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Title: The Catholic Church and history
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release date: March 2, 2026 [eBook #78085]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY ***
THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
_Belloc_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
_Chesterton_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION
_McNabb_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY
_Ward_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE APPEAL TO REASON
_Windle_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS REACTIONS WITH SCIENCE
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
_NEW YORK_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All Rights Reserved_
Nihil Obstat
ARTHUR J. SCANLAN, S. T. D.
Censor Librorum.
Imprimatur
PATRICK CARDINAL HAYES
✠ Archbishop, New York.
New York, September 16, 1926.
Copyright, 1926,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published November, 1926.
Reprinted, April, 1927
September, 1927.
_Printed in the United States of America by_
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK.
PREFACE
The object of the author has been to state and summarise in a brief,
succinct form the arguments drawn from History in opposition to the
claim of the Catholic Church: that is, to the claim put forward by
that Church to speak with Divine and Infallible Authority. The author
insists upon the point that he is not attempting a positive apologetic
drawn from History in favour of this claim, but a rebutting of the
evidence drawn from History opposed to this claim. He is engaged in
examining the value of the arguments drawn from History to prove that
the Catholic Church has varied or erred in her teaching or has made it
depend upon immoral methods, and in showing that they have no force.
The little book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the
three moral arguments: (1) that the Church has made pronouncements
which History can prove to be false; (2) that the Church can be proved
by History to have used material which she knew to be false; (3) that
the Church, being proved by history to be not only organised but
increasingly organised from the beginning of its existence, is thereby
shown to be different from the simple thing which a divine institution
of the sort should be.
Secondly, the intellectual argument, to wit, that the Church can
be proved by History to be man-made, not God-made. This the author
divides into two sections: (1) the Protestant argument that there was
some original good message told by Jesus Christ, which the Church has
gradually corrupted and from the origin of which she has deviated;
(2) the general agnostic argument that the Church can be proved
historically to be but one of many religions, to have grown up like
any other religion, with the same illusions and similar rites and
mysteries, and is therefore man-made--which last form of attack the
author regards as to-day by far the most serious.
EDITOR’S PREFACE
There needs but a brief introduction from the same pen as that which
composed the essay which follows it.
It must be to this effect.
The general subject “The Catholic Church and History” might be treated
from a hundred different positions. Perhaps the most important in
the eyes of the cultured man of our day is the question whether the
Catholic Church is, or is not, proved by the general story of European
history for the last two thousand years to have been a beneficent
influence. That question, however, I cannot touch upon because the
question whether the Church be beneficent or no is, to a Catholic,
subsidiary to the point whether its claim to be the very truth is valid
or no. If this claim is justified, then certainly the Church must
be beneficent. If it be proved beneficent, that will indeed be some
support of its claim; but a weak one, because we cannot even judge
whether it be beneficent or no until we have decided what we think
better and what worse--and this issue cannot be decided until we are
certain of our philosophy, that is, of our religion.
It is another and more important point to discuss whether the Church in
her long history has, or has not, shown exceptional signs of holiness
and of supernatural power, which are an evidence of her claim. There
are also, as I have said, very many other points of discussion which
the general title suggests.
I have confined myself to _one_, and _one_ only, to wit, the rebutting
of a certain argument drawn from History _against_ the Church. I
have done so for the reason that, in my eyes at least, much the most
formidable assault delivered against the Catholic Church to-day is
the assault delivered from the historical argument. There remains (as
I have said in the Essay that follows) much of the old Protestant
argument, to wit, that an original excellent establishment or message
of divine origin was corrupted in the course of the centuries and that
the Roman Communion still defends that corruption, so that its claim to
authority fails. This I have attempted to meet. But of far more weight
in my judgment, at the present moment, is the general argument that,
regarding History as a whole and adding to it what little we can guess,
and what very little we positively know, about man before he began
to establish records, the Faith is but an illusion, parallel to many
another such illusion to which men have been subject by the process of
projecting their own imaginations upon the void of the universe.
