Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History Part 8

Under this new form, divested of the swaddling-clothes by which at first it was bound, Christianity always seems to me to be best as it is, a spiritual and eternal principle, which brings peace to the soul, and which alone can give harmony and unity to the world. Nothing can contradict it except evil and error; everything serves and strengthens it. It is this principle which to my eyes manifests itself with ever-growing clearness in that heroic love of Science which, in our time, has created so many marvels and made so many martyrs; this it is which reveals itself to me in the works of all the great artists, in that ideal of beauty which enraptures them and brings such generous tears into our eyes; it is this which I honour and bless in the efforts of men who interest themselves in the future of humanity, and who in the political direction of their country or in the work of social education seek and find some means of raising and ameliorating the condition of the people: I salute it in the ill.u.s.trious apostles of all great causes and in the obscure workers at all humble tasks, from the mother who teaches her children to join their hands and bend their knees before the Father in Heaven, to the preacher and the missionary who faithfully distribute to the hungry soul the bread of the Gospel, from the sister of charity who devotes her life to the solace of the sick and suffering, to the thinker who fathoms the mysteries of the heart and of the universe in order that he may shed on the paths of erring humanity some rays of light and joy.

Amid the twilight that envelopes us you predict the threatening night; I see the day that is about to dawn with a new century. Where you see nothing but discords, conflicts, and confusion, I see a concourse of forces which, coming from all points of the horizon, are still ignorant of each other, and, because ignorant, conflicting, but which, by these very conflicts and collisions, are labouring together in the common work of elevation and salvation: the mysterious work whose nature Christ defined in His Gospel, and whose motive-power he created by breathing into the human heart His own fraternal love. Since then there has been a secret inquietude at the heart of all egoisms, a sentence of condemnation on the brow of all abuses and all tyrannies.

The modern world can never settle down again into repose, or fall asleep in evil and in slavery; it has had a vision it cannot forget; it has been touched with a flame that cannot be quenched. Many who are often the best collaborators in this work of redemption know not whence it comes and whither it tends; they even blaspheme the Christ who inspires it and the G.o.d who maintains it. They know not what they do, nor what they say: in their ignorance they calumniate that which is best both in their life and in themselves.

BOOK THIRD

DOGMA

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS A DOGMA?

1. _Definition_

Dogma, in the strictest sense, is one or more doctrinal propositions which, in a religious society, and as the result of the decisions of the competent authority, have become the object of faith, and the rule of belief and practice.

It would not be enough to say that a religious society has dogmas as a political society has laws. For the first, it is a much greater necessity. Moral societies not only need to be governed; they need to define themselves and to explain their _raison d'etre_. Now, they can only do this in their dogma.

Dogma therefore is a phenomenon of social life. One cannot conceive either dogma without a Church, or a Church without dogma. The two notions are correlative and inseparable.

There are three elements in dogma: a religious element, which springs from piety; an intellectual or philosophic element, which supposes reflection and discussion; and an element of authority, which comes from the Church. Dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a law.

All the peoples of antiquity believed that their legislation came from heaven. In like manner all the Churches have believed, and many of them still believe, that their dogmas, in their official form, have been directly given to them by G.o.d Himself. The history of evolution, political and religious, has dissipated these illusions. Every law of righteousness and truth should, doubtless, be referred to the mysterious action of the Divine Spirit which works incessantly in the spirits of men; but, in its historical form, it bears, nevertheless, the stamp of the contingent conditions in which it is born. The genius of a people is nowhere more manifest than in its const.i.tution and its laws, nor the soul and the original inspiration of a Church than in its dogmatic creations. The work always bears the moral impress of the workman.

It follows that a Church cannot claim for its dogma more authority than it possesses itself. Only a Church which is infallible can issue immutable dogmas. When Protestantism sets up such a pretension, it falls into a radical contradiction with its own principle, and that contradiction ruins all attempts of this kind.

In Catholicism the theory of the immutability of dogmas is opposed to history; in Protestantism it is opposed to logic. In both cases the affirmation is shown to be illusory. It is with dogmas, so long as they are alive, as it is with all living things; they are in a perpetual state of transformation. They only become immutable when they are dead, and they begin to die when they cease to be studied for their own sakes--that is, to be discussed.

