THE BREAKDOWN OF AUTHORITY
1. _God’s Government_
The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much
of our current controversy is between those who hope to stay the
dissolution and those who would like to hasten it. The prime fact about
modernity, as it presents itself to us, is that it not merely denies
the central ideas of our forefathers but dissolves the disposition to
believe in them. The ancestral tradition still lives in many corners of
the world. But it no longer represents for us, as it did for Dante and
for St. Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago, the triumphant wisdom
of the age. A child born in a modern city may still learn to use the
images of the theological drama, but more or less consciously he is
made to feel that in using them he is not speaking of things that are
literally and exactly true.
Its dogma, as Mr. Santayana once said, is insensibly understood to
be nothing but myth, its miracles nothing but legend, its sacraments
mere symbols, its bible pure literature, its liturgy just poetry, its
hierarchy an administrative convenience, its ethics an historical
accident, and its whole function simply to lend a warm mystical aureole
to human culture and ignorance. The modern man does not take his
religion as a real account of the constitution, the government, the
history, and the actual destiny of the [p069] universe. With rare
exceptions his ancestors did. They believed that all their activities
on this earth had a sequel in other activities hereafter, and that
they themselves in their own persons would be alive through all the
stretches of infinite time to experience this fulfilment. The sense of
actuality has gone out of this tremendous conception of life; only the
echoes of it persist, and in our memories they create a world apart
from the world in which we do our work, a noble world perhaps in which
it is refreshing to dwell now and then, and in anxiety to take refuge.
But the spaces between the stars are so great; the earth is now so
small a planet in the skies; man is so close, as St. Francis said, to
his brother the ass, that in the daylight he does not believe that a
great cosmic story is being unfolded of which his every thought and act
is a significant part. The universe may have a conscious purpose, but
he does not believe he knows just what it is; humanity may be acting
out a divine drama, but he is not certain that he knows the plot.
There has gone out of modern life a working conviction that we are
living under the dominion of one supreme ideal, the attainment of
eternal happiness by obedience to God’s will on earth. This conviction
found its most perfect expression in the period which begins with St.
Augustine’s _City of God_ and culminates in the _Divine Comedy_ of
Dante. But the underlying intuitions are to be found in nearly all
popular religion; they are the creature’s feeling of dependence upon
his creator, a sense that his destiny is fixed by a being greater than
himself. At the bottom of it there is a conviction that the universe
is governed by superhuman persons, that the daily visible [p070]
life of the world is constitutionally subject to the laws and the
will of an invisible government. What the thinkers of the Middle Ages
did was to work out in elaborate detail and in grandiose style the
constitutional system under which supernatural government operates. It
is not fanciful, and I hope not irreverent, to suggest that the great
debates about the nature of the Trinity and the Godhead were attempts
to work out a theory of divine sovereignty; that the debates about
election and predestination and grace are attempts to work out a theory
of citizenship in a divine society. The essential idea which dominates
the whole speculation is man’s relation to a heavenly king.
As this idea was finally worked out by the legists and canonists and
scholastics
every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part
of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists,
and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that
_Civitas Dei_, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and
the earth. Then, on the other hand, the eternal and other-worldly
aim and object of every individual man must, in a directer or an
indirecter fashion, determine the aim and object of every group
into which he enters.
But as there must, of necessity, be connection between the various
groups, and as all of them must be connected with the divinely
ordered Universe, we come by the further notion of a divinely
instituted Harmony which pervades the Universal Whole and every
part thereof. To every Being is assigned its place in that whole,
and to every link between Beings corresponds a divine decree....
There is no need to suppose that everyone in the Middle Ages
understood the theory, as Gierke describes it here, [p071] in all its
architectural grandeur. Nevertheless, the theory is implicit in the
feeling of simple men. It is the logical elaboration of the fundamental
belief that the God who governs the world is no mere abstraction made
up of hazy nouns and a vague adoration, but that, as Henry Adams says,
he is the feudal seigneur to whom Roland, when he was dying, could
proffer “his right-hand glove” as a last act of homage, such as he
might have made to Charlemagne, and could pray:
O God the Father who has never lied,
Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death,
And Daniel from the lions saved,
Save my soul from all the perils
For the sins that in my life I did!
2. _The Doctrine of the Keys_
The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties
to human reason, as we can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly
made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided
over by the Bishop of Rome or whether it was an ideal and invisible
congregation of the saved. But we may be sure that to plainer minds it
was necessary to believe that God governs mankind through the agency
of the visible church. The unsophisticated man may not be realistic,
but he is literal; he would be quite incapable, we may be sure, of
understanding what St. Thomas meant when he asked “why should not the
same sacred letter ... contain several senses founded on the literal?”
