distance of time, he would see them as an episode of extraordinary
extension in things that should be dissociated: knowledge and wealth,
on the one hand, the unhappiness of men upon the other. And he would
see that as the process matured, or rather as the corruption deepened,
all its marks were pushed to a degree so extreme as to jeopardize at
last the very structure of European society. Physical science acquired
such power, the oppression of the poor was pushed to such a length, the
reasoning spirit in man was permitted to attain such a tottering pitch
of insecurity, that a question never yet put to Europe arose at
last—whether Europe, not from external foes, but from her own inward
lesion may not fail.
Corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question—the
culmination of so much evil—necessarily arises this the sole vital
formula of our time: “_Europe must return to the Faith, or she will
perish._”
I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation
of the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much more
than its mere statement might promise.
The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the
sane balance produced by general experience, the weight of security,
and the general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition
of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much
more than merely complete and confirm human misery.
In the first place and underlying all, the isolation of the soul
releases in a society a furious new accession of _force_. The break-up
of any stable system in physics, as in society, makes actual a
prodigious reserve of potential energy. It transforms the power that
was keeping things together with a power driving separably each
component part: the effect of an explosion. That is why the Reformation
launched the whole series of material advance, but launched it
chaotically and on divergent lines which would only end in disaster.
But the thing had many other results.
Thus, we next notice that the new isolation of the soul compelled the
isolated soul to strong vagaries. The soul will not remain in the void.
If you blind it, it will grope. If it cannot grasp what it appreciates
by every sense, it will grasp what it appreciates by only one.
On this account in the dissolution of the corporate sense and of
corporate religion you had successive idols set up, worthy and
unworthy, none of them permanent. The highest and the most permanent
was a reaction towards corporate life in the shape of a worship of
nationality—patriotism.
You had at one end of the scale an extraordinary new _tabus_, the
erection in one place of a sort of maniac god, blood-thirsty, an object
of terror. In another (or the same) a curious new ritual observance of
nothingness upon every seventh day. In another an irrational attachment
to a particular printed book. In another successive conceptions: first,
that the human reason was sufficient for the whole foundations of human
life—that there were no mysteries: next, the opposite extravagance that
the human reason had no authority even in its own sphere. And these
two, though contradictory, had one root. The rationalism of the
eighteenth century carried on through the materialism of the
nineteenth, the irrational doubts of Kant (which included much
emotional rubbish) carried on to the sheer chaos of the later
metaphysicians, with their denial of contradictions, and even of being.
Both sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to make itself
some system from within: as the unsupported soul, in an evil dream, now
stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved in some fearful
emptiness.
All this, the first interior effect of the Reformation, strong in
proportion to the strength of the reforming movement, powerful in the
regions or sects which had broken away, far less powerful in those
which had maintained the Faith, would seem to have run its full course,
and to have settled at last into universal negation and a universal
challenge proffered to every institution, and every postulate. But
since humanity cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy, we may well
believe that there is coming, or has already begun, yet another stage,
in which the lack of corporate support for the soul will breed
attempted strange religions: witchcrafts and necromancies.
It may be so. It may be that the great debate will come up for final
settlement before such novel diseases spread far. At any rate, for the
moment we are clearly in a stage of complete negation. But it is to be
repeated that this breaking up of the foundations differs in degree
with varying societies, that still in a great mass of Europe,
numerically the half perhaps, the necessary anchors of sanity still
hold: and that half is the half where directly by the practice of the
Faith, or indirectly through a hold upon some part of its tradition,
the Catholic Church exercises an admitted or distant authority over the
minds of men.
The next process we note is—by what some may think a paradox—also due
to the isolation of the soul. It is the process of increasing
knowledge. Men acting in a fashion highly corporate will not so readily
question, nor therefore so readily examine, as will men acting alone.
Men whose major results are taken upon an accepted philosophy, will not
be driven by such a need of inquiry as those who have abandoned that
guide. In the moment, more than a thousand years ago, when the last of
the evangelizing floodtide was still running strongly, a very great man
wrote of the physical sciences: “Upon such toys I wasted my youth.” And
another wrote, speaking of divine knowledge: “All the rest is smoke.”
But in the absences of faith, demonstrable things are the sole
consolation.
There are three forms in which the human mind can hold the truth: The
form of Science, which means that we accept a thing through
demonstration, and therefore cannot admit the possibility of its
opposite. The form of Opinion, which means that we accept a thing
through probability, that is through a partial, but not complete
demonstration, and therefore we do not deny the possibility of the
opposite. The form of Faith, where we accept the thing without
demonstration and yet deny the possibility of its opposite, as for
instance, the faith of all men, not mad, in the existence of the
universe about them, and of other human minds.