Dogma, therefore, which serves as a law and visible bond to the Church, is neither the principle nor the foundation of religion. It is not primitive; it never appears until late in the history of religious evolution. "There were poets and orators," says Voltaire, "before there was a grammar and a rhetoric." Man chanted before he reasoned.

Everywhere the prophet preceded the rabbi, and religion theology. It may be said, no doubt, that dogma is in religion, since it comes out of it; but it is in it as the fruits of Autumn are in the blossoms of Spring. Dogmas and fruits, in order to form and ripen, need long summers and much suns.h.i.+ne. The best way to describe their nature will be to trace their genesis.

2. _The Genesis of Dogma_

Dogma has its tap-root in religion. In every positive Religion there is an internal and an external element, a soul and a body. The soul is inward piety, the movement of adoration and of prayer, the divine sensibility of the heart; the body consists of external forms, of rites and dogmas, inst.i.tutions and codes. Life consists in the organic union of these two elements. Without the soul, religion is but an empty form, a mere corpse. Without the body, which is the expression and the instrument of the soul, religion is indiscernible, unconscious, and unrealised.

Which of these two elements is primitive and generative? The answer is not doubtful. Modern psychology has learnt it in a manner never to be forgotten from Schleiermacher, Benjamin Constant, and Alexander Vinet.

The principle of all religion is in piety, just as the principle of language is in thought, although it is not possible now to conceive of them as being separate. Consider a moment. That religion which time and custom have transformed, perhaps, into a mechanical round of ceremonies, or into a system of abstractions and metaphysical theories, what was it at first? Trace it to its source, and you will find that these cold blocks of lava once came burning hot from an interior fire.

But this is the parting of the ways. This is the point at which religious minds separate into widely different groups.

Regarding religion as a saving inst.i.tution in the form of a visible organised Church maintained by G.o.d and provided with all the means of grace, Catholicism was bound to end in a sort of mechanical psychology, and to explain the sentiment of piety as the inward effect of the outward and supernatural inst.i.tution. This is done by Bellarmine and de Bonald, the most consistent of the Catholic theologians.

Protestantism, on the contrary, which makes of the faith of the heart, of the immediate and personal relation of the soul to G.o.d, the very principle of justification, and of all religious life, was bound none the less logically to end, by a.n.a.lysis, in a more profound psychology, and to refer to an inward principle all the forms and manifestations of religion. Religious history thus becomes h.o.m.ogeneous, and runs parallel with that of all the other activities of the human mind.

None the less, this subjectivity of the religious principle frightens many good men. Persons devoted to practice, and unconsciously dominated by the habits and necessities of ecclesiastical government and religious teaching, hesitate to enter upon a road so naturally opened. As, from generation to generation, religion has been taught and propagated externally by the Church, the family, or special agents, it is impossible for them to imagine that it was not always so, and not to trace back to G.o.d Himself that chain or tradition of external instruction. In which they are certainly right. Their only error, but it is a grave one, is to represent G.o.d as an ordinary teacher, the first of a series, who once acted, like the rest of them, upon His pupils from without; whereas G.o.d works in all souls, acts and teaches without ceasing through all human masters, and is present throughout the whole religious education of humanity.

Who does not see that to represent things otherwise is to remain in the crudest and least religious of anthropomorphisms? At bottom, these men are afraid of losing revelation, which they rightly judge to be inseparable from the very idea of religion. They object that piety and the awakening of the religious sentiment must have an objective cause, and that that cause can only be a revelation of G.o.d Himself. Nothing is more true; but this revelation which is effected without, in the events of Nature or of History, is only known within, in and by the human consciousness. This inward inspiration alone enables religious men to interpret Nature and History religiously. Now, this interpretation is made by their intellect and according to the laws and conditions which regulate it. The religious phenomenon therefore has not two moments only, the objective revelation as a cause and the subjective piety as an effect; it has three, which always follow each other in the same order: the inner revelation of G.o.d, which produces the subjective piety of man, which, in its turn, engenders the historical religious forms, rites, formularies of faith, sacred books, social creations, which we can know and describe as external facts. It will be seen what an error they commit, what a mistake they make, who identify the third term with the first, suppressing the second, which is the necessary link and forms the transition between the other two.

