because each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it
happens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less
distinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity
coincide--what a miracle!--with his own Lutheran and Kantian
sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is
the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well
expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by
what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the
modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a
matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.
Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less
intellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most
primitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole
man--intellect, habits, and affections--from the life of the world to
a new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about
destiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,
the respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote
oneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and
preaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny
which justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the
world, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on
account of its wickedness, and that the ignorant, the poor, and the
down-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at
once on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and
would form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be
raised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,
but the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there
was in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of
speculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of
goodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched
and depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of
goodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus
of circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly
as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could
bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and
diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice
of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the
interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a
cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was
Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled
with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a
special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye
fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as
of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the
state exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and
learning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and
in Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a
messenger from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an
experience of perpetual graces and miracles.
The prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not
fulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less
disconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous
or instinctive Christian--and there is such a type of mind, quite
apart from any affiliation to historic Christianity--takes a personal
and dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are
the values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him
nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the
destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be
subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the
prophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and
nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this
prophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must
actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of
view that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider
posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are
short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their
substance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being
fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved,
is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an
operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the
experience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to
repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of
Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for "this wicked
world" we read "this transitory life" and for "the coming of the
Kingdom" we read "life everlasting." The change is important, but it
affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally
there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns
another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other
hand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations
and millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation
of the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there
will always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling
that the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in
store.
What would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would
be the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has
happened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in
another. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of
events to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole
inspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not
metaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised
land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one
which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
himself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,
preached to the world.
Even the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it
for a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their
imaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or
the groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether
millstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their
pictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the
unseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult
existences, how much more must this have been the case among a more
ignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, _events_ are
what the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion
was not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and
experimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in
the description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the description of
his ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,
if we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the
belief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of
conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both
national and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly
a demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted
by a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern
it; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same
principles, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.
There is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal
apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into
the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they
were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the
Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in
attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and
imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because
it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the
world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the
sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a _fundamental
apostasy_ from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and
living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the
punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most
brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a
faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,
within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the
destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that
failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our
point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,
physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in
our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and
the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the
intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It
flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all
existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at
the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by
the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the
cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,
from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for
prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly
comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.
It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might
wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human
society. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its
Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not
his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven
is his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a
nation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at
baptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the
flesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,
and the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a
family, will form an integral part of that very world which he will
pledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the
font. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the
Christian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite
another. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
only superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element
can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for
instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what
seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?
Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless
rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a
dawning of all sorts of scientific and æsthetic passions, in
themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.
Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it
was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or
less Christian. We may see the same thing under different
circumstances in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government
consciously labouring in the service of the church, to resist Turks,
convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very
forces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition,
were alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of
chivalry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The
ecclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed
in spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An
anti-worldly religion finds itself in fact in this dilemma: if it
remains merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot
affect the world; while if it develops organs with which to operate on
the world, these organs become a part of the world from which it is
trying to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is armed
for conflict such a religion has two enemies on its hands. It is
stifled by its necessary armour, and adds treason in its members to
hostility in its foes. The passions and arts it uses against its
opponents are as fatal to itself as those which its opponents array
against it.
In every age in which a supernaturalistic system is preached we must
accordingly expect to find the world standing up stubbornly against
it, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have
been christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to
find expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic
system, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the
faithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a
religion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we
call the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later
open rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is
radically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,
even if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and
the Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they
are living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to restore
pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and
in morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.
Instead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance
accept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;
they believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
perfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect
it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the
flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty
and its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand
by the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its
autonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart
and will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the
devil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in
nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical
and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
religion of the gospel.
"I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet
so wonderfully strange--Cæsar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing
to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche
goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,
which was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its
mellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid
Christianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than
Nietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or
neo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have
worked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual
rationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have
been 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 Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It
re-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it
insisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent
and fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised
church, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to
man, was to God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon
became heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own
weapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister
convictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without
Luther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent
Cæsar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel
fashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the
literal realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too
much the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While
the church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these
principles can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who
feel themselves to be exiles in this world--and what noble mind, from
Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?--are mightily inclined to
believe themselves citizens of another. There will always be
spontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of
sin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the
supernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers
will not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed
if it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the
philosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment
when any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,
when new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,
when the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap
philosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when
the judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday
and smile at those of to-day--such a moment is rather ill chosen for
prophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because
your own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you
hold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary
postulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.
Modernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic
and wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the
rationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other
modern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.
The sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is
creditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as
Catholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic
historians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance,
convincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental
speculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their
faith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may
lead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of
history, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the
motives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of
so many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under
rather unfortunate circumstances. For the modernists to begin with are
Catholics, and usually priests; they are pledged to a fixed creed,
touching matters both of history and of philosophy; and it would be a
marvel if rationalistic criticism of the Bible and rationalistic
church history confirmed that creed on its historical side, or if
irresponsible personal speculations, in the manner of Ritschl or of M.
Bergson, confirmed its metaphysics.
I am far from wishing to suggest that an orthodox Christian cannot be
scrupulously honest in admitting the probable facts, or cannot have a
fresh spiritual experience, or frame an original philosophy. But what
we think probable hangs on our standard of probability and of
evidence; the spiritual experiences that come to us are according to
our disposition and affections; and any new philosophy we frame will
be an answer to the particular problems that beset us, and an
expression of the solutions we hope for. Now this standard of
probability, this disposition, and these problems and hopes may be
those of a Christian or they may not. The true Christian, for
instance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either
believe he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them
earnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance
with the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred
abundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of
one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make
instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid
or on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it
would be a sign of apostasy.