This I am convinced is the chief attack which we of the Faith have to
meet in modern times. The modern white world, the world of the European
races and their oversea expansion, is rapidly becoming divided into
two fairly definite camps: those who accept the full mission of the
Catholic Church and those who are convinced, by the study of geology
and recorded History, that the Catholic Church is but one more example
of man’s power of self-delusion.
Two questions may be asked of me by those who should read the analysis
which makes up my booklet. First, why have I confined myself to
rebutting, that is, to a negative position, instead of advancing
positive evidence from History in favor of the Catholic claim (evidence
drawn from holiness, continuity, unity, etc.)? Secondly, why have
I given but a portion, and not the largest portion, of my space to
what I have called the most important part of the attack, to wit, the
attack from general pre-History and History, the purely Sceptical
attack which I deal with at the end of my Essay? My answer to these two
questions is as follows:
First, that, in my judgment, the action of the Catholic Church is here
a defensive action. The opponent _takes it for granted_ that History
and pre-History _dis_prove the Catholic claim. He must be met as one
attacking.
Secondly, that though the general Sceptical attack is by far the more
important, yet it needs less space in writing for the meeting of it
than does the discussion of the old Protestant attitude. The reason
is that the issue between the Faith and mere scepticism is narrower
and sharper, and at the same time more general. If you are debating
whether the Church declined or was corrupted you must go into more
historical detail. You must in some degree, even in so short an essay
as this, be concrete. But on the other and larger issue you have a
very simple and direct “yes” or “no”; which is, briefly, the answer
to that old, eternal question “whether religion be from God or from
man”; and upon the answer to that question depends the future of our
civilisation.--_The Editor._
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
I
1. By the term “The Church” I mean the Catholic Church; and by the
Catholic Church I mean that visible society real, one, and clearly
present before the world to-day, which is in communion with the
Apostolic See of Rome, and accepts not only the supremacy of that
see but also the Infallibility of its occupant when, as shepherd and
teacher of all Christians, and speaking in that capacity, he defines a
matter in faith or morals.
2. The Church claims Divine Authority. She says:
“I alone know fully and teach those truths essential to the life and
final happiness of the soul. I alone am that Society wherein the human
spirit reposes in its native place; for I alone stand in the centre
whence all is seen in proportion and whence the chaotic perspective of
things falls into right order. Mankind cannot feed upon itself--for
that is death at last. I alone provide external sustenance from that
which made mankind. The soil of my country alone can fully nourish
mankind. Here, in me, alone is reality. For I alone am not man-made but
am of direct divine foundation and am by my divine Founder perpetually
maintained.”
3. Against this claim many forms of rejection are found, each with its
type of argument: as, that the claim conflicts with the ascertained
results of Physical Science: that it advances a particular affirmation
not based on the only proofs admissible by reason: that the objector
discovers in the Church not the marks of holiness which should
accompany such a claim, but rather of evil, etc.
Among the chief objections is the objection from History. It is
affirmed that the records of the past, the better they are known
and the more closely they are examined, make the more certainly for
the rejection of the Church’s claim to Divine Authority, to unique
inspiration. These records (it is affirmed) show the Church to be of
merely human origin. They yield manifold evidence that illusion, myth
and even craft have built up her structure. Her rites are of the kind
imagined by men in all ages and places wherever men have abandoned
themselves to emotional images divorced from reason. Her doctrines are
spun out of nothingness by men engaged upon mere systems invented
to explain irrational statements. Her objects of worship are but
projections of the worshipper’s mind and have no real existence.
History, it is said, can prove all this. We can trace illusion growing
from step to step: the mythical and legendary gradually accepted for
fact; the doubtful, vague, uncertain, tentative dream hardening into
fixed and absurd dogma. Supposed contemporary evidence, enlightened
History with modern apparatus, proved to be subsequent interpolations.
The writings traditionally ascribed to witnesses turn out--under the
examination of History--to be of a very different and later date.
Beyond all this and clinching the argument is the discovery through
History that men have always thus created for themselves wholly
fanciful beings whom they have worshipped always in much the same
fashions. There has been a long process of self-deception from which
humanity in its advance is gradually freeing itself, and in this
process the Catholic Church is but the last phase.
