits
Aristotle speaketh seriously and wisely when he saith, “Qui respiciunt ad
pauca, de facili pronunciant,” “they who contemplate a few things have no
difficulty in deciding.”
5.
And now I have said enough to explain the inconvenience which I conceive
necessarily to result from a refusal to recognize theological truth in a
course of Universal Knowledge;—it is not only the loss of Theology, it is
the perversion of other sciences. What it unjustly forfeits, others
unjustly seize. They have their own department, and, in going out of it,
attempt to do what they really cannot do; and that the more mischievously,
because they do teach what in its place is true, though when out of its
place, perverted or carried to excess, it is not true. And, as every man
has not the capacity of separating truth from falsehood, they persuade the
world of what is false by urging upon it what is true. Nor is it open
enemies alone who encounter us here, sometimes it is friends, sometimes
persons who, if not friends, at least have no wish to oppose Religion, and
are not conscious they are doing so; and it will carry out my meaning more
fully if I give some illustrations of it.
As to friends, I may take as an instance the cultivation of the Fine Arts,
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, to which I may add Music. These high
ministers of the Beautiful and the Noble are, it is plain, special
attendants and handmaids of Religion; but it is equally plain that they
are apt to forget their place, and, unless restrained with a firm hand,
instead of being servants, will aim at becoming principals. Here lies the
advantage, in an ecclesiastical point of view, of their more rudimental
state, I mean of the ancient style of architecture, of Gothic sculpture
and painting, and of what is called Gregorian music, that these inchoate
sciences have so little innate vigour and life in them, that they are in
no danger of going out of their place, and giving the law to Religion. But
the case is very different when genius has breathed upon their natural
elements, and has developed them into what I may call intellectual powers.
When Painting, for example, grows into the fulness of its function as a
simply imitative art, it at once ceases to be a dependant on the Church.
It has an end of its own, and that of earth: Nature is its pattern, and
the object it pursues is the beauty of Nature, even till it becomes an
ideal beauty, but a natural beauty still. It cannot imitate that beauty of
Angels and Saints which it has never seen. At first, indeed, by outlines
and emblems it shadowed out the Invisible, and its want of skill became
the instrument of reverence and modesty; but as time went on and it
attained its full dimensions as an art, it rather subjected Religion to
its own ends than ministered to the ends of Religion, and in its long
galleries and stately chambers, did but mingle adorable figures and sacred
histories with a multitude of earthly, not to say unseemly forms, which
the Art had created, borrowing withal a colouring and a character from
that bad company. Not content with neutral ground for its development, it
was attracted by the sublimity of divine subjects to ambitious and
hazardous essays. Without my saying a word more, you will clearly
understand, Gentlemen, that under these circumstances Religion was bound
to exert itself, that the world might not gain an advantage over it. Put
out of sight the severe teaching of Catholicism in the schools of
Painting, as men now would put it aside in their philosophical studies,
and in no long time you would have the hierarchy of the Church, the
Anchorite and Virgin-martyr, the Confessor and the Doctor, the Angelic
Hosts, the Mother of God, the Crucifix, the Eternal Trinity, supplanted by
a sort of pagan mythology in the guise of sacred names, by a creation
indeed of high genius, of intense, and dazzling, and soul-absorbing
beauty, in which, however, there was nothing which subserved the cause of
Religion, nothing on the other hand which did not directly or indirectly
minister to corrupt nature and the powers of darkness.
6.
The art of Painting, however, is peculiar: Music and Architecture are more
ideal, and their respective archetypes, even if not supernatural, at least
are abstract and unearthly; and yet what I have been observing about
Painting, holds, I think, analogously, in the marvellous development which
Musical Science has undergone in the last century. Doubtless here too the
highest genius may be made subservient to Religion; here too, still more
simply than in the case of Painting, the Science has a field of its own,
perfectly innocent, into which Religion does not and need not enter; on
the other hand here also, in the case of Music as of Painting, it is
certain that Religion must be alive and on the defensive, for, if its
servants sleep, a potent enchantment will steal over it. Music, I suppose,
though this is not the place to enlarge upon it, has an object of its own;
as mathematical science also, it is the expression of ideas greater and
more profound than any in the visible world, ideas, which centre indeed in
Him whom Catholicism manifests, who is the seat of all beauty, order, and
perfection whatever, still ideas after all which are not those on which
Revelation directly and principally fixes our gaze. If then a great master
in this mysterious science (if I may speak of matters which seem to lie
out of my own province) throws himself on his own gift, trusts its
inspirations, and absorbs himself in those thoughts which, though they
come to him in the way of nature, belong to things above nature, it is
obvious he will neglect everything else. Rising in his strength, he will
break through the trammels of words, he will scatter human voices, even
the sweetest, to the winds; he will be borne upon nothing less than the
fullest flood of sounds which art has enabled him to draw from mechanical
contrivances; he will go forth as a giant, as far as ever his instruments
can reach, starting from their secret depths fresh and fresh elements of
beauty and grandeur as he goes, and pouring them together into still more
marvellous and rapturous combinations;—and well indeed and lawfully, while
he keeps to that line which is his own; but, should he happen to be
attracted, as he well may, by the sublimity, so congenial to him, of the
Catholic doctrine and ritual, should he engage in sacred themes, should he
resolve by means of his art to do honour to the Mass, or the Divine
Office,—(he cannot have a more pious, a better purpose, and Religion will
gracefully accept what he gracefully offers; but)—is it not certain, from
the circumstances of the case, that he will be carried on rather to use
Religion than to minister to it, unless Religion is strong on its own
ground, and reminds him that, if he would do honour to the highest of
subjects, he must make himself its scholar, must humbly follow the
thoughts given him, and must aim at the glory, not of his own gift, but of
the Great Giver?
7.
As to Architecture, it is a remark, if I recollect aright both of Fénélon
and Berkeley, men so different, that it carries more with it even than the
names of those celebrated men, that the Gothic style is not as _simple_ as
befits ecclesiastical structures. I understand this to be a similar
judgment to that which I have been passing on the cultivation of Painting
and Music. For myself, certainly I think that that style which, whatever
be its origin, is called Gothic, is endowed with a profound and a
commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses with which we are
acquainted, and which probably the Church will not see surpassed till it
attain to the Celestial City. No other architecture, now used for sacred
purposes, seems to be the growth of an idea, whereas the Gothic style is
as harmonious and as intellectual as it is graceful. But this feeling
should not blind us, rather it should awaken us, to the danger lest what
is really a divine gift be incautiously used as an end rather than as a
means. It is surely quite within the bounds of possibility, that, as the
_renaissance_ three centuries ago carried away its own day, in spite of
the Church, into excesses in literature and art, so that revival of an
almost forgotten architecture, which is at present taking place in our own
countries, in France, and in Germany, may in some way or other run away
with us into this or that error, unless we keep a watch over its course. I
am not speaking of Ireland; but to English Catholics at least it would be
a serious evil, if it came as the emblem and advocate of a past ceremonial
or an extinct nationalism. We are not living in an age of wealth and
loyalty, of pomp and stateliness, of time-honoured establishments, of
pilgrimage and penance, of hermitages and convents in the wild, and of
fervent populations supplying the want of education by love, and
apprehending in form and symbol what they cannot read in books. Our rules
and our rubrics have been altered now to meet the times, and hence an
obsolete discipline may be a present heresy.
8.