Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History Part 9

The proof that dogmas are not immutable lies in the fact that they have a history. That history is as full of conflicts, controversies, revolutions, as the history of philosophy.... One Church has said of its dogmas what a Jesuit General said of his Order: _sint ut sunt aut non sint_! It is an illusion. Momentarily arrested at one point, the movement begins again at another. In one half of Christendom, and certainly the most living half, criticism of dogma has never ceased since the sixteenth century. Even in the bosom of the Catholic Church, its most skilful advocates, the Moehlers and the Newmans, unable to deny that Catholicism is not to-day what it was in the first centuries, have made this strange concession to history; they have applied to dogmas the theory of development. At Paris in 1682 the dogma of the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome would have been condemned as an error. Since 1870 the orthodoxy of 1682 has become the gravest of heresies. There is no fiction more evident than that of the immutability of dogmas, whether in the Catholic or in the Protestant Churches. Like all other manifestations of life, they have an evolution as natural as it is inevitable. The proof that dogmas are not religion, and that criticism does not kill them but transforms them, will appear in what I now proceed to say.

2. _The Two Elements in Dogma; and its Historical Evolution_

Dogma is the language spoken by faith. In it there are two elements: a mystical and practical element, the properly religious element; this is the living and fruitful principle of dogma: then there is an intellectual or theoretical element, a judgment of mind, a philosophical proposition serving at once as an envelope and as an expression of religion.

Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it, trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now, thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into an intellectual judgment. Thus, wis.h.i.+ng to express this relation, the believer will exclaim, _e.g._ "G.o.d is great!" marking the infinite disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him tremble.[1] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed in the mind into the notion of a relation, _i.e._ into an intellectual notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression which ideally represents a given quant.i.ty, but it is not the quant.i.ty itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious experience....

[1] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation and other experiences: the revelation of G.o.d and of a higher life, in the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "G.o.d is Love!" as the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "G.o.d is great!" And this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.

The intellectual will therefore be the variable element in dogma. It is the matter united to the germ, and it is ceaselessly transformed by the very effect of the movement of life. The reason of this is simple.

We said just now that a religious emotion, like every other, translates itself into a notion which fixes the relation of the subject to the object, implied in the emotion itself. But what will this notion be?

With what materials, with what concepts, will the religious man construct it? Clearly with those at his disposal. His religious formula will depend on his state of intellectual culture. A child, he will think and speak religiously as a child. Religious reason and language have followed the same steps as the general reason....

I am well aware that many Christians imagine that G.o.d has revealed to us dogmas in the Bible, and that they will accuse me of denying revelation. G.o.d forbid! We believe with all our soul in Divine Revelation and in its particular action in the souls of prophets and apostles, and especially in Jesus Christ. Only, the question is whether the revelation of G.o.d has consisted of doctrines and dogmatic formulas. No. G.o.d does nothing needless, and since these doctrines and formulas can be and have been conceived by human intelligence, He has left to it the care of elaborating them. G.o.d, entering into commerce and contact with a human soul, has produced in him a certain religious experience whence, afterwards, by reflection, the dogma has sprung. That therefore which const.i.tutes revelation, that which ought to be the norm of our life, is the creative and fruitful religious experience which first arose in the souls of the prophets, of Christ, and of His apostles. We may be tranquil. So long as this experience shall be renewed in Christian souls, Christian dogmas may be modified, but they will never die. But why should we retain dogmas which, in the nature of things, must always be imperfect? Why not have religion pure and simple without dogmas? What would happen if we listened to this cry for pure unmixed religion? By suppressing Christian dogma you would suppress Christianity; by discarding all religious doctrine you would destroy religion. How many great and eternal things there are which never exist, for us, in a pure and isolated state! All the forces of Nature are in this case. Thought, in order to exist, must incarnate itself in language. Words cannot be identified with thought, but they are necessary to it. The hero in the romance, who was said to be unable to think without speaking was not so ridiculous as was once supposed, for that hero is everybody. The soul only reveals itself to us by the body to which it is united. Who has ever seen life apart from living matter? It is the same with the religious life and the doctrines and rites in which it manifests itself. A religious life which did not express itself would neither know itself nor communicate itself. It is therefore perfectly irrational to talk of a religion without dogma and without wors.h.i.+p. Orthodoxy is a thousand times right as against rationalism or mysticism, when it proclaims the necessity for a Church of formulating its faith into a doctrine, without which religious consciousnesses remain confused and undiscernible.

