Chapter 16

Development, however great the changes which it exhibits, can only follow certain laws; and the development of the Church of Rome has steadily followed a direction opposite to that which the Modernists demand that it shall take. Newman might plausibly claim that the doctrines of purgatory and of the papal supremacy are logically involved in the early claims of the Roman Church. The claim is true at least in this sense, that, given a political Church organised as an autocracy, these useful doctrines were sure, in the interests of the government, to be promulgated sooner or later. But there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the next development will be in the direction of that peculiar kind of Liberalism favoured by the Modernists. It is difficult to see how the Vatican could even meet the reformers half-way without making ruinous concessions.' This supernatural mechanism,' M. Loisy says in his last book, 'Modernism tends to ruin completely,' Just so; but the Roman Church lives entirely on the faith in supernatural mechanism. Her sacramental and sacerdotal system is based on supernatural mechanism--on divine interventions in the physical world conditioned by human agency; her theology and books of devotion are full of supernatural mechanism; the lives of her saints, her relics and holy places, the whole literature of Catholic mysticism, the living piety and devotion of the faithful, wherever it is still to be found, are based entirely on that very theory of supernaturalistic dualism which the Modernist, when he acts as critic, begins by ruling out as devoid of any historical or scientific actuality. The attractiveness of Catholicism as a cult depends almost wholly on its frank admission of the miraculous as a matter of daily occurrence. To rationalise even contemporary history as M. Loisy has rationalised the Gospels would be suicide for Catholicism.

It is tempting to give a concrete instance by way of illustrating the impassable chasm which divides Catholicism as a working system from the academic scheme of transformation which we have been considering.

'The French Catholics (writes the _Times_ correspondent in Paris on June 25, 1908) are awaiting with concern the report of a special commission on a mysterious affair known as the Miraculous Hailstones of Remiremont. On Sunday, May 26, 1907, during a violent storm that swept over that region of the Vosges, among the great quantity of hailstones that fell at the time a certain number were found split in two. On the inner face of each of the halves, according to the local papers that appeared the next day, was the image of the Madonna venerated at Remiremont and known as Notre Dame du Trésor. The local Catholics regarded it as a reply to the municipal council's veto of the procession in honour of the Virgin. So many people testified to having seen the miraculous hailstones that the bishop of Saint-Dié instituted an inquiry; 107 men, women, and children were heard by the parish priest, and certain well-known men of science [names given] were consulted. The report has just been published in the _Semaine Religieuse_, and concludes in favour of the absolute authenticity of the fact under inquiry. ....The last word rests with the bishop, who will decide according to the conclusions of the report of the special commission.'

This is Catholicism in practice. Those who think to reform it by their contention that supernatural interventions can never be matters of fact, are liable to the reproach which they most dislike--that of scholastic intellectualism, and neglect of concrete experience.

This denial of the supernatural as a factor in the physical world seems to us alone sufficient to make the position of the Modernists in the Roman Church untenable. That form of Christianity stands or falls with belief in miracles. It has always sought to bring the divine into human life by intercalating acts of God among facts of nature. Its whole sacred literature, as we have said, is penetrated through and through by the belief that God continually intervenes to change the course of events. What would become of the cult of Mary and the saints if it were recognised that God does not so interfere, and that the saints, if criticism allows that they ever existed, can do nothing by their intercessions to avert calamity or bring blessing? The Modernist priest, it appears, can still say 'Ora pro nobis' to a Mary whose biography he believes to be purely mythical. At any rate, he can tell his consultants with a good conscience that if they pray to Mary for grace they will receive it. But what is the good of this make-believe? And, if it is part of a transaction in which the worshipper pays money for assistance which he believes to be miraculous and only obtainable through the good offices of the Church, is it even morally honest? The worshipper may be helped by his subjective conviction that his cheque on the treasury of merit has been honoured; but if, apart from the natural effects of suggestion, nothing has been given him but a mere _placebo_, is the sacerdotal office one which an honourable man would wish to fill?