He would accept all the senses but he would accept them all literally.
And taking them literally he would have to believe that [p072] if God
governs the world, he governs it, not in some obscure meaning of the
term, but that he actually governs it, as a king who is mightier than
Charlemagne, but not essentially unlike Charlemagne.
The disposition to believe in the rule of God depended, therefore, upon
the capacity to believe in a visible church upon earth which holds its
commission from God. In some form or another all simple people look
to a priestly caste who make visible the divine power. Without some
such actualization the human imagination falters and becomes vagrant.
The Catholic Church by its splendor and its power and its universality
during the Middle Ages must have made easily credible the conception
of God the Ruler. It was a government exercising jurisdiction over
the known world, powerful enough to depose princes, and at its head
was the Pope who could prove by the evidence of scripture that he was
the successor to Peter and was the Vice-gerent of God. To ask whether
this grandiose claim was in fact true is, from the point of view of
this argument, to miss the point. It was believed to be true in the
Middle Ages. Because it was believed, the Church flourished. Because
the Church flourished, it was ever so much easier to be certain that
the claim was true. When men said that God ruled the world, they had
evidence as convincing as we have when we say that the President is
head of the United States Government; they were convinced because they
came into daily contact with God’s appointees administering God’s laws.
It is this concrete sense of divine government which modern men have
lost, and it may well be that this is where the Reformation has
exercised its most revolutionary [p073] effect. What Luther did was
to destroy the pretensions not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but
of any church and of any priestly class to administer God’s government
on earth. The Protestant reformers may not have intended to destroy
as deeply as they did; the theocracies established by Calvin and Knox
imply as much. But, nevertheless, when Luther succeeded in defying the
Holy See by rejecting its claim that it was the exclusive agent of God,
he made it impossible for any other church to set up the same claim and
sustain it for any length of time.
Now Christ says that not alone in the Church is there forgiveness
of sins, but that where two or three are gathered together in His
name, they shall have the right and the liberty to proclaim and
promise to each other comfort and the forgiveness of sins.... We
are not only kings and the freest of all men, but also priests
forever, a dignity far higher than kingship, because by that
priesthood we are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others,
and to teach one another mutually the things which are of God.
This denial of the special function of the priesthood did not, of
course, originate with Luther. Its historical antecedents go back to
the primitive Christians; there is quotable authority for it in St.
Augustine. It was anticipated by Wyclif and Huss and by many of the
mystics of the Middle Ages. But Luther, possibly because the times were
ripe for it, translated the denial of the authority of the priesthood
into a political revolution which divided Christendom. When the
Reformation was an accomplished fact, men looked out upon the world
and no longer saw a single Catholic Apostolic Church as the visible
embodiment of God’s government. A large part of [p074] mankind, and
that an economically and politically powerful part, no longer believed
that Christ gave to Simon Peter and his successors at the Roman See the
Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise that “whatsoever thou
shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
3. _The Logic of Toleration_
As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were
forced to realize that unless they consented to the policy of
toleration they would be ruined. There is no reason to suppose that
except among a few idealists toleration has ever been much admired
as a principle. It was originally, and in large measure it still is,
nothing but a practical necessity. For in its interior life no church
can wholly admit that its rivals may provide an equally good vehicle of
salvation.
Martin Luther certainly had none of the modern notion that one church
is about as good as the next. To be sure he appealed to the right
of private judgment, but he made it plain nevertheless that in his
opinion “pagans or Turks or Jews or fake Christians” would “remain
under eternal wrath and an everlasting damnation.” John Calvin let
it be known in no uncertain tone that he did not wish any new sects
in Geneva. Milton, writing his beautiful essay on liberty, drew the
line at Papists. And in our own day the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ says
in the course of an eloquent argument for practical civic toleration
that “as the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church
of Christ can tolerate no strange churches beside herself, [p075]
or, what amounts to the same, she can recognize none as theoretically
justified.” This is the ancient dogma that outside the church there is
no salvation—_extra ecclesiam nulla salus_. Like many another dogma
of the Roman church, it is not even in theory absolutely unbending.
Thus it appears from the allocution of Pope Pius IX, _Singulari quadam_
(1854), that “those who are ignorant of the true religion, if their
ignorance is invincible (which means, if they have never had a chance
to know the true religion) are not, in this matter, guilty of any fault
in the sight of God.”
As a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom the
churches find themselves in an anomalous position. Inwardly, to
their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the
only complete version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic
relations with other churches and with the civil power, they preach
and practice toleration. The separation of church and state involves
more than a mere logical difficulty for the churchman. It involves a
deep psychological difficulty for the members of the congregation.