The mistake that orthodoxy sometimes makes is in denying or desiring to arrest the constant metamorphosis to which dogma, like all living things, is subject. So long as they are alive, dogmas have the faculty of changing and evolving. How is their evolution effected? The a.n.a.logy between dogma and language will help us to the answer. A language is modified in three ways: (1) By disuse, _i.e._ by the disappearance of words whose contents have vanished; (2) by intussusception, _i.e._ by the faculty which words have, without changing their form, of acquiring new significations; (3) by the renaissance of old or the creation of new words, _i.e._ by neologisms.

Nothing is easier than to establish these three kinds of variations in the history of dogmas. Some religious formulas perish from disuse; others acquire a new content; while still others are themselves renewed. Many doctrines that were once alive and prevalent are seldom heard of now; they gradually pa.s.sed out of use. There is hardly a dogma dating from the seventeenth or the sixteenth century that has now the same signification that it had at the beginning. The new wine that has been put into them has modified the old skins. There are limits, however, to the elasticity of words and formulas. There comes a moment when the new wine bursts the old skins, and when the Church has to construct other vessels to receive it. In this way neologisms spring up in languages, and new dogmas in theology. In the sixteenth century the dogmas of Justification by Faith and of the universal priesthood were resuscitated with a new energy. The verses of Horace, on which I might appear to have been commenting, are eternally true:

Ut silvae foliis p.r.o.nos mutantur in annos, * * * * *

Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere cadentque Quae nunc sunt in honore, vocabula...

The evolution of dogma is possible; why is it necessary? Simply because the material of which it is composed is in a state of constant flux and evolution.... We do not mean to say that everything in the old formulas should be condemned. There are to be found in them many great and excellent ideas which still retain their truth and power. We simply say that there is nothing absolute in them, nothing that may be imposed by authority on Christian thought. It is always with notions borrowed from current science and philosophy that the Church constructs her dogmas. But science and philosophy are continually evolving and carrying dogma in their train. Everything changes, even our manner of thinking. Why do certain things appear absurd or grotesque in the imaginations of the past? Because we have lost the faculty for comprehending them. It is as impossible for us to think in Greek as to speak in Greek. Since the end of the Middle Ages two or three intellectual revolutions have occurred which have profoundly separated us from antiquity and changed the inner and the outer world in which we live. It will suffice to recall them in a few words in order to deepen our sense of the decadence of Graeco-Roman dogmatic Christianity, and of the necessity inc.u.mbent upon us to reform and renovate it, if only we are strong enough to answer to the call of G.o.d.

3. _The Crisis of Dogma_

The first of these revolutions was a religious one. Our specific consciousness as Protestant Christians dates from the Reformation.

Now, the Evangelical Reformation of the sixteenth century was the rupture of the tradition of the Church, of which the Dogmatics of the great Councils was the framework and the centre. In breaking the authority of the Church, the Reformers broke up the basis on which those ancient dogmas had been built. In appealing to the Word of G.o.d against traditional doctrines, they at least called in question the Dogmatics of the Councils. After protesting against all the infiltrations of pagan manners and superst.i.tions into the morals of the Church, into its organisation and its hierarchy into its wors.h.i.+p and its rites, why should they regard as sacrosanct the ancient philosophy which had entered into the construction of its dogmas?

On the other hand, the Reformation renewed the Christian consciousness by its fundamental doctrine of Justification by Faith. Until then salvation had come through adhesion to the Symbols of the Church and obedience to its commands. Justification by Faith (and faith here means the trust of the heart) freed the Christian from the tutelage of the priesthood and the bondage of Symbols. To maintain that you can only be saved by believing certain theological doctrines, is the same as to say that you can only be saved by doing certain works; it is to add to or to subst.i.tute for faith some other condition of salvation.

The second principle of the Reformation therefore also shook the ancient edifice; in Dogmatics it subst.i.tuted the internal principle of Christian experience for the external principle of authority; it made of Christianity a moral life and no longer a metaphysic. Is it not right and necessary to give the new principles of the Reformation a new theological expression? This process has been going on ever since the sixteenth century and can never cease.

The Reformation displaced the centre of the Christian consciousness.

At the same time there began a scientific revolution which displaced the centre of the universe. I speak of that which is connected with the names of Copernicus and Kepler, and which was continued by such men as Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. Modern astronomy, geology, biology, etc., have completely changed the outlines and the horizon of our philosophy, and rendered for ever impossible the popular cosmogonies which, until then, had reigned supreme. And who does not see the bearing of this revolution on our views of Scripture, on its cosmography in particular, and on many of its minor teachings? The traditional doctrines of creation have been greatly modified, as also the doctrines as to the origin of evil, suffering, and death. These discoveries, it is said, have ruined religion, and are destroying Christian faith. Not so. What is being destroyed is the debris of an ancient philosophy. But they do compel us, absolutely, if we would remain in touch with the thought of our age, to modify the formulas by which the Church has. .h.i.therto believed that she might render an account of the origin and evolution of the universe.