It is this objection, the argument from History, that I propose to
refute. Certain other of the main objections--the objection from
Reason, the objection from Philosophy, the objection from Physical
Science--are dealt with in other works in this series. I am dealing
with the historical objection alone. I propose to show, not that
History may convince any man of the Church’s claim, but that the
supposed argument from History against that claim has failed. I propose
to enquire upon the validity of the objection from History.
II
Premises must precede such an enquiry. I lay them down as follows:
(1) The refutation of any argument against the Faith is not a
demonstration of the truth of the Faith. It is the removal only
of an obstacle to the Faith. For the Faith is not arrived at by
demonstration, but by demonstration it is shown to be at least tenable.
The Faith is not a conclusion which all can reach by the formal action
of reason, but a revelation to be defended by reason. The Faith is not
a theory, but a thing. It is rational, but not deductively arrived at.
There is no process whereby all mankind can be convinced of it as of an
abstract proposition. But there is a process whereby all mankind can be
convinced that each particular proposition against it has failed.
This principle in what is called “Apologetics” (that is, writings in
defence of Catholic truth) is so generally neglected that it is of
the first importance to make it quite clear at the opening of any
discussion upon revealed religion.
A man who can see colours will never be able to prove colour
to a colour-blind man. He can show that the colour-blind man’s
arguments--e.g., that colours do not exist because if they did they
would affect surface--are false. If he proceeds to establish the
presence of colours positively, he must do so by analogy, by convergent
evidence, by the manifest action of others, by the proved nature of
other senses than that of sight. He can only _prove_ (in the strict
deductive sense of the word “prove”) that the sense of colour is
rational, acceptable without violence to the human mind; but that it is
present he must establish by other methods.
Nearly all our modern debates in this matter are confused by the fact
that one of the parties misconceives the nature of these debates. The
opponent of Catholicism thinks that its apologist is, in arguing,
trying to prove Catholic truth as one proves a case for a positive
verdict. He is not. He is rebutting the supposed value of opposing
evidence; he is pleading for a negative verdict; for acquittal of
the charge “irrational.” When he comes to establishing the Faith
positively, he does not do so by following one line of deductive
reason, but by a mass of converging considerations.
History cannot be said to prove the Faith, save in the very extended
use of the word “prove” to mean a general process of increasing
conviction from the examination of what is revealed of the Church’s
action on the world, of men’s attitude towards it, of the moral and
intellectual activities of acceptors and rejectors compared. But it can
be _proved_ that an increasing knowledge of History does not shake the
Church’s claim to Divine Authority: while, on the contrary, a lesser
knowledge is almost invariably more hostile to that authority than a
greater.
(2) I have used the term “reason,” and this leads me to my second
premise: The human reason is absolute in its own sphere.
That elementary truth is often denied to-day (though the minds which
deny it can only use reason to arrive at this very conclusion!), but it
is fundamental and I must postulate it as a necessary prelude to any
discussion. For to argue with men who deny the basis of all argument
is futile; it is like pleading in a court where the judge is a corpse
and the jury a set of waxworks.
A man says, “The river Ohio flows eastwards.” I show by the compass,
the map, and the sun, or in any other rational way you like that it
flows westward. If he then answer me, “Oh! that is formal logic--I have
no use for it! Westward and eastward are but apparent contradictories.
They can be resolved into a higher unity. And, after all, what is
‘flowing’? And here is a bend of the river which does flow eastward
for a mile or two. And a statement may well be true in a higher sense
than the geographical one. And anyhow, the modern mind is no longer
bound by the mediaeval fetters of dialectic”--if he replies with
this sort of rigmarole, I must leave him to it. I am writing not for
modernists--that is, not for people who think that a proposition can be
both true and untrue at the same time--but for men of sane tradition
who admit logic as a court of final appeal in things of the mind. For
we Catholics regard reason as supreme in its own sphere and will admit
nothing contrary to reason.