As communicants they are expected to believe without reservation
that their church is the only true means of salvation; otherwise the
multitude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citizens
they are expected to maintain a neutral indifference to the claims of
all the sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect upon the
religious practices of the others. This is the best compromise which
human wisdom has as yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence
which the superficial advocates of toleration often overlook. It is
difficult to remain warmly convinced that the authority [p076] of any
one sect is divine, when as a matter of daily experience all sects have
to be treated alike.
The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be
indifferent in one part of his soul and firmly believing in another.
The existence of rival sects, the visible demonstration that none has
a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against an
unquestioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many faiths,
so many loyalties, are offered to the modern man that at last none
seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in the order of the universe.
The existence of many churches in one community weakens the foundation
of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power
proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.
But when there are many churches in the same community, none can make
wholly good the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to
discipline the individual which a universal church exercises. For, as
Dr. Figgis puts it, when many churches are tolerated, “excommunication
has ceased to be tyrannical by becoming futile.”
4. _A Working Compromise_
If the rival churches were not compelled to tolerate each other, they
could not, consistently with their own teaching, accept the prevailing
theory of the public school. Under that theory the schools are silent
about matters of faith, and teachers are supposed to be neutral on the
issues of history and science which bear upon religion. The churches
permit this because they cannot agree on the dogma they would wish to
have taught. The Catholics would rather have no dogma in the schools
than [p077] Protestant dogma; the fundamentalists would rather have
none than have modernist. This situation is held to be a good one. But
that is only because all the alternatives are so much worse. No church
can sincerely subscribe to the theory that questions of faith do not
enter into the education of children.
Wherever churches are rich enough to establish their own schools, or
powerful enough to control the public school, they make short work
of the “godless” school. Either they establish religious schools of
their own, as the Catholics and Lutherans have done, or they impose
their views on the public schools as the fundamentalists have done
wherever they have the necessary voting strength. The last fight of
Mr. Bryan’s life was made on behalf of the theory that if a majority
of voters in Tennessee were fundamentalists then they had the right
to make public education in Tennessee fundamentalist too. One of the
standing grievances of the Catholic Church in America is that Catholics
are taxed to support schools to which they cannot conscientiously send
their children.
As a matter of fact non-sectarianism is a useful political phrase
rather than an accurate description of what goes on in the schools. If
there is teaching of science, that teaching is by implication almost
always agnostic. The fundamentalists point this out, and they are quite
right. The teaching of history, under a so-called non-sectarian policy,
is usually, in this country, a rather diluted Protestant version of
history. The Catholics are quite right when they point this out.
Occasionally, it may be, a teacher of science appears who has managed
to assimilate his science to his theology; now and then a Catholic
history teacher [p078] will depart from the standard textbooks to give
the Catholic version of disputed events during the last few hundred
years. But the chief effect of the non-sectarian policy is to weaken
sectarian attachment, to wean the child from the faith of his fathers
by making him feel that patriotism somehow demands that he shall not
press his convictions too far, that commonsense and good fellowship
mean that he must not be too absolute. The leaders of the churches
are aware of this peril. Every once in a while they make an effort
to combat it. Committees composed of parsons, priests, and rabbis
appear before the school boards and petition that a non-sectarian
God be worshipped and the non-controversial passages of the Bible be
read. They always agree that the present godless system of education
diminishes the sanctions of morality and the attendance at their
respective churches. But they disagree when they try to agree on the
nature of a neutral God, and they have been known to dispute fiercely
about a non-controversial text of the Ten Commandments. So, if the
sects are evenly balanced, the practical sense of the community turns
in the end against the reform.
5. _The Effect of Patriotism_
Modern governments are not merely neutral as between rival churches.
They draw to themselves much of the loyalty which once was given to the
churches. In fact it has been said with some truth that patriotism has
many of the characteristics of an authoritative religion. Certainly
it is true that during the last few hundred years there has been
transferred to government a considerable [p079] part of the devotion
which once sustained the churches.
In the older world the priest was a divinely commissioned agent and
the prince a divinely tolerated power. But by the Sixteenth Century
Melanchthon, a friend of Luther’s, had denied that the church could
make laws binding the conscience. Only the prince, he said, could do
that. Out of this view developed the much misunderstood but essentially
modern doctrine of the divine right of kings. In its original historic
setting this doctrine was a way of asserting that the civil authority,
embodied in the king, derived its power not from the Pope, as God’s
viceroy on earth, but by direct appointment from God himself. The
divine right of kings was a declaration of independence as against
the authority of the church. This heresy was challenged not only by
the Pope, but by the Presbyterians as well. And it was to combat
the Presbyterian preachers who insisted on trying to dictate to the
government that King James I wrote his _True Law of Free Monarchy_,
asserting the whole doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
In the Religious Peace of Augsburg an even more destructive blow was
struck at the ancient claim of the church that it is a universal power.