A third intellectual evolution has been effected in our own time by the advent of the Historical Method. This has completely upset the traditional view of the history of mankind. Floods of new light have been poured upon the prehistoric and historic races of man. Modern criticism and exegesis have given us an entirely new view of the origin and contents of many parts of the Old and New Testaments. In every department of knowledge the historic method has made the point of view of evolution possible and victorious. It is in vain to oppose it, for it is the law of life. Those who cling to the doctrine of dogmatic immutability, whether in the Catholic or the Protestant Churches, are exactly in the position of the Romish cardinals who covered Galileo with anathemas and protested energetically against the rotation of the earth. Neither their protests nor their anathemas prevented the earth from turning round, and the cardinals along with it. In Protestantism, a resistance so blind would be the grossest of inconsistencies.

Dogmatic revision is always alive, both in principle and in fact, in the Churches of the Reformation: in principle, because all Confessions of Faith are relative, and subordinate to the Word of G.o.d; in fact, because the spirit of research, of criticism, and free discussion has never ceased to breathe in Protestant Theology, and breathes to-day more ardently than ever. The work will therefore be completed; I am sure of it. We may lack the faith and courage to carry it on, but, failing us, G.o.d will not fail to raise up other fellow-workers with Himself in this great enterprise. Christianity cannot perish; it has never failed to adapt itself to the state of mind of ages past; in the future, it will find and make new forms in which to express and propagate itself, forms adapted to the coming times....

"One day, the monk Sarapion, a man of deep piety and ardent zeal, was told by the priest Paphnutius and the deacon Photinus that G.o.d, in whose image man had been created, was a purely spiritual being, without body, without external figure, without sensible organs. Serapion was convinced by the ascendancy of Catholic tradition and by the arguments that had been employed. The a.s.sistants rose to render thanks to G.o.d for having rescued so holy a man from the wicked heresy of the anthropomorphists. But, in the midst of their devotions, the unhappy old man, feeling the image of the G.o.d to whom he had been accustomed to pray vanis.h.i.+ng from his heart, was deeply moved, and bursting into sobs and tears, he threw himself upon the ground, and cried out: 'Woe is me!

Unhappy man! They have taken away my G.o.d. I have no one now to cling to and invoke.'"[2]

[2] J. Ca.s.sanius, abb. Ma.s.sil.: Collatio, X. c. III.

Touching image of our own experience and of the experience of humanity!

We are always making to ourselves some idol or other. It is very difficult for us to realise that G.o.d is spirit: we attach ourselves therefore to some fetish of human fabrication. And then, when science comes and takes it away from us, we are troubled and perplexed, as if they had taken from us G.o.d Himself. The study of dogmas and their evolution, were it wider spread, would relieve us of our illusions and calm our inquietude. It would teach us that our religious life depends on our faith alone, and that the G.o.d Who is its source and end is independent of all theory or representation, because He is infinitely above all human conceptions, and because, in order never to be separated from Him, it suffices that we wors.h.i.+p Him in spirit and in truth.

CHAPTER III

THE SCIENCE OF DOGMAS

1. _The Mixed Character of Dogmatics_

We have shown the necessity of a free criticism of dogmas. This criticism, if it is religious, will at the same time be positive; it will tend not to destroy, but to distinguish, in each dogma, that which is truly religious and permanent from that which is philosophical and fleeting. Such is the object of the discipline that, in the schools, is called _Dogmatics_, or the Science of Dogmas. It remains to define its task and to point out the resources which it has at its disposal.

Both points are connected with its relation to the Church and to Philosophy. The science of dogmas has always necessarily followed the life of the one and the vicissitudes of the other.

In the religious experiences of the Church it finds the material that it elaborates; from philosophy it borrows the methods according to which it treats this material and the form in which it organises it.

This science is, therefore, a mixed science: positive and practical in its object, speculative and theoretical in its procedure, it seeks to connect the religious and moral experience with the rest of the experience of humanity, and to effect the synthesis claimed, in order to their full vigour, by the scientific order of thought and by the moral order of practical life.

This intermediate position of our science, between the Church and philosophy, const.i.tutes its independence and its originality. If, as in Catholicism, it were absolutely subjected to the authority of the Church, and were limited to receiving, without critical examination, its successive decisions and traditions, it would be confounded with the history of dogmas, and would be merely a survival of scholasticism.

