"Can any good come out of Trinity?" is a question that has been asked
and answered in various senses during the recent Catholic University
controversies in Ireland; but for whatever other good Catholics might
look to that staunchly Elizabethan institution, they would scarcely turn
thither for theological guidance. Yet all definition is negative as well
as positive; exclusive as well as inclusive; and we always know our
position more deeply and accurately in the measure that we comprehend
those other positions to which it is opposed. The educative value of
comparing notes, quite apart from all prospect of coming to an
agreement, or even of flaying our adversaries alive, is simply
inestimable; we do not rightly know where we stand, except in so far as
we know where others stand--for place is relative.
The Donnellan Lecturer for 1897-8 [1] took for his subject the doctrine
of the Blessed Trinity in relation to contemporary idealistic
philosophy. The scope of these lectures is, not to prove the doctrine of
the Trinity philosophically, but to show that the difficulty besetting
the conception of a multiplicity of persons united by a superpersonal
bond, is just the same difficulty that brings idealistic philosophy to a
dead-lock when it endeavours (1) to escape from solipsism, (2) to
vindicate free-will,(3) to solve the problem of evil. He naturally
speaks of Idealism as "the only philosophy which can now be truly called
living," in the sense in which a language is said to live; that is,
which is growing and changing, and endeavouring to bring new tracts of
experience under its synthesis; which is current in universities of the
day. Of the Realism which survives in the seminaries of the
ecclesiastical world he naturally knows nothing; addressing himself to a
wholly different public, he speaks to it on its own assumptions, in its
own mental language; and indeed he knows no other. But having weighed
idealism in the balance of criticism, he finds it far short of its
pretensions to be an adequate accounting for the data of experience; he
finds that it leads the mind in all directions to impassable chasms
which only faith can overleap. It does not demand or suggest the mystery
of the Trinity, but reveals a void which, as a fact that doctrine alone
does fill. The convinced Realist will not be very interested about the
problem of solipsism which for him is non-existent, but the proposed
relief from the difficulties of free-will and of the existence of evil
may be grateful to all indifferently; or at least may suggest principles
adaptable to other systems. In his Trinitarian theology Mr. D'Arcy is in
many points at variance with the later conclusions of the schools; and
in some instances his argument depends vitally on this variance; but not
in the main. For his main point is that as our own personality--the
highest unity of which we have experience--takes under itself unities of
a lower grade; so the doctrine of the Trinity implies what the hiatuses
of philosophy require, namely, that personal unity is not the highest;
that, beyond any power of our present conception, the personally many
can be really (not only morally or socially) _one thing_. "A wonderfully
unspeakable thing it is," says Augustine, "and unspeakably wonderful
that whereas this image of the Trinity" _(sc.,_ the human soul), "is one
person, and the sovereign Trinity itself, three persons, yet that
Trinity of three persons is more inseparable than this trinity" (memory,
understanding, and will) "of one person." This "superpersonal" unity is
of course a matter of faith and not of philosophy, yet it is a faith
without which subjective philosophy must come to a stand-still; it is as
much a postulate of the speculative reason as God and immortality are of
the practical reason.
"If man is to retain the full endowment of his moral nature, we must
make up our minds to accept for ourselves an incomplete theory of
things." A philosophy which should unify the sum-total of human
experience, including the supernatural facts of Christianity, is
impossible; but even excluding these facts there is always need of some
kind of non-rational assent, which, however reasonable and prudent in
the very interests of thought, is not necessitated by the laws of
thought--is not, in the strictest sense philosophical. Idealism, like
other philosophies, "is not satisfied with an imperfect knowledge of the
greatest things. It must rise to the Divine standpoint and comprehend
the concrete universal," and so, of course, it breaks down. "But it
would surely be a hasty inference," says Mr. D'Arcy, "that philosophy
must needs be exhausted because idealism has done its work and delivered
its message to mankind," that is, has explored another blind alley, and
has arrived at the _cul de sac_. In fact, if idealism is a living
philosophy, it is nevertheless showing signs of age and decay. Ptolemaic
astronomy, as an explanation of planetary movements, proved its
exhaustion by a liberal recourse to epicycles as the answer to all
awkward objections; and philosophies show themselves moribund in an
analogous way, by a monotonous pressing of some one hackneyed principle
to a degree that makes common-sense revolt and fling the whole theory to
the winds--chaff and grain indiscriminately. But philosophy must be
distinguished from philosophies, as religion from religions. The
imperfection of the various concrete attempts to satisfy either
spiritual need, may make the desperate-minded wish to cut themselves
free from all connection with any particular system; but the desire and
effort to have a knowledge of the whole (_i.e._, a philosophy) is as
natural and ineradicable as the desire to live and breathe. In this
general sense, philosophy "takes human experience, sets it out in all
its main elements, and then endeavours to form a plan of systematic
thought which will account for the whole. It has one fundamental
postulate, that there is a meaning, or, in other words, that there is an
all-pervading unity." This "faith" in the ultimate coherence and unity
of everything is the presupposition and motive of the very attempt to
philosophize or to determine the nature of that unity. It is not,
therefore, itself a product of philosophy; it is an innate conviction
that can be denied only from the teeth outwards, but can neither be
proved nor disproved by the finite mind.