(3) Lastly, I must premise that we are discussing things as they are:
the real Catholic Church; and are excluding from the discussion what
is not germane to it. We are discussing the claim of the Catholic
Church to authority, the claims of its accredited organs to express
divine truth--not what some opponent may in ignorance regard as an
accredited organ of the Catholic Church, when it is nothing of the
kind, nor a supposed doctrine of the Church which the Church has never
taught. Conversely, I do not admit as rebutting evidence such phrases
as “all the best authorities” or “all the latest authorities”--they are
worthless as evidence. I examine the grounds on which the affirmations
are made, not the mere affirmation unsupported by anything but fashion.
(Thus, if an opponent advance, “Marcus, a priest, said the earth was
flat: it is proved round; therefore the Catholic Church was wrong,”
it is replied that Marcus, a priest, is not the Catholic Church.
Or if it be said, “The Catholic Church teaches that mankind is but
six thousand years old,” it is answered, “Many heretical sects have
taught this but the Catholic Church has never taught it.” Or if it be
said, “The Catholic Church affirms the witness of the fourth Gospel
but all reasoning men admit that it is spurious,” it is replied,
“All reasoning men do not admit that it is spurious: that is but the
affirmation of a fashionable school.”)
III
We must begin by establishing the main sections into which is divided
the argument from History against the claims of the Catholic Church.
But before setting out these sections in their order I must reject one
as having no relation to the discussion, though often confused with it:
I mean the so-called historical argument from material prosperity.
It is advanced that the claim of the Catholic Church to Divine
Authority is negatived by a proved historical process whereby societies
rejecting the Church’s claim are blessed with material prosperity,
while societies accepting that claim become poor.
Such an argument no more applies to societies in their relation to
the Church’s authority than it does to individuals in relation to the
authority of their own conscience or of their own reason. My conviction
that a course of action is morally right, or that a given statement is
intellectually true, is not to be tested by its effect upon my income.
In point of fact, the argument is as worthless in its presumptions as
in its reasoning. The historical affirmation is historically false. It
is not true that societies have risen in wealth through the rejection
of the Catholic Faith, or fallen in wealth through the retention of it.
The two phenomena are not correlated in History at all, and there is
as much to be set upon the one side of the account in this brief two
hundred years over which the rises and falls extend as on the other.
But even were the statement true, the application of it would be
clearly beside the mark: even had every Catholic society fallen into
penury and every anti-Catholic risen to affluence, it would be utterly
without bearing upon the truth or falsehood of the Catholic claim.
This being said, what are the respectable and historical arguments
against the Faith? What are those arguments drawn from History of which
the intelligent man must take serious notice? They would seem to fall
into two categories:
The first argument I will call the minor argument, because it appeals
only to the moral sense--not that the moral sense is less than the
intellectual, but that in weighing questions of material evidence
(which is the matter of History) a moral test takes the second place.
Thus, in a court of justice evidence to character, though of weight,
counts less in establishing a man’s claim than material evidence. Next
I find, and much more cogent, a major argument, which is directly
concerned with the intellectual facilities of man.
(I) The minor, or moral argument, as I have called it, is directed
against the character of the Church, and attempts to show from History
that her character is not consonant with her claims. It has many forms:
accusations of cruelty, of unsocial neglect in material things, etc.,
but the main headings are three:
(a) The Church has been historically confident upon and has affirmed
as truths a number of points since proved to be erroneous: a Divine
Authority would never go wrong upon any point.
(b) The Church has relied on falsehoods and propagated them _after_ she
had known them to be falsehoods, and has not abandoned them until she
was compelled to abandon them by the overwhelming weight of evidence.
No Divine Authority would act in this fashion.
(c) The Church is highly organised and has apparently always shown
organisation: such organisation has developed more and more from the
beginning, or at any rate from a very early stage indeed. The Church
is a body whose doctrines, institutions and structure have perpetually
proceeded from the simpler to the more complex and from the less to the
more defined. Nothing possessing divine inspiration would be organised,
for organisation is mechanical and is of death: inspiration, which is
of life, remains free, at large, untrammelled by rule.