On the other hand, if it did not start from the data furnished by history and by the personal and collective experience of piety,--if it did not study the Christian life in its objectivity and in its historic continuity, but abandoned itself to purely subjective and general speculations--it would be fatally confounded with philosophy. It escapes this double peril, first, by taking as its object the study of the doctrinal tradition of the Church, tracing it back to its generative principle, following it in its successive forms and necessary evolution; and, secondly, by freely applying to this objective material the principles and rules of a truly rational method, a method that may be avowed as such by philosophers. It thus const.i.tutes the philosophy of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, setting itself to connect the consciousness of the Church with the general consciousness of humanity, and establis.h.i.+ng or maintaining between them communications equally profitable to both.

It follows that our discipline, in studying the tradition of the Church, is independent of philosophy. On the other hand, the fact that it borrows its methods and processes from philosophy, renders it independent with regard to the Church. Its freedom springs from its twofold subjection. Such a little princ.i.p.ality, placed between two great rival Powers without whose help it could not live, maintains its independence of them both by virtue of their very rivalry, and may become an arbiter, an element of pacification and good understanding, between forces which are only hostile because they either do not know or do not understand each other. Thus the science of dogmas will be free, pacific, fruitful, on condition that it does not break its connection on either hand, but remains in close communication with the two sources of its life, without which it would be liable either to die of inanition for want of food, or of impotence for lack of liberty.

2. _The Science of Dogmas and the Church_

A religious society cannot dispense either with doctrines or doctrinal teaching. The more moral it is in its character, the more it needs a dogmatic symbol which defines it and explains its _raison d'etre_. It will have its teachers as well as its pastors and missionaries. The apostle Paul compares the Church to an organism in which each member has its necessary function, according to the special gift it has received. "G.o.d," says he, "gave some, apostles; some, prophets; some, teachers" (1 Cor. xii. 28; Rom. xii. 6-8. "Teaching of the Apostles,"

13 and 15). In pa.s.sing through different lips the Gospel takes different forms. It creates divers types of doctrine, divers schools or parties (1 Cor. i. 10-14). It is necessary to instruct the ignorant, to refute heretics, to heal schisms, to administer reproofs, to correct the interpretation of texts. This could only be done by means of discussion, reasoning, exegesis, speculation. It was not an effort of pure science, but of practical science, in the interest of the Church itself, with a view to its inner edification and to the continuous reform of its wors.h.i.+p and its faith. The labour of dogmatics thus sprang up spontaneously in the bosom of the Church itself, and it has continued its work, not from without, but from within, through an office which is an essential ministry, an organ of the Church. It could not be done well in any other way....

A religious society, by the very fact that it endures, creates a doctrinal tradition, and this tradition soon a.s.sumes a divine character and tends to become an absolute authority. This is the effect of a psychological illusion characteristic of the religious consciousness so long as reflection does not put it on its guard against itself. The object of our faith being divine, we ingenuously transport this quality into the formula by which it has been transmitted to us, and we hold this formula to be divine before we have learnt to distinguish between the essence of faith and its historical manifestations, between the religious substance of the doctrine and its traditional expression.

Add to the prestige of the past the necessity of educating the new generations. Every Christian begins as a catechumen, and, in certain respects, he is and ought to be a learner all his life, for he cannot fail to see that the collective consciousness is always richer and more stable than his own. But, if the aim of Christian education is to produce adult Christians--that is, Christians who, having received the Holy Spirit, have entered into a direct and permanent relation to the common Father, and into personal and living piety, they possess an inward rule of conduct, and along with this a principle of free judgment. As St. Paul says, our tutelage ends when we have attained to our majority. The spiritual man judges all, but is judged of none. He becomes independent of the authority under which he has grown up, as the full-grown man becomes free from the mother who has borne and nourished him. He will, doubtless, always gratefully welcome the tradition of the past; but he feels within himself a higher principle which gives him the right to amend and the power to increase, in some degree, the inheritance he has received from his fathers. No one is either a man or a Christian on any other condition.

The solution of the problem named above is to be found in these considerations. A tradition which desires to be absolute, which misunderstands and stifles individual inspiration, is not only an usurper--it also fails in its mission, which is to make adult Christians, Christians who are inwardly inspired and autonomous. It is like those tyrannical mothers who, if they could, would keep their sons in a perpetual minority. On the other hand, the children, even when they have attained their majority, should not despise their parents and disdain the counsels of experience and of age. Individual inspiration is apt to lead to self-sufficiency and sectarianism; it loses sight of the link of solidarity which unites the generations, and the social continuity in which alone progress is made in the religious life, as in the life of civilisation. The first defect, the tyrannical usurpation of tradition, predominates in the Catholic Church; the opposite defect, that of the intransigeance of individual convictions and of Illuminism, is the plague of Protestant communities. The truth would be found in a middle course, and in the organisation of a traditional Church stable enough to receive and keep the heritage of the past, large and flexible enough to permit in it the legitimate expansion of the Christian consciousness and the acquisition of new treasure.