It was agreed that the citizen of a state must adopt the religion of
his king. _Cuius regio ejus religio._ This was not religious liberty as
we understand it, but it was a supreme assertion of the civil power.
Where once the church had administered religion for the multitude, and
had exercised the right to depose an heretical king, it now became
the prerogative [p080] of the king to determine the religious duties
of his subjects. The way was open for the modern absolute state, a
conception which would have been entirely incomprehensible to men who
lived in the ages of faith.
We must here avoid using words ambiguously. When I speak of the
absolute state, I do not refer to the constitutional arrangement of
powers within the state. It is of no importance in this connection
whether the absolute power of the state is exercised by a king,
a landed aristocracy, bankers and manufacturers, professional
politicians, soldiers, or a random majority of voters. It does not
matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the
consent of the governed. A state is absolute in the sense which I
have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force
within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life,
to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to
punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family,
to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state
claims all these powers, and in the matter of theory there is no real
difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and
democrats. There are lingering traces in the American constitutional
system of the older theory that there are inalienable rights which
government may not absorb. But these rights are really not inalienable
because they can be taken away by constitutional amendment. There
is no theoretical limit upon the power of the ultimate majorities
which create civil government. There are only practical limits. They
are restrained by inertia, and by prudence, even by good will. But
ultimately [p081] and theoretically they claim absolute authority as
against all foreign states, as against all churches, associations, and
persons within their jurisdiction.
The victory of the civil power was not achieved everywhere at the same
time. Spasmodically, with occasional setbacks, but in the long run
irresistibly, the state has attained supremacy. In the feudal age the
monarch was at no time sovereign. The Pope was the universal lawgiver,
not only in what we should call matters of faith, but in matters
of business and politics as well. As late as the beginning of the
Seventeenth Century, Pope Paul V insisted that the Doge of the Venetian
Republic had no right to arrest a canon of the church on the charge of
flagrant immorality. When, nevertheless, the canon was arrested, the
Pope laid Venice under an interdict and excommunicated the Doge and the
Senate. But the Venetian Government answered that it was founded on
Divine Right; its title to govern did not come from the church. In the
end the Pope gave way, and “the reign of the Pope,” says Dr. Figgis,
“as King of Kings was over.”
It was as a result of the loss of its civil power that the Roman Church
evolved the modern doctrine of infallibility. This claim, as Dr. Figgis
points out, is not the culmination but the (implicit) surrender of
the notions embodied in the famous papal bull, _Unam Sanctam_. The
Pope could no longer claim the political sovereignty of the world; he
then asserted supreme rights as the religious teacher of the Catholic
communion. “The Pope, from being the Lord of Lords, has become the
Doctor of Doctors. From being the mother of states, the Curia [p082]
has become the authoritative organ of a teaching society.”
6. _The Dissolution of a Sovereignty_
Thus there has gradually been dissolving the conception that the
government of human affairs is a subordinate part of a divine
government presided over by God the King. In place of one church which
is sovereign over all men, there are now many rival churches, rival
states, voluntary associations, and detached individuals. God is no
longer believed to be a universal king in the full meaning of the
word king, and religious obedience is no longer the central loyalty
from which all other obligations are derived. Religion has become
for most modern men one phase in a varied experience; it no longer
regulates their civic duties, their economic activities, their family
life, and their opinions. It has ceased to have universal dominion,
and is now held to be supreme only within its own domain. But there
is much uncertainty as to what that domain is. In actual affairs,
the religious obligations of modern men are often weaker than their
social interests and generally weaker than the fiercer claims of
patriotism. The conduct of the churches and of churchmen during the
War demonstrated that fact overwhelmingly. They submitted willingly or
unwillingly to the overwhelming force of the civil power. Against this
force many men claim the right of revolution, or at least the right of
passive resistance and conscientious objection. Sometimes they base
their claims upon a religious precept which they hold sacred. But even
in their disobedience to Caesar they are forced to acknowledge that
loyalty in the modern world is complex, that it has become [p083]
divided and uncertain, and that the age of faith which was absolute
is gone for them. However reverent they may be when they are in their
churches, they no longer feel wholly assured when they listen to the
teaching that these are the words of the ministers of a heavenly king.