(II) What I have called the major, intellectual argument, which is much
the more serious in all our debate, stands thus:
The Church is man-made, as can be seen by the appearance over and over
again in History of a doctrine or a practice unknown to an earlier
epoch, and more largely, by a comparison between all religions; for
the Church, which seemed a unique phenomenon to the lesser historical
knowledge of our fathers, is now discovered to be but one of many
similar phenomena, one of many religions, with rites and doctrines not
indeed identical (they differ widely), but all having parts in common
and all presumably of human institution. Therefore the Church must be
included in the character of all religions: it is but one of many and
man-made like the rest.
But this major, intellectual argument falls into two very distinct
branches, which I will call the Protestant and the purely Sceptical.
(a) The Protestant appeal to History takes the form of saying: “The
Christian revelation is indeed divine, but at some period (earlier
or later, according to the views of the disputant) it was corrupted
by man-made accretions and illusions. History is therefore opposed
to the Catholic Church: for History bears witness to the fact that
the Catholic Church as we know it is essentially man-made. But there
does underlie it some divine foundation, some moral revelation not
man-made.” (The limits of this acceptable minimum each individual
disputant fixes for himself.)
(b) The Sceptical appeal to History--much the most formidable to-day,
and always intellectually the most respectable--speaks in much bolder
tones, thus: “The whole of the Catholic Faith from beginning to end
is man-made. It is a mass of illusions: of projections of the human
mind thrown by the human imagination upon the void; of deceptions,
some of them conscious in some degree, many more but half-conscious;
by far the most unconscious, implanted in the mind by early training.
What the Catholic Church affirms is false from beginning to end, and
History shows that the affirmations of the Catholic Faith have been
thus man-made step by step from the very first origins we can discover.
The idea of a God is man-made; so is the sacramental idea, the idea of
Incarnation--the whole affair.”
Such, as it seems to me, are the historical arguments against the claim
of the Catholic Church to Divine Authority. Those arguments, tabulated
in the order of their importance, that is, of the power they wield
over a rational human mind fully open to evidence and to approaches of
reason, I will here set down in graphic form:
I propose therefore to deal with them in their order, beginning with
the least and going on to the greatest.
IV
(I) THE MINOR OR MORAL ARGUMENT
(a) _That the Church has been historically wrong upon a number of
facts: a Divine Authority would not go wrong in this fashion._
⎧ ⎧ (a) The Catholic Church
⎪ ⎪ has taught things later
⎪ ⎪ proved erroneous--which
⎪ ⎪ no Divine Authority would
⎪ ⎪ do.
⎪ I. The _Minor_ or Moral ⎫ ⎪
⎪ Argument from History ⎪ which ⎪ (b) The Catholic Church
⎪ against the Catholic ⎬ says that ⎨ has taught things erroneous
⎪ claim to Divine ⎪ ⎪ after she knew them to be
⎪ Authority. ⎭ ⎪ erroneous--which no Divine
⎪ ⎪ Authority would do.
History shows ⎪ ⎪
the Catholic ⎪ ⎪ (c) The Catholic Church is
claim to Divine ⎨ ⎪ highly and increasingly
Authority to be ⎪ ⎪ organised--which no Divinely
false, by: ⎪ ⎩ Authorised body would be.
⎪
⎪ ⎧ (a) (Protestant) The
⎪ ⎪ Catholic Church can be
⎪ ⎪ historically proved a mass
⎪ II. The _Major_ or ⎫ ⎪ of man-made accretions upon
⎪ Intellectual argument ⎪ which ⎪ an original basis morally
⎪ from History against ⎬ says that ⎨ true.
⎪ the Catholic claim to ⎪ ⎪
⎪ Divine Authority. ⎭ ⎪ (b) (Sceptical or Pagan)
⎪ ⎪ The Catholic Church can be
⎪ ⎪ historically proved to be
⎪ ⎪ _wholly_ man-made in _all_
⎩ ⎩ its structure.
We begin by defining what we mean by the words “the Church,” or that
body of pronouncement by the Church which we call “the Faith.”
Manifestly, a corporate authority is not responsible for pronouncements
on which it has allowed divergence: manifestly, again, such an
authority is not responsible for pronouncements on which it has
allowed change without protest. Manifestly, it is not responsible
for pronouncements made not by itself through its admitted organs of
universal affirmation, but by certain of its body acting as individuals
or even as parts.