To "explain" is in one way or another to liken the less known to what is
better known; and thus every philosophy is an attempt to express--by
means of sundry extensions and limitations--the universe of our
experience in the terms of some totality with which we are more
familiar; plainly, it is also an endeavour to express the greater in
terms of the less, and must therefore be almost infinitely inadequate
even at the best. At one time the Whole has been conceived as the unity
of a mere aggregate--of a heap of stones; at another, as a mere
sand-storm of fortuitous atoms; there has been the egg-theory, and the
tortoise-theory, and many others, no less grotesque to our seeming. But,
leaving fanciful and poetical philosophies aside, and considering only
those which pretend to be strictly rational, we find the objective
philosophy and the subjective confronting one another; the former
likening the universe to the works of men's hands; the latter likening
it to man himself; the former taking its metaphors from the artificer
shaping his material according to a preconceived plan for a definite
purpose; the latter, from the thinking and willing self considered as
the creator of its own personal experience.
There is enough uniformity of plan throughout the animal body to make
any one part of the organism a likeness of the whole--the eye, the
heart, or the hand. And so, presumably, there is hardly any unity we can
think of in our own little corner of experience that does not offer some
similitude of the universal unity. But to take this as an adequate
explanation; to force the metaphor to its logical consequences, to the
exclusion of every other reasonable though non-rational assent, is the
commonest but most fatal form of intellectual provincialism and
narrowness. Our mind is essentially limited not merely in that it cannot
know everything, but in that its mode of knowledge is imperfect and
analogical in regard to all that is greater than itself. It is broad
only when conscious of its narrowness.
The first difficulty into which idealism gets itself is that of
solipsism. According to its rigidly argued principles, "mind is
separated from mind by a barrier which is, not figuratively, but
literally impassable. It is impossible for any _ego_ to leap this
barrier and enter into the experience of any other _ego_." It is not an
abstract self-in-general, but my one solitary concrete self for which
all experience exists. There is no room for any other person. But this
philosophy does not account for our common-sense belief in Nature as
existing independently of self and of other selfs; or in those other
selfs with their several and distinct spheres of experience.
The unification it effects when treated rigorously as a complete
philosophy leaves out of account the best part of what it was bound to
account for. In spite of idealism, the idealist goes on _believing_ in
other persons or spheres of experience, and in Nature as the experience
of a Divine Person. But since, on his principles, persons are mutually
exclusive, and none can enter the sphere of another's experience, to see
with his eyes, or to feel with his nerves, since,
Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart,
we are thrown back on a disconnected plurality of beings, and God
Himself, viewed as personal (in this sense) is but one among many.
Albeit immeasurably the greatest, He cannot be regarded as the ground of
the possibility and existence of all the rest--the home and bond of
union of all other spirits which in Him live and move and have their
being.
The belief in the personality of God is all-essential for the
satisfaction of our religious cravings, as a presupposition of trust,
love, prayer, obedience, and such relationships; as bringing out the
transcendence in contrast with the all-pervading immanence of the deity;
as checking the pantheistic perversion of this latter truth by which, in
turn, its own deistic perversion is checked. God is not only in and
through all things; but also outside and above all things; just as
Christ is not only the soul of the Church, but also its Head and Ruler.
Between these two compensating statements the exact truth is hidden from
our eyes.