We have no wish whatever to make any imputation against the motives of the brave men who have withstood the thunders of the Vatican, and who in some cases have been professionally ruined by their courageous avowal of their opinions. Perhaps none but a Catholic priest can understand how great the sacrifice is when one in his position breaks away from the authority of those who speak in the name of the Church, and deliberately incurs the charge, still so terrible in Catholic ears, of being a heretic and a teacher of heresy. Not one man in twenty would dare to face the storm of obloquy, hatred, and calumny which is always ready to fall on the head of a heretical priest. The Encyclical indicates the measures which are to be taken officially against Modernists. Pius X ordains that all the young professors suspected of Modernism are to be driven from their chairs in the seminaries; that infected books are to be condemned indiscriminately, even though they may have received an _imprimatur_; that a committee of censors is to be established in every diocese for the revision of books; that meetings of liberal priests or laymen are to be forbidden; that every diocese is to have a vigilance committee to discover and inform against Modernists; and that young clerical Modernists are to be put 'in the lowest places,' and held up to the contempt of their more orthodox or obsequious comrades. But this persecution is as nothing compared with the crushing condemnation with which the religious world, which is his only world, visits this kind of contumacy; the loss of friendships, the grief and shame of loved relatives, and the haunting dread that an authority so august as that which has condemned him cannot have spoken in vain. Assuredly all lovers of truth must do homage to the courage and self-sacrifice of these men. The doubt which may be reasonably felt and expressed as to the consistency of their attitude reflects no discredit on them personally. Nevertheless, the alternative must be faced, that a 'modernised' Catholicism must either descend to deliberate quackery, or proclaim that the bank from which the main part of her revenues is derived has stopped payment.

What will be the end of the struggle, and in what condition will it leave the greatest Church in Christendom? There are some who think that the Church will grow tired of the attitude of Canute, and will retreat to the chair which Modernism proffers, well above high-water mark. But the policy of Rome has never been concession, but repression, even at the cost of alienating large bodies of her supporters; and we believe that in the present instance, as on former occasions, the Vatican will continue to proscribe Modernism until the movement within her body is crushed. She can hardly do otherwise, for the alternative offered is not a gradual reform of her dogmas, but a sweeping revolution. This we have made abundantly clear by quotations from the Modernists themselves. If the Vatican once proclaimed that such views about supernaturalism as those which we have quoted are permissible, a deadly wound would be inflicted on the faith of simple Catholics all over the world. The Vicar of Christ would seem to them to have apostatised. The whole machinery of piety, as practised in Catholic countries, would be thrown out of gear. Nor is there any strong body of educated laymen, such as exists in the Protestant Churches, who could influence the Papacy in the direction of Liberalism. Not only are the laity taught that their province is to obey, and never to call in question the decisions of ecclesiastics, but the large majority of thoughtful laymen have already severed their connection with the Church, and take no interest in projects for its reform. Everything points to a complete victory for the Jesuits and the orthodox party; and, much as we may regret the stifling of free discussion, and the expulsion of earnest and conscientious thinkers from the Church which they love, it is difficult to see how any other policy could be adopted.

Of the Modernists, a few will secede, others will remain in the Church, though in open revolt against the Vatican; but the majority will be silenced, and will make a lip-submission to authority. The disastrous results of the rebellion, and of the means taken to crush it, will be apparent in the deterioration of the priesthood. Modern thought, it will be said, has now been definitely condemned by the Church; war has been openly declared against progress. Many who, before the crisis of the last few years, believed it possible to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood without any sacrifice of intellectual honesty, will in the future find it impossible to do so. We may expect to see this result most palpable in France, where men think logically, and are but little influenced by custom and prejudice. Unless the Republican Government blows the dying embers into a blaze by unjust persecution, it is to be feared that Catholicism in that country may soon become 'une quantité négligeable.' The prospects of the Church in Italy and Spain do not seem very much better. In fact the only comfort which we can suggest to those who regret the decline of an august institution, is that decadent autocracies have often shown an astonishing toughness. But as head of the universal Church, in any true sense of the word, Rome has finished her life.

A more vital question, for those at least who are Christians, but not Roman Catholics, is in what shape the Christian religion will emerge from the assaults upon traditional beliefs which science and historical criticism are pressing home. We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M. Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the kingdom of God which Christ preached was something much more than a patriotic dream. We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our worship was a historical figure. Nothing has yet come to light, or is likely to come to light, which prevents us from identifying the Christ of history with the Christ of faith, or the Christ of experience.

But, if too much is surrendered on one side, too much is taken back on the other. The contention that the progress of knowledge has left the traditional beliefs and cultus of Catholics untouched is untenable. It is not too much to say that the whole edifice of supernaturalistic dualism under which Catholic piety has sheltered itself for fifteen hundred years has fallen in ruins to the ground. There is still enough superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at Lourdes, and split hailstones at Remiremont. But that kind of religion is doomed, and will not survive three generations of sound secular education given equally to both sexes. The craving for signs and wonders--that broad road which attracts so many converts and wins so rapid a success--leads religion at last to its destruction, as Christ seems to have warned His own disciples. Science has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor. She has left us the divine Christ, whatever may be the truth about certain mysterious events in His human life. But assuredly she has not left us the right to offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and knowledge will not serve. Man is one, and reality is one; there can no more be two 'orders of reality' not affecting each other than there can be two faculties in the human mind working independently of each other. The universe which is interpreted to us by our understanding is not unreal, nor are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M. Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'--myths in fact--which do not become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems to suggest. Faith is not the born storyteller of Modernist theology. Faith is, on the practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is a progressive initiation, by experiment which ends in experience, into the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner assurance that these three attributes of the divine nature have one source and conduct to one goal.

The Modernists are right in finding the primary principle of faith in the depths of our undivided personality. They are right in teaching that faith develops and comes into its own only through the activity of the whole man. They are right in denying the name of faith to correct opinion, which may leave the character untouched. As Hartley Coleridge says:

'Think not the faith by which the just shall live Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given. It is an affirmation and an act That bids eternal truth be present fact.'

For all this we are grateful to them. But we maintain that the future of Christianity is in the hands of those who insist that faith and knowledge must be confronted with each other till they have made up their quarrel. The crisis of faith cannot be dealt with by establishing a _modus vivendi_ between scepticism and superstition. That is all that Modernism offers us; and it will not do. Rather we will believe, with Clement of Alexandria, that pistê hê gnhôsist, gnôsthê de hê phistist.

If this confidence in the reality of things hoped for and the hopefulness of things real be well-founded, we must wait in patience for the coming of the wise master-builders who will construct a more truly Catholic Church out of the fragments of the old, with the help of the material now being collected by philosophers, psychologists, historians, and scientists of all creeds and countries. When the time comes for this building to rise, the contributions of the Modernists will not be described as wood, hay, or stubble. They have done valuable service to biblical criticism, and in other branches, which will be always recognised. But the building will not (we venture to prophesy) be erected on their plan, nor by their Church. History shows few examples of the rejuvenescence of decayed autocracies. Nor is our generation likely to see much of the reconstruction. The churches, as institutions, will continue for some time to show apparent weakness; and other moralising and civilising agencies will do much of their work. But, since there never has been a time when the character of Christ and the ethics which he taught have been held in higher honour than the present, there is every reason to expect that the next 'Age of Faith,' when it comes, will be of a more genuinely Christian type than the last.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] Bishop Creighton always emphasised this view of Roman Catholicism. 'The Roman Church,' he wrote, 'is the most complete expression of Erastianism, for it is not a Church at all, but a state in its organisation; and the worst form of state--an autocracy.' (_Life and Letters_, ii. 375.)

[51] In contrast with 'henotheism' or 'monolatry,' such as the worship of the early Hebrews.

[52] 'Nunc defecit certa successio in omnibus ecclesiis apostolicis, praeterquam in Romana, et ideo ex testimonio huius solius ecclesiae sumi potest certum argumentum ad probandas apostolicas traditiones.' Bellarmine, _De Verbo Dei scripto et non scripto_, IV, ix, 10.

[53] Bellarmine, _De Laicis_, III, xxi, 22.

[54]: Santayana, _Return in Religion_, p. 108.

[55] Tertullian, _De Virg. Vel_., 1.

[56] Encyclical of October 27, 1901.

[57] In _The Programme of Modernism_, and _Quello che vogliamo_.

[58] _The Programme of Modernism_, p. 16.

[59] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 50-54.

[60] Loisy, _Simples Réflexions_, p. 168.

[61] _Ibid. L'Évangile et l'Église_, pp. 3-5.

[62] _Ibid. Les Évangiles Synoptiques_, p. 119.

[63] _Ibid_.

[64] _Ibid_. p. 143.

[65] _Ibid_. pp. 138, 139.

[66] _Ibid_. p. 104.

[67] Loisy, _Les Évangiles Synoptiques_, p. 166.

[68] _Ibid_. p. 169.

[69] _Ibid. Le Quatrième Évangile_, passim.

[70] Loisy, _Les Évangiles Synoptiques_, p. 214.

[71] _Ibid_. p. 218.

[72] Loisy, _Les Évangiles Synoptiques_, p. 223.

[73] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 82, 83.

[74] _Ibid_. p. 90.

[75] Loisy, _Simples Réflexions_, p. 211.

[76] Laberthonnière, _Le Réalisme Chrétien et l'Idéalisme Grec,_ pp. 44, 45.

[77] _Malachi_, ii. 6.

[78] Le Roy, _Dogme et Critique_, p. 26.

[79] _Lex Orandi_, p. 165 (abridged).

[80] This is not carelessness on the part of the writer. Paulsen also says (_Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 112), 4 It is impossible to separate feeling and willing from each other.... Only in the highest stage of psychical life, in man, does a partial separation of feeling from willing occur.' But it is the highest stage of psychical life, the human, with which we are alone concerned; and in this stage it is both possible and necessary to distinguish between feeling and willing. Some Voluntarists, hard pressed by facts, try to make 'will' cover the whole of conscious and subconscious life, with the exception of logical reasoning, which is excluded as a sort of pariah!

[81] Mgr. Moyes, in _The Nineteenth Century_, December, 1907.

CARDINAL NEWMAN

(1912)

The life of Newman was divided into two nearly equal portions by his change of religion in October 1845. For the earlier half of his career we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another communion. The voluminous literature of the Tractarian movement, which includes large collections of Newman's own letters, has confirmed the accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that strange episode in English University life superfluous. With the 'Apologia' and Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement' before him, the reader needs no more. Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to adhere loyally to the Cardinal's wishes, by confining himself to the last half of Newman's life, after a brief summary of his childhood, youth, and middle age till 1845. Nevertheless, it is misleading to give the title 'The Life of Cardinal Newman' to a work which is only, as it were, the second volume of a biography. There are very few men, however long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions. From every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical historian, Newman's Anglican career was far more interesting and important than his residence at Birmingham. He will live in history, not as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal's hat which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the Vatican, when he had passed the normal limit of human life, but as the real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy. The projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was making a chapter of English history. His greatest book, though it was written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Passionist. It is 'The History of my Religious Opinions'; and after 1845 his religious opinions had, as he says himself, no further history. The incomparable style which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences as his own. Newman's English is only the Oriel manner at its best. Such an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory, where his associates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that he could be satisfied with their company. His best sermons and his best poetry belong to his Anglican period. 'The Dream of Gerontius,' with all its tender grace, is far less virile than 'Lead, kindly Light,' and other short poems of his youth. Moreover, his record as a Roman ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure. If he had died eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for neglect and obscurity. From the first he was distrusted by the 'Old Catholics' (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected at the Vatican, where Talbot assiduously represented him as 'the most dangerous man in England.' When Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, followed his example and joined the Roman Church, Newman was confronted with a still more subtle and relentless opponent, whose hostility was never relaxed till the accession of a Liberal Pope made it no longer possible to resist the bestowal of tardy honours upon a feeble octogenarian. The recognition came in time to soothe his decline, but too late to enable him to leave his mark upon the administration of the Roman Church.