I use the word “manifestly.” This may seem too strong a term in the
ears of those who have heard precisely these false arguments repeated
so often that the statement of their falsity sounds novel and strange.
But if we examine the propositions closely, we shall see that this word
“manifestly” exactly and inevitably applies in the three cases.
A particular body makes the awful claim to Divine Authority and
Infallibility. That claim may be false, and even ridiculous: but
“manifestly” it could not at the same time make the claim and make an
absolutely contradictory claim. For the word “body” substitute the
word “man”; let us suppose a particular man to come forward and say,
“I have Divine Authority to teach. On matters essential to ultimate
human happiness I can give replies which are infallibly true.” If such
a man were asked, “What do you think the weather will be to-morrow?”
or “What was the date of the Battle of Hastings?” and he were to
answer, “The weather may be this or that,” or “I cannot tell you when
the Battle of Hastings was fought, but I seem to remember that it was
on such and such a date,” he is not, when making such replies, acting
within the framework of his tremendous claim. If you say, “A man making
such a claim ought never to speak at all upon any subject save as an
infallible authority,” you are pre-supposing non-human conditions.
There is no sort of reason why such a man should not admit his doubts
or his ignorance in things not pertinent to his authority. There is
not even any reason why he should not say with regard to a particular
proposition, “You ask my definition in this matter: so far I have not
defined it; but I warn you that when I do define it I shall claim my
reply to be infallible.” If he so answer, then the hypotheses he may be
examining in the interval may be numerous and even contradictory one
to the other without their divergence affecting his claim.
Tested by this very simple (and I think, conclusive) parallel, the
historical argument drawn from historical error attributable to the
Church fails. _If any man can give a particular instance in which a
specific affirmation has been made by those organs of affirmation
which the Church solemnly defines as hers, and can say what error,
historically proved, has since attached to such an affirmation then he
shall be met._ But no man has brought forward such a case.
What such affirmation is to be found? The history is a long one; it
extends over nearly two thousand years. It is not difficult at all,
rather it is singularly easy and definite to say in any period, “Here
was the Church, these were its accredited organs of expression, and
this was a solemn affirmation of the Church, not of any individual or
of any part.” For instance, you can read the acts of the first Council
of Ephesus; it was œcumenical; it acted overtly under Papal authority.
Can you give a point therein defined which has been proved since to be
historically erroneous? or in the Council of Trent? or of the Fourth
Lateran? or of the Vatican? or of Nicæa? In which of them have you an
affirmation which History has disproved? There is none. The more you
contemplate that extraordinary historical phenomenon the more you will
be astonished by it. But I do not advance it as a proof of the Church’s
divine claim. I am here only concerned with the negative argument.
There has not been in point of fact any official affirmation proceeding
from the accredited organs of the Catholic Church--not one--from the
beginning to the present day, which has received historical disproof.
Here it may be objected that such affirmations, solemnly pronounced
as the final decision of the Church, concern matters which are not of
their nature susceptible of historical disproof; they concern such
matters as the immortality of the soul, the personality of the Godhead,
its triune quality, the Incarnation, etc. In other words, since the
Church has not touched on historical matters but only on metaphysical,
she has preserved herself from attack upon those lines.
In point of fact, the argument is not strictly conclusive, for there
are exceptional points--for instance, the Resurrection--in which the
Church might very well have been challenged by clear, overwhelming,
multiple, historical proof--and it has not been so challenged. But
take the contention for what it is (and in the main it is true) that
the Church, not having dealt with History but with transcendental
truth, has thus escaped historical error. It at least disposes of the
_historical_ argument against the Faith in that particular. We must
under this particular head--a minor one I admit--accept the fact that
the Faith has not proposed through its authoritative organs in any of
its definitions of dogma something which _History_ has disproved.
But what of divergence, and what of change?