But it is not to the conception of the Divine personality and
separateness that we are to look for the missing bond by which the head
and members are to be knit together, and the essential disconnection of
these "spheres of experience" overcome. The ultimate unity is a mystery;
in a word, philosophy, as a quest of that unity, breaks down. The
solution is suggested only by the revelation of a superpersonal unity in
some sense prior to the multiplicity of Divine Persons, a unity in which
they being many are one, and in which we too are, not merged, but
unified without prejudice to our personal distinctness.
Hence, the writer concludes: "Materialism, when its defect is discovered
and understood, points on to idealism. Idealism, when its defect is
disclosed, points to Christian theism." For those who have not come to
Christian theism by this thorny and circuitous path, the mode in which
the idealist extricates himself from his self-wrought entanglement may
seem of little interest; but inasmuch as they take for granted the
existence of that same multitude of mutually impenetrable personalities
which he, by a revolt of his common-sense against his philosophy is
forced to confess, the problem of the ultimate unity exists for them
also.
If in its endeavour to vindicate the spirituality of man against the
materialist, idealism tumbles into the slough of solipsism and needs to
be fetched out by the doctrine of the Trinity, it fares much the same
way in its attempted defence of free-will against necessity. That
freedom from determination by the "not-self" which idealism vindicates,
can belong only to the all-inclusive Spirit, outside whose self nothing
exists; it belongs to me only on the supposition that I am the
all-inclusive; and this, as before, is the point at which common-sense
revolts. "Free-will is based on man's consciousness of his moral nature.
It represents not any speculative theory, but one of the great facts
which every theory of things must explain or perish." If we ascribe
freedom to the Absolute and to other spirits (whose existence is forced
on us in spite of Idealism), it is because we first find it in ourselves
as the very essence of our spiritual nature. But if we accept our
freedom as a fact which it is the business of philosophy to explain and
not to deny; on just the same testimony we must accept the fact of the
manifold limitations of our liberty of which we are continually
conscious. Now here it is that the Idealist defence of liberty against
materialism fails by a deplorable _nimis probat_. It can only save our
liberty by denying our limitations; or at least it leaves us facing a
problem which can be solved only by an assumption for which Idealism
offers no philosophical warrant. Hence we are brought back to the
world-old dilemma "between a freedom of God which annihilates man, and a
freedom of man which annihilates God." Idealism has really contributed
nothing to the solution of the difficulty which is persistent as long as
God is known only as a Sovereign and Infinite Personality among a
multitude of finite personalities, and until revelation hints at the
possibility of a higher "unity which transcends personality, by which He
is to be the reconciling principle and home of the multitude of
self-determining agents." "Final reconciliation of the Divine and human
personality is in fact beyond us."
Similarly, in dealing with problems of moral evil, Idealism leads to an
_impasse_. As long as we keep to the notion of one all-inclusive Spirit,
the Subject of universal experience, it is easy to show that sin is but
relatively evil, that it is, when viewed absolutely, as much a factor of
the universal life as is righteousness; yet surely this is not to
account for so large and obstinate a part of our experience, but to deny
it. Nor can the ethical corollaries of such a view be tolerated for a
moment. That sin is an absolute, eternal, in some sense, irreparable
evil is a conception altogether fundamental to that morality with which
Christianity and modern civilization have identified themselves. It is
but another aspect of the doctrine of freedom and responsibility. Of
physical and necessary evil it is possible to assert the merely negative
or relative character; we can view it as the good in process of making;
or as the good imperfectly comprehended; but if this optimism be
extended to sin it can only be because sin is regarded as necessitated,
_i.e._, as no longer sin. Hence the view in question does not account
for, but implicitly denies the existence of sin.
Furthermore, the whole tendency of more recent idealism is to explain
moral evil as an offence against man's social nature by which he is a
member of an organism or community. It is the undue self-assertion of
the part against the interests of the whole. Of course the idealist
explains this organic conception with a respect for personality which is
absent from socialistic and evolutionary doctrines of society. But the
notion of sin as a rebellion of one member against all, is common to
both. The latter consider the external life and activity of the unit as
an element in the collective external life of the community--as part of
a common work; the former considers the unity as a free spiritual
agency, an end for itself--whose liberty is curtailed only by the claims
of other like agencies, equal or greater. But by what process, apart
from faith and practical postulates and regulative ideas, can
subjectivism pass to belief in other free agencies outside the thinking
and all-creating self? The result of Mr, D'Arcy's criticism of the
matter is that "it is because the man exists as a member of a spiritual
universe, and must therefore so exert his power of self-determination as
to be in harmony or discord with God above him, and with other men
around him, that the distinction between the good self and the bad self
arises. But in this very conception of a universe of spirits we have
passed beyond the bounds of a purely rational philosophy. Such a
universe is not explicable by reference to the vivifying principle of
the self;" and accordingly we are driven back as before upon the
alternative of philosophical chaos, or else of faith in such a
superpersonal unity as is suggested by the doctrine of the Trinity.