Whoever will fathom this little problem in psychology, and reflect upon it with a little attention, will see that all religious revelation of G.o.d must necessarily pa.s.s through human subjectivity before arriving at historical objectivity.

Pa.s.sing now from the intellectual interpretation to the intellectual expression of religion, and noting the successive stages through which it must necessarily advance towards dogma, I remark once more that man's first language is that of the imagination. The imagination of the child or of the savage animates, dramatises, and transfigures everything. It spontaneously engenders vivid and poetic images. At the beginning, religion, consisting chiefly of emotions, presentiments, movements of the heart, clothed itself in mythologic forms.... But the age of individual reflection comes. The image tends to change into the idea. Men interpret, define, translate it. The religious myth is replaced by the religious doctrine. These are at first entirely personal interpretations. Nevertheless, these opinions desire to propagate themselves, to become general, and, as they are imperfect and diverse, they engender conflicts which threaten to become schisms.

Myths, appealing to the imagination merely, and only professing to translate the common emotion, draw souls together and fuse them into a real unity; individual reason, private exegesis, inevitably separates them. But the consciousness of the community, thus menaced, naturally reacts by the instincts of conservation. There is therefore a struggle between the two, and out of this conflict dogma is born.

A new element must intervene. There must be a Church. Now, all religions do not form churches. The phenomenon is only produced in the universalist and moral religions. Strictly speaking, there is no Church except in Christianity; and no dogmas save Christian dogmas. In ancient societies, where religion was confounded either with the State, or with the nationality, the religious unity was maintained and guaranteed by the same means as the political unity. There were no dogmas, because dogmas were of no use. As much may be said of Hebraism and of Islam: in them there were rites, external signs and seals, which sufficed to weld and to maintain the religious bond.

Dogma only arises when the religious society, distinguis.h.i.+ng itself from the civil, becomes a moral society, recruiting itself by voluntary adherents. This society, like every other, gives to itself what it needs in order to live, to defend itself, and propagate itself.

Doctrine necessarily becomes for it an essential thing; for in its doctrine it expresses its soul, its mission, its faith. It is necessary also that it should carry its doctrine to a degree at once of generality and precision high enough to embrace and to translate all the moments of its religious experience and to eliminate all alien and hostile elements. Controversy springs up and threatens to rend it.

The Church then chooses and formulates a definition of the point contested: it enacts it as the adequate expression of its faith, and sanctions it with all its objective authority: dogma is born. From that moment also the two correlative notions of _orthodoxy_ and _heresy_ are formed. Orthodoxy is official and collective doctrine; heresy is individual doctrine or interpretation.... By and by symbols or confessions of faith are formed, and these become the standards of faith and practice in the various churches that adopt them.

This long evolution is fully justified in the eyes of reason. It is a movement of the mind as legitimate as it is necessary. The germ must become a tree, the child grow to manhood, the image be transformed into the idea, and poetry give place to prose. It is possible to be mistaken as to the nature, origin, and value of dogma, but not as to its necessity. The Church may make a different use of it in the future, but it will not be able to dispense with it, for the doctrinal form of religion answers to an imperative need of the epoch of intellectual growth at which we have arrived. No one can either reverse or arrest its development....

The word dogma is anterior to Catholicism. It had two senses in Greek antiquity: a political and authoritarian sense, designating the decrees of popular a.s.semblies and of kings; this is the meaning which dominates and characterises the Catholic notion of dogma. But the word had also in the schools of Greece an essentially philosophical and doctrinal meaning; it designated the characteristic doctrine of each school. The Protestant Churches have inherited this latter sense of the word: it is in perfect harmony with the spirit and the principle of Protestantism.

Dogma, in the Protestant sense, means the doctrinal type generally received in a Church, and publicly expressed in its liturgy, its catechisms, its official teaching, and especially in its Confession of Faith.[1]

[1] Originally the word dogma signified a command, a precept, and not a truth (Luke ii. 1, and the Septuagint of Dan. ii. 13; vi. 8; Esther iii. 9; 2 Maccab. x. 8, etc.). Ignatius of Antioch still uses the word in this sense. It is not until towards the time of Athanasius or of Augustine that it begins to be used of the doctrinal decisions of the Fathers, the Councils, and the Pope. (Cf. also Acts xv. 28, 29. This is afterwards called a dogma, the only time it is used in the N.T. with reference to a decision of the Church.)