When acknowledged and defined Faith departs, it is clear that of the
remaining two rivals, Opinion has no ground against Science. That which
can be demonstrated holds all the field. Indeed, it is the mark of
modern insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude
save certitude through demonstration, and therefore does not, as a
rule, appreciate even its own unproved first principles.
Well, this function of the isolated soul, inquiry and the necessity for
demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and
physical fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the three
modern centuries. We all are equally familiar with its prodigious
results. Not one of them has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one
but has been increasingly misused to the misery of man. There is in the
tragedy something comic also, which is the perpetual puzzlement of
these the very authors of discovery, to find that, somehow or other,
discovery alone does not create joy, and that, somehow or other, a
great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else can be used ill. Also
in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further extension of physical
science as promising, in some illogical way, relief.
A progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so
natural to man (so long as civic order is preserved) that it would,
indeed, have taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the unity
of Europe been preserved. But the destruction of that unity totally
accelerated the pace and as totally threw the movement off its rails.
The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older
than the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The
doors upon modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was
to enter them, had been cut off from its fellows. We owe the
miscarriage of all our great endeavor in this field, not to that spring
of endeavor, but to its deflection. It is a blasphemy to deny the value
of advancing knowledge, and at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it
for its supposed consequences. Its consequences are only evil through
an evil use, that is, through an evil philosophy.
In connection with this release of powerful inquiry through the
isolation of the soul, you have an apparently contradictory, and
certainly supplementary effect: the setting up of unfounded external
authority. It is a curious development, one very little recognized, but
one which a fixed observance of the modern world will immediately
reveal; and those who come to see it are invariably astonished at the
magnitude of its action. Men—under the very influence of
skepticism—have come to accept almost any printed matter, almost any
repeated name, as an authority infallible and to be admitted without
question. They have come to regard the denial of such authority as a
sort of insanity, or rather they have in most practical affairs, come
to be divided into two groups: a small number of men, who know the
truth, say, upon a political matter or some financial arrangement, or
some unsolved problem; and a vast majority, which accepts without
question an always incomplete, a usually quite false, statement of the
thing because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in
a hundred books.
This singular and fantastic result of the long divorce between the
non-Catholic mind and reason has a profound effect upon the modern
world. Indeed, the great battle about to be engaged between chaos and
order will turn largely upon this form of suggestion, this acceptation
of an unfounded and irrational authority.
Lastly, there is of the major consequences of the Reformation that
phenomenon which we have come to call “Capitalism,” and which many,
recognizing its universal evil, wrongly regard as the prime obstacle to
right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now
intolerable modern strains.
What is called “Capitalism” arose directly in all its branches from the
isolation of the soul. That isolation permitted an unrestricted
competition. It gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent an
unchecked career. It gave every license to greed. And on the other side
it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in an
economic stability. Through it there arose in England first, later
throughout the more active Protestant nations, and later still in
various degrees throughout the rest of Christendom, a system under
which a few possessed the land and the machinery of production, and the
many were gradually dispossessed. The many thus dispossessed could only
exist upon doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human life a care
to these. The possessors also mastered the state and all its
organs—hence the great National Debts which accompanied the system:
hence even the financial hold of distant and alien men upon subject
provinces of economic effort: hence the draining of wealth not only
from increasingly dissatisfied subjects over-seas, but from the
individual producers of foreign independent states.
The true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement,
and you naturally get a demand for relief through the denial of the
principle of ownership altogether. Here again, as in the matter of the
irrational _tabus_ and of skepticism, two apparently contradictory
things have one root: Capitalism, and the ideal inhuman system (not
realizable) called Socialism, both spring from one type of mind and
both apply to one kind of diseased society.
Against both, the pillar of reaction is peasant society, and peasant
society has proved throughout Europe largely coördinate with the
remaining authority of the Catholic Church. For a peasant society does
not mean a society composed of peasants, but one in which modern
Industrial Capitalism yields to agriculture, and in which agriculture
is, in the main, conducted by men possessed in part or altogether of
their instruments of production and of the soil, either through
ownership or customary tenure. In such a society all the institutions
of the state repose upon an underlying conception of secure and
well-divided private property which can never be questioned and which
colors all men’s minds. And that doctrine, like every other sane
doctrine, though applicable only to temporal conditions, has the firm
support of the Catholic Church.
So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of
that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which
cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the
spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere
feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening
road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a
settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more.
Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this
awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is
still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly
insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the
ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final,
thing.
In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our
European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical
antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will
stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.
Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.