As to divergence, the answer to me seems simple and brief. Where
divergence is admitted, and so long as it is admitted, infallible
pronouncement is neither claimed nor can be at work. The divergence
is openly between the judgments or affirmations of individuals or
of sections. If the Church, having definitely pronounced by the
voice of her head and of any of the great councils with which he
has been in communion and which have acted with his authority--the
Council of Nicæa, for instance--something which in a later age the
same authoritative organs had to deny in the face of new historical
evidence, then there would be a fundamental divergence and an
historical argument against the claim to Divine Authority. I repeat, as
I shall continue to repeat throughout this brief essay, the essential
point that the argument is negative. I am not affirming here, and for
the moment, that such consistency is proof of the divinity of the
claim--though it is certainly very remarkable; I am only pointing out
that the consistency _is_ present throughout History. You may say, if
you will, that it is present because even a human corporation claiming
infallibility would take great care never to contradict itself. Granted
(though I think it would have its work cut out)! But at least it must
be admitted that the consistency is there, and that, therefore, an
historical argument drawn from inconsistency does not lie.
Now what of the more formidable argument drawn from change? It is not
to be doubted as an historical truth that in one era the general mood
of Christians with regard to a particular point lay in one direction,
in another era, in another. It is probable, for instance, that the
early Church expected the Second Advent in a more or less brief period.
It is certain that many holy men, perhaps repeating the mood of their
time, thought, in an earlier age, of the state of the dead as one of
sleep awaiting the Resurrection, with no definition of the Particular
Judgment, and so forth. In one period one devotion prevails; in
another, another. One great doctrine is emphasised in one era; another
in a later era.
Here, then, is change.
To which I answer that the change is never--has never been in any
particular instance which any historian can find and point out--a
change of doctrine. There has never been a definition, never a
pronouncement, by any organ of the Church, saying “This or that is so,”
of which such changes of mood have later compelled a retraction.
Had we, for instance, in the early documents of the Church, a solemn,
definite Apostolic statement that Our Lord would come back to earth in
glory before the destruction of Jerusalem: had we any trace or echo of
a protest raised by some who, disappointed in the delay of their hopes,
laid their disappointment to the Apostles: had we any echo of voices in
the Apostolic or sub-Apostolic period saying, “Since He has not come
again we are deceived by the Church”--then the particular case I have
mentioned (and it is only one out of a great number) would be arguable.
But we have none such.
Had we a solemn pronouncement registered, as of the Faith, that the
dead lay unliving and out of communion with us or with life as a whole
from the moment of their passing to the Resurrection of the Flesh, then
the statement that this was a contradiction with later defined doctrine
on the Particular Judgment and with our prayers for the dead, would be
arguable. But there has been no such pronouncement.
In other words, change, in the sense of change of vague mood, has no
more historical weight in this department than the admitted divergence
between individuals or sections upon matters undefined.
Before authority has spoken, authority has not committed itself.
When authority has spoken, contradiction must be established between
itself and itself: or there is no historical argument against the
claim of authority. You may say that there is no such argument only
because authority is careful not to contradict itself. Well and good;
but it remains true that the contradiction has not taken place, and
that therefore the historical argument based upon it fails. When or
if it shall apparently take place, there will be time to meet such
an argument in its apparent strength. But so far--and the period,
remember, is one far longer than that attached to any other defined
human institution--the argument does not apply.
Now, though it is not logically connected with the strict process of
reason I am here developing, may I not ask the reader rhetorically once
more whether that is not in his eyes a very singular phenomenon?
Here is an organised corporation, a strict society, which has
admittedly existed continuously for this prodigious length of time,
through extreme vicissitudes of knowledge and of ignorance, through
the most violent revolutions of human mood: a society which sprang
up in the brilliant light of Pagan antiquity and of the half-divine
Greek power of thought, and in the open majesty of the Empire, which
persisted through the darkest periods of our material ignorance, which
lived on through phases of gross popular credulity and equally gross
alternate phases of popular scepticism; which has been bathed in the
enthusiasm of the twelfth century, has gloried in the moral splendours
of the thirteenth, has struggled through the filth of our modern time;
has suffered the splendid temptations of the Renaissance; has next
found itself struggling with the base madnesses of Puritan assaults.