3. The Religious Value of Dogma

The intolerance of Catholic dogmatism has had consequences so revolting, and, in Protestantism, wherever this dogmatism has revived, it has given rise to conflicts so sterile and so lamentable, that certain minds have gone so far as to deny the utility of dogma in the largest sense of the word, and have wished to suppress all doctrinal definition of the Christian Faith. To call dogma either divine in itself or evil in itself is to go to an unwarrantable extreme. In religious development, whether individual or social, it has an organic place that cannot be taken away from it, and a practical importance that cannot be contested.

Religious faith is a phenomenon of consciousness. G.o.d Himself is its author and its cause; but it has for psychological factors all the elements of consciousness--feeling, volition, idea. It must never be forgotten that these verbal distinctions are pure abstractions; that these elements co-exist, and are enveloped and implicated with each other in the unity of the ego. In the living reality there has never existed feeling which did not carry within it some embryo of an idea and translate itself into some voluntary movement.... As it is impossible for thought not to manifest itself organically by gesture or language, so it is impossible for religion not to express itself in rites and doctrines.

No doubt, in the first period of physical life, sensation dominates, and at the _debut_ of religious life, feeling and imagination. But as science springs from sensation, so religious doctrine springs from piety. To say that "Christianity is a life, therefore it is not a doctrine" is to reason very badly. We should rather say, "Christianity is a life and therefore it engenders doctrine;" for man cannot live his life without thinking it. The two things are not hostile; they go together. In apostolic times the greatest of missionaries was the greatest of theologians. St. Augustine at the end of the old world, Calvin, Luther, Zwingle, at the beginning of the modern world, followed the example of St. Paul. When the sap of piety fails, theology withers. Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a decline of religious life. Spencer, by re-opening the springs of piety, renewed the streams of theology. Without Pietism Germany would have had no Schleiermacher; without the religious revival at the beginning of this century we should have had neither Samuel Vincent nor Alexander Vinet.

If the life of a Church be compared to that of a plant, doctrine holds in it the place of the seed. Like the seed, doctrine is the last to be formed; it crowns and closes the annual cycle of vegetation; but it is necessary that it should form and ripen; for it carries within it the power of life and the germ of a new development. A Church without dogmas would be a sterile plant. But let not the partisans of dogmatic immutability triumph: let them pursue the comparison to the end: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and _die_," said Jesus, "it bears no fruit." To be fruitful, dogma must be decomposed--that is to say, it must mix itself unceasingly with the evolution of human thought and die in it; it is the condition of perpetual resurrection.

Without being either absolute, or perfect in itself, then, dogma is absolutely necessary to the propagation and edification of the religious life. The Church has a pedagogic mission that could not be fulfilled without it. It bears souls, nourishes them and brings them up. Its role is that of a mother. In that educative mission, we may add, the mother finds the principle and aim of her authority, the reason and the limit of her tutelage. In this sense, dogma is never without authority. But this same pedagogic authority is neither absolute nor eternal; it has a double limit, in the nature of the pupil's soul, which it ought to respect, and in the end it would attain, the making of free men, adult Christians, sons of G.o.d in the image of Christ and in immediate relations.h.i.+p to the Father. If dogma is the heritage of the past transmitted by the Church, it is the children's duty first to receive it, and then to add to its value by continually reforming it, since that is the only way to keep it alive and to render it truly useful and fruitful in the moral development of humanity. It is therefore to this idea of necessary dogma, but of dogma necessarily historical and changing, that we must henceforth accustom ourselves; and we shall most easily habituate ourselves to it by tracing its evolution in the past.

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION

1. _Three Prejudices_

I here encounter three prejudices which are, I think, the most inveterate in the world. The first is that dogmas are immutable; the second, that they die fatally the moment they are touched by criticism; the third, that they form the essence of religion, which rises or falls with them. I wish to show that dogmas have neither this pretended immobility nor this delicate fragility; that they live by an inner life extraordinarily resistant and fecund, and that the criticism of dogmas, so far from injuring the Christian religion, frees it from the chains of the past and permits it to manifest its marvellous gift of rejuvenescence and adaptation to circ.u.mstances.