To this ideal, Catholicism cannot resign itself without succ.u.mbing to death. Protestantism aspires to it without reaching it; and yet nothing is more really in the logic of its principle. No Protestant Church professes to be infallible. Its most solemn Confessions of Faith have only a provisional value. The spirit of reform breathes in it without truce, continually. The princ.i.p.al task of the community, as of the individual, is to amend itself, to advance in knowledge and in virtue. A Church which should exclude this spirit of reform would cease to be a Protestant Church. And, of course, the duty of reform implies the legitimacy of criticism, of an appeal to the Gospel better understood, of a constant effort to bring the real up to the ideal.

The only matter of importance is to decide aright on the principle or criterion according to which this criticism shall be made.

Shall it be another dogma? No; not even if it be called a fundamental one such as the authority of Scripture. For this very dogma, formulated by tradition, is therefore human and contingent, and is open to criticism like all the rest. With what then, or in the name of what, shall dogma be criticised? Shall we, with Rationalism, take a moral or philosophical axiom as the criterion? We should then violate the autonomy of the religious consciousness; we should denaturalise religion itself, by subjecting it to an external rule; and Dogmatics, basing its fabric on an alien principle, would produce a hybrid structure that would be rejected by believers and philosophers with equal disdain.

The principle of criticism of Christian dogmas can only be the principle of Christianity itself, which is anterior to all dogmas, and which it is the aim of dogmas to manifest and to apply. Now the principle of Christianity is not a theoretical doctrine: it is a religious experience--the experience of Christ and His disciples through the centuries. It is the Gospel of salvation by the faith of the heart, the revelation of a moral relation, of a new relation, of a filial relation, created and realised between the man who is sinful and lost, and the Father who calls and pardons him. Such is the initial germ from which the whole Christian development has sprung, and by which consequently that development should and can be judged.

This generative principle of the life and of all the dogmas of the Church being laid down, and the distinction established between the ideal principle and its successive realisations, all of them necessarily incomplete, the criticism of dogmas will be effected automatically, without violence, and with fruit. It will be enough to tell the story of the genesis and evolution of each of them. It will then be seen what contingent and peris.h.i.+ng elements have entered into it in the course of history. Christianity is an organism whose soul is immortal, but whose body is renewed unceasingly by the fact that its materials are in constant movement, and that they are gathered from the various environments through which it has to pa.s.s. The philosophical notions which have served it as a temporary expression, and which are doubly dead to-day, either because civilisation has advanced, or because they were without vital connection with the initial Christian experience, fall from the tree like withered leaves or lifeless branches. As to the others, in which the sap still rises from the mother root, they will be seen to be transformed, to grow and flower from year to year under the same salubrious breath of criticism. Our discipline, religiously faithful to the principle of Christian piety, may often find itself in conflict with the administrative powers of the Church, but never really with the Church itself.

3. _The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy_

If less burning, the problem of the relations of dogmatics to philosophy is perhaps more difficult to solve than the problem just discussed. It has given rise to quite as many controversies. The danger is twofold. On the one hand, there is the pretension of scholasticism, the attempt to absorb philosophy in theology and make it subservient. It is still the pretension of a certain simple Protestant orthodoxy, for which there is no philosophy outside the Christian faith. At the other extreme is the attempt of rationalism to include the Christian religion in general ethics and philosophy. In the first case it is dogmatics which absorbs philosophy; in the second it is philosophy which absorbs dogmatics. But, in both cases, the specifically religious phenomena are lost sight of, the original character of Christian piety is misconceived, and theology, no longer having any special domain, succ.u.mbs and vanishes. It is the merit of the Reformation of Luther, in the sixteenth, and of the thought of Schleiermacher and Vinet in the nineteenth century, to have brought out and rendered manifest, among all other psychological phenomena, the character _sui generis_ of Christian faith and life, and thus to have a.s.signed to theology an object of study, eminent no doubt, but very special and very circ.u.mscribed. A task was thus marked out for theology widely different from that of philosophy--a task which consists, not in explaining everything in heaven and earth, but, more modestly and usefully, in giving an account of the religious experience of the Christian Church. Saved at once from scholasticism and rationalism, dogmatic theology may therefore build itself up in its own domain by the side of the other sciences without menacing or fearing any of them.