worthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of
their contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in
history and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical
criticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no
special remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,
with no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is
remarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they
should have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this
non-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to
the Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are
particularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of
history, of theology, and of the world.
Everything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as
the modernists bitterly complain, very little is heard of the views
held in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the
Christian religion is only one of many, some of them older and
superior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and
contains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided
into rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and
its future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to
persuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere
is founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical
evidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect
and spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from
the outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive
and studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own
religious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,
perhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas
originated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.
This (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of
disillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider
basis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing
here; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be
enlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself
many diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of
thought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and
other types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be
progressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.
This insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him
a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the
acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton
information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,
expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national
hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy
of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,
render these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal
expressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,
provided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that
the world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man
would have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and
the foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian
dogmas are definite,[2] while human inspirations are potentially
limitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas
must be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does
not conform to them must be denounced as illusory or diabolical.
[Footnote 2: At least in their devotional and moral import. I suggest
this qualification in deference to M. Le Roy's interesting theory of
dogma, viz., that the verbal or intellectual definition of a dogma may
be changed without changing the dogma itself (as a sentence might be
translated into a new language without altering the meaning) provided
the suggested conduct and feeling in the presence of the mystery
remained the same. Thus the definition of transubstantiation might be
modified to suit an idealistic philosophy, but the new definition
would be no less orthodox than the old if it did not discourage the
worship of the consecrated elements or the sense of mystical union
with Christ in the sacrament.]
At this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him
away, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to
desert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of
inspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not
become one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished
modernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal
to make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking
another part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand
firmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what
you challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the
pope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and
then the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against
the New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in
the Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental
self against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your
conscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the
flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
follow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of
partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
him a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
only in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted
in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a
derivation from it--a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have
wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of
professors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret
of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent
outraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this
unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of
what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is. He feels
himself full of love--except for the pope--of mysticism, and of a sort
of archaeological piety. He is learned and eloquent and wistful. Why
should he not remain in the church? Why should he not bring all its
cold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?
The modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified
in contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the
formulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have
crystallised round it. In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship
there is notoriously a deal of mummery: phrases and ceremonies abound
that have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even
that general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that
can be asked for in the presence of mysteries. Not only is all sense
of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma
itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock
phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.
Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would
be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is
that "Scholasticism" and "Mediævalism" against which the modernists
inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness
may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice
which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and
pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for
historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists
to contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the
religion of their fathers. Like the early Protestants, they wish to
revert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical
imagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in
the sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant
principle of faith. The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle
which personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in
any way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to
prompt. But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the
residue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was
of divine authority. The Bible never became for them merely an
ancient Jewish encyclopædia, often eloquent, often curious, and often
barbarous. God never became a literary symbol, covering some
problematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience. But for
the modernist this total transformation takes place at once. He keeps
the whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it
demands to be believed. He understands and shares the moral experience
that it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world
has been discovered to be but painted. He has ceased to be a Christian
to become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.
He believes--and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his
age--in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German
idealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in
revelation. His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in
its evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in
its entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a
language or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the
contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly
supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.
Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the
love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.
It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has
discovered that he is a pagan.
When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double
allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological
criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while
the Christian dogmas touching these things--the incarnation and
resurrection of Christ, for instance--must be taken in a purely
symbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it
seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of
meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth
there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of
little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of
all religions, is to be found in its _moral idealism_, I mean, in the
expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,
of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a
moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what
it is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic
rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity
is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the
pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of
salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,
from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the
Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons
and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have
lost all force for it and become fables.
The modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion
that Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox
though amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,
any hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore
compatible with Catholicism. He bathes himself in idealistic
philosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates
rationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon he finds
himself, on every particular point, out of sympathy with the acts and
tendencies of the church to which he belongs; and then he yields to
the most pathetic of his many illusions--he sets about to purge this
church, so as not to be compelled to abandon it; to purge it of its
first principles, of its whole history, and of its sublime if
chimerical ideal.
The modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he
forgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its
message was believed. It came to announce salvation from the world;
there should be no more need of just those things which the modernist
so deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be
adorned with--emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic
politics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian
conscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan
world itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain
because they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the
revealed law of God; and they would lead surely and quickly to
destruction. The needful salvation from these follies, Christianity
went on to announce, had come through the cross of Christ; whose
grace, together with admission to his future heavenly kingdom, was
offered freely to such as believed in him, separated themselves from
the world, and lived in charity, humility, and innocence, waiting lamp
in hand for the celestial bridegroom. These abstracted and elected
spirits were the true disciples of Christ and the church itself.
Having no ears for this essential message of Christianity, the
modernist also has no eyes for its history. The church converted the
world only partially and inessentially; yet Christianity was outwardly
established as the traditional religion of many nations. And why?
Because, although the prophecies it relied on were strained and its
miracles dubious, it furnished a needful sanctuary from the shames,
sorrows, injustices, violence, and gathering darkness of earth; and
not only a sanctuary one might fly to, but a holy precinct where one
might live, where there was sacred learning, based on revelation and
tradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy
the speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to
the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,
transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,
and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is
not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
another world. The _mise-en-scène_ has changed immensely. The gospel
has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel
has been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated
fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater
resemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;
but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the
natural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the
blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural
human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full
of pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and
certainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.
Of course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler
religion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that
there is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism,
that there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think
the pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to
say for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and
reason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in
their hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath
their dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them
already feel it. To say they are not Christians at heart, but
diametrically opposed to the fundamental faith and purpose of
Christianity, is not to say they may not be profound mystics (as many
Hindus, Jews, and pagan Greeks have been), or excellent scholars, or
generous philanthropists. But the very motive that attaches them to
Christianity is worldly and un-Christian. They wish to preserve the
continuity of moral traditions; they wish the poetry of life to flow
down to them uninterruptedly and copiously from all the ages. It is an
amiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the
Renaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to
whom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive
just because it presupposes that Christianity is true.
Yet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I
suspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion. They think the
weakness of the church lies in its not following the inspirations of
the age. But when this age is past, might not that weakness be a
source of strength again? For an idea ever to be fashionable is
ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. No doubt it
would be dishonest in any of us now, who see clearly that Noah surely
did not lead all the animals two by two into the Ark, to say that we
believe he did so, on the ground that stories of that kind are rather
favourable to the spread of religion. No doubt such a story, and even
the fables essential to Christian theology, are now incredible to most
of us. But on the other hand it would be stupid to assume that what is
incredible to you or me now must always be incredible to mankind. What
was foolishness to the Greeks of St. Paul's day spread mightily among
them one or two hundred years later; and what is foolishness to the
modernist of to-day may edify future generations. The imagination is
suggestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of
religion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the
conventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are
superficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may
have disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers
themselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,
and say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be
saved--for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.
These philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient
method of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a
falsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We
may well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not
in consciousness but in nature, which intelligence alone can reveal;
but we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial
growth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of
the world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,
and of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore
probably more lasting human possession than is that of clear
historical or scientific ideas.
Now religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than
the Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than
the Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically
for the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its
probable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in
internal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a
strong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave
the church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,
ridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but
must use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is
not those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments
only as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them
literally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the
rich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight
clericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of
the church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the
world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying
in the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will
be some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the
past. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those
concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and
double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a
mortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that
everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.
III
THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON