Tragic Sense Of Life Part 6

xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29; vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that pa.s.sage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose."

And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that G.o.d raised him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense (see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of G.o.d.

But more of this later.

Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual streams--the Judaic and the h.e.l.lenic--each one of which had arrived on its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in a personal and living G.o.d, the formation of which faith comprises all their spiritual history.

Jahwe, the Judaic G.o.d, began by being one G.o.d among many others--the G.o.d of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that wors.h.i.+p should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a metaphysical ent.i.ty, and he was the G.o.d of battles. But this G.o.d of social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more universal. He is the Jahwe who, instead of loving Israel because Israel is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).

And faith in the personal G.o.d, in the Father of men, carries with it faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.

h.e.l.lenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their character, marking not the start but the close of a civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the wors.h.i.+p of souls and ancestors, always persisted underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology, among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and in the wors.h.i.+p of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the t.i.tanic and the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force in the mortal body, was never an object of popular h.e.l.lenic belief"

(Rohde, _op. cit._).

Recall the _Phaedo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the h.e.l.lenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes (_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896), "no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The h.e.l.lenism which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana is an h.e.l.lenic idea.

Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the entrance into spiritual p.u.b.erty, the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that the living G.o.d is begotten by humanity. The discovery of death is that which reveals G.o.d to us, and the death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die.

Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic and h.e.l.lenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, the h.e.l.lenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his subst.i.tution for the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsacker (_Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892).

He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19).

And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that "all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Herac.l.i.tus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is to say a witness--of Christianity? No.

And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up. The G.o.d-man, the incarnate Word, came in order that man, according to his mode, might be made G.o.d--that is, immortal.

And the Christian G.o.d, the Father of Christ, a G.o.d necessarily anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of us. And a certain solidarity was established between G.o.d and His creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_ Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_ man had fallen.

After the death of Paul years pa.s.sed, and generations of Christianity wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the Council of Nicaea came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.

Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism, threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that Christ cannot make us G.o.ds if he has not first made himself G.o.d; if his Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.

"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became G.o.d; but He was first G.o.d and then became man in order that He might the better deify us (_theopoiese_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored;[15] and thus he inst.i.tuted a separation between nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?

This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the learned might pa.s.s over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with G.o.d, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.

And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of a.s.serting things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists in the _h.o.m.oousios_ carried in its train a whole army of contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.

At Nicaea, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say, and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.

_Quid ad aeternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a tombstone on which this verse is carved:

_Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos, en Ti, Senor, nuestra esperanza fia, que tornaremos a vivir vestidos con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16]

"With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says.

So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies.

They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malon de Chaide of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see G.o.d, in whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their own bodies."

And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality.

This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is subst.i.tuted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word.

Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible respect, but without wis.h.i.+ng to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase--the eating and drinking of G.o.d, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality of G.o.d Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.

And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.

For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.

It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.

The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish, among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore, in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.

What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its earthly vocation and pa.s.sive trust in G.o.d is due the religious coa.r.s.eness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklarung_, and which pietism, infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_, in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "Catholicism produced heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy, wealthy, free, as far as their outer inst.i.tutions go, but incapable of any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the heart of man all that made him capable of daring and n.o.ble self-sacrifice."

Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolvent a.n.a.lysis--that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example--and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: "The question regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.

Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it a.s.surance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versohnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii., 52). All this is very rational, but ...

In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.

Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's commerce with G.o.d (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective knowledge of G.o.d and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to obtain the grace of G.o.d, and to serve Him in truth. Until that time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as _doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And in his book on the Christian's commerce with G.o.d, this eminent Lutheran doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in G.o.d, peace of conscience, and an a.s.surance of salvation that is not strictly and precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the forgiveness of sins.

And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music, in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This, then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may give us life.

And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of h.e.l.l, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of G.o.d: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence h.e.l.l. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?

The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet--

_No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20]

and the rest that follows.

The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an a.s.sa.s.sin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to be posited.

It is the vital a.s.serting itself, and in order to a.s.sert itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became a.s.similated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right.

Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbe, said: "I say simply this, that the Church and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific movement, and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power, they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not a.s.sociated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement.

Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history, together with that general philosophy of nature and history which results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice. Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn from modern science, natural or historical, and as if by itself it had the power and the right to exercise a direct and absolute control over all the activities of the human mind" (_Autour d'un Pet.i.t Livre_, 1903, p. 211).

And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's att.i.tude in its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading exponent.

The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks a.s.surance of survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone?

Read, moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, _Dogme et Critique_, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection of body as well as soul? This new psychological apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the Jews, seek for a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all the powers of the soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands and the feet and the mouth, if it be possible.

But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith, which does not feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of consciousness. We need security, certainty, signs, and they give us _motiva credibilitatis_--motives of credibility--upon which to establish the _rationale obsequium_, and although faith precedes reason (_fides praecedit rationem_), according to St. Augustine, this same learned doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (_per fidem ad intellectum_), and to believe in order to understand (_credo ut intelligam_). How far is this from that superb expression of Tertullian--_et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile est!_--"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible!" and his sublime _credo quia absurdum!_--the scandal of the rationalists. How far from the _il faut s'abetir_ of Pascal and from the "human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortes, which he must have learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!

And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of tradition and the revelation of the word of G.o.d, and the principle of unanimous consent was arrived at. _Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est erratum, sed traditum_, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries later, that "cert.i.tude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is, if I may be allowed the expression, a social product."[21] But here, as in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic, whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is uncertain, either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the Dominican, implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love, and when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love," Seuse replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul." Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.

And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its handmaiden--_ancilla theologiae_--scholastic philosophy, and this handmaiden turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanism were resolved for future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks, gave place little by little to what is called natural theology and is merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception of substantiality.

But for this, implicit faith suffices--the faith of the coalheaver,[23]

the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (_Vida_, cap. xxv. 2), do not wish to avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason of that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was inst.i.tuted, that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii.

3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.

And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as upon the free and inscrutable will of G.o.d--by accentuating its supreme irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to believe in the existence of G.o.d; but the sentence of anathema falls on him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the present n.o.body by means of these rational arguments has ever demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it now attacks G.o.d, the soul, and Christ."[24]

The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the inward experience of the living G.o.d in Christ, an intransmittible experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own personality in G.o.d, and so does not save our vital longing--between mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsacker, _op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost?

At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France and Spain there are mult.i.tudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with the reason and not with life.