We have but hinted at the barest outlines of Mr. D'Arcy's argument
which, as against Idealism, is close-reasoned and subtle; and now we
have left but little space to deal with the more really interesting
chapter on the "Ultimate Unity." It is not pretended that we can form
any conception of the precise nature of that unity, but merely that some
such unknown kind of unity is needed to deliver us from the antinomies
of thought. As we could never rise to the intrinsic conception of
personal unity from the consideration of some lower unity, material or
mechanical; so neither can we pass from the notion of personal to that
of superpersonal unity or being.
This is only a modern and Hegelian setting of the truth that "being" and
"unity" are said analogously and not univocally of God and creatures.
That there are grades of reality; that "substance is more real than
quality and subject is more real than substance," that "the most real of
all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive universal"--the _Ens
determinatissimum_, is not a modern discovery, but a re-discovery. That
our own personality is the highest unity of which we have any proper
non-analogous notion; that it is the measure by which we spontaneously
try to explain to ourselves other unities, higher or lower, by means of
extensions or limitations; that our first impulse, prior to correction,
is to conceive everything self-wise, be it super-human or infra-human,
is of course profoundly true; but for this reason to make "self" the
all-explaining and only category, to deny any higher order of reality
because we can have no definite conception of its precise nature, is the
narrowness which has brought Idealism into such difficulties. It is
probably in his notion of Divine personality that Mr. D'Arcy comes most
in conflict with the technicalities of later schools. If, as he says,
modern theology oscillates between the poles of Sabellianism and
Tritheism, he himself inclines to the latter pole. Father de Regnon,
S.J., in his work on the Trinity, shows that the Greek Fathers and the
Latin viewed the problem from opposite ends. "How three can be one," was
the problem with the former; "How one can be three," with the latter.
These inclined to an emptier, those to a fuller notion of personality.
Mr. D'Arcy's Trinitarianism is decidedly more Greek than Latin. The more
"content" he gives to Divine personality, the more he is in-danger of
denying identity of nature and operation; as appears later.
Plainly, the word "person," however analogously applied to God, must
contain something of what we mean when we call ourselves "persons," else
"we are landed in the unmeaning." When Christ spoke of Himself as "I,"
the selfness implied by the pronoun must have had some kind of
resemblance to our own; just as when He called God His Father He
intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then
hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other
conditions and ages seems very doubtful; and so if the word "person" has
acquired a fuller and different meaning in modern philosophy, we are not
at once justified in applying this fuller conception to the Divine
persons, unless we can show that it is a legitimate development of the
older sense.
He argues that if the Trinity be the ultimate truth, the Unitarian
suppositions and conclusions of the "natural theologian" are bound to
lead to antinomies and confusions; and he sees in those harmonious
interferences and variations of universal import (which are no less an
essential factor in the evolution of the world than the groundwork of
uniformity and law), evidence of a multi-personal Divine government, of
a division of labour between co-operant agencies. This, of course, goes
beyond the doctrine of "appropriation;" and amounts to a denial of the
singleness of the Divine operation _ad extra_. It seems, in short, to
imply a diversity of nature in each of the persons, over and above the
principle of personal distinctness. Indeed, while it offers a plausible
solution of some minor perplexities, it rather weakens the value of the
general argument. For the notion of a superpersonal unity is needed
chiefly as suggesting a mode in which many mutually exclusive
personalities or "spheres of experience" or lives, may be welded
together into a coherent whole. Even could I reproduce most exactly in
myself the thoughts and feelings of another, it were but a reproduction
or similarity. I can know and feel the like; but I cannot know his
knowing and feel his feeling; for this were to be that other and not
myself.
That God's knowledge of our thoughts and feelings should be of this
external, inferential kind is as intolerable to our mental needs of
unification as it is to our religious sense, our hope, our confidence,
our love. In Him we live and move and think and feel; and He in us. That
we can say this of no other personality is what constitutes the burden
of our separateness and loneliness. Our experience exists for no other;
but at least it is in some mysterious way shared by That which lies
behind all otherness, not destroying, but fulfilling. "We know not why
it is," says St. Catherine of Genoa, "we feel an internal necessity of
using the plural pronoun instead of the singular." Perhaps it was that
she saw in a purer and clearer light what we only half feel in the
obscurity of our grosser hearts.
But if God knows our knowing, and feels our feeling, not merely by a
similitude but in itself, it is not because He is transcendent and
"personal," as we understand the word, because He is immanent and
"superpersonal," whatever that may mean. But it is just because
revelation tells us that in God there are three selves or Egos, for each
of whom the experience (i.e., the thought, love, and action) of the
other two exists, not merely similar, but one and the same--the same
thinking, loving, and doing, no less than the same thought, love, and
deed--that we can believe in the possibility of our personal
separateness being at once preserved and overcome in that mysterious
unity.
That God is love; and that love, which as an affection, produces an
affective unity between separate persons, can as the subsistent and
primal unity produce a substantial and ineffable union of which the
other is a shadow, is a view towards which revelation points. That the
mere affection of love, the moral union of wills, is an insufficient
unification of personalities is implied by the fact that love always
tends to some sort of real union and communication; and still more, that
it springs from a sense of inexplicable identity.
It is almost a crime in criticism to deal with such a multitude of deep
problems in so brief and hasty an essay. But if we have roughly
indicated the main outlines of the author's position, we shall have done
as much as can be reasonably expected of us; though it is with great
reluctance that we pass over many points, and even whole chapters,
bristling with interest.
Perhaps the most important feature of the book is the prominence it
gives to the difficulties and insufficiencies of idealism. With those of
realism we are all familiar enough, but so far, idealism has been looked
at one-sidedly as evading, if not solving, some of the antinomies of the
earlier philosophy, while its own embarrassments have been condoned in
hopes of future solution. The solution has not come, and now the hopes
are dead or dying. What we need is a higher synthesis, if such be
possible for the human mind, or else a frank admission that faith, in
some sense or other, is a necessary complement of every philosophy. One
thing is clear, that reconciliation can be effected, if at all, only by
a fair-minded admission of difficulties inseparable from either system,
and by a conscientious criticism of presuppositions. No one can deal
effectually with the idealist position to whom it is simply "absurd" or
"ridiculous;" who has not been to some degree intellectually entangled
in it; whose realism is not more or less of an effort. Else he is
dealing with some man of straw of his own fancy, and will be found, as
so often happens, assuming the truth of realism in every argument he
brings forward. Plainly the best minds of modern times have not been
victimized by a fallacy within the competence of a school-boy. And a
like intellectual self-denial is needed on the part of the idealist, who
is apt to dismiss all realism as crude, uncritical, or barbaric. We have
all our antinomies, our blind alleys, our crudities; and we have all to
fill up awkward interstices with assumptions and postulates.
However much we may dissent from Mr. D'Arcy's theology in certain
details; however little we personally may labour under the difficulties
of idealism, we cannot too strongly commend the endeavour to meet the
modern mind on its own platform; to speak to the cultivated in their own
language. Belief is caused by the wish to believe; but it is conditioned
by the removal of intellectual obstacles, different for different grades
of intelligence and education. To create the "wish to believe" is
largely a matter of example, of letting Christianity appear attractive
and desirable, and correspondent to the deeper needs of the soul. It is
also to some extent a work of exposition. But when this all-important
wish has been created, the intellect can hinder its effect. It is much
to know and feel that Christianity is good and useful and beautiful;
"But some time or other the question must be asked: _Is it true_?" And
to liberate the will by satisfying the intellect is work of what alone
is properly called apologetic. Unless we fall back into quietism which
would tell us to read a Kempis and say our prayers and wait, we must
address ourselves first of all to making Christianity attractive; and
then to making it intelligible. And if we do not find it against Gospel
simplicity to address ourselves, as we continually do, to the
intelligence of the semi-educated, we cannot allege that scruple as a
reason why we should not address ourselves to the fully educated,--to
those who eventually form and guide the opinions of the many.
_Feb. 1901_.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: _Idealism and Theology_. By Charles D'Arcy, B.D. Hodder and
Stoughton, 1900.]