Through such endless variety of circumstance it has remained consistent
throughout that long, long term of centuries; centuries filled with
every conceivable reaction of the human mind, with gusts of enthusiasm
blowing from every point, each in exact contradiction to some other
earlier one. Through all these the institution which is historically
the oldest and the most permanent of political human things cannot be
discovered affected to change in any of its final pronouncements by
these human changes. It cannot be discovered in a contradiction.
That such a phenomenon--wholly unique in the story of mankind--should
be of human origin is logically possible. It involves no contradiction
in terms. An unbroken tradition of rigid caution, coupled with
an unceasing consultation of record, might conceivably produce
such consistency by human agency alone and as the result of human
calculation. But the least we can say is that such an effect would be
different from anything we know of men and of their actions.
(b) _That the Church has maintained error after knowing it to be error:
that it has lied._
The second charge under this head is that the Church has not only made,
in good faith, errors which she has had to retract, but has actually
relied on falsehood when she knew it to be falsehood and particularly
in the case of errors originally committed in good faith, but continued
with the deliberate intention to deceive. No Divine Authority would do
that.
Now the value of such assertions--and they are frequently made--may be
tested _a fortiori_, by taking the two principal classical examples
upon which our opponents especially rely. It would be impossible to go
over the whole category of these assertions, for they touch innumerable
points. But since they all have in common one similar misunderstanding,
it will suffice to examine two with perhaps a brief allusion to another.
These two chief examples I take to be the Donation of Constantine and
the eternal Galileo case.
Though in each case the wrongful assertion against the Faith is based
on the same fundamental misunderstanding, yet each exemplifies one of
the two separate chief types of that misunderstanding. The accusation
in connection with the Donation of Constantine exemplifies the supposed
deliberate use of forgery by the Church: the Galileo case exemplifies
her supposed tenacity in demonstrated error--an authority claiming
infallibility and reluctant to admit that it has been clearly proved
fallible.
Let us see how these two test cases come out of a close examination.
It is asserted in the case of the Donation of Constantine that this
document was a forgery: that on that forgery was based a particular
doctrine, to wit, the supremacy of the see of Peter: that when it was
proved a falsehood the Church continued to defend it, and that, since
her spokesmen were compelled at last to abandon it, with it there fell
the necessary prop of the Papal contention.
The Donation of Constantine is a document purporting to be a grant
by the Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester, his contemporary, of
civil jurisdiction over the town of Rome; of temporal sovereignty over
certain adjacent districts in Central Italy; of sundry ritual dignities
in dress and public office; of the Lateran Palace for a residence
in perpetuity; and with all this the recognition of the spiritual
jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome over the universal Church.
It first appeared about the time when the French Monarchy was
supporting the Pope against his enemies and particularly against
Byzantium, and when that monarchy was preparing the way for being
declared the Empire of the West. It contains episodes which in a
critical age would clearly stamp it as unauthentic. There is a
ridiculous story of a dragon, for instance, which lived in a cave
under the Capitol. The Emperor Constantine is represented as receiving
baptism from the hands of St. Sylvester before he moved his capital to
Byzantium; whereas we now know that he did not receive baptism till
long after, and then not from the Pope, but from an Eastern Bishop.
It represents the Emperor as being cured by baptism of leprosy--a
disease which he certainly never had--and as making the donation out of
gratitude.
The whole thing is manifestly mythical and legendary. But how does that
false character affect the claim of the Church to infallibility in
doctrine?
To answer that question we must begin by granting all those points,
both doubtful and actually false, which our opponents advance as
historical fact; for we shall see that even with the fullest admission
of their imaginary facts, that case has not a leg to stand upon.
They tell us that the document was a forgery (that is, a falsehood)
produced with deliberate intent to support a novel claim upon the
part of the Papacy. It is in fact nothing of the sort. It is a
conglomeration of legend, arisen for the most part in Syria, the growth
of which can be traced through the centuries. The weight of evidence
would show that it was accepted as true, not first in Rome, but in
Northern France--the policy of whose monarch it exactly suited. It
was first quoted, not in Rome, but in Rheims. It was not brought in
to support the Papal claims even in temporal sovereignty, let alone
in spiritual jurisdiction, till long after even the temporal claims
had been universally admitted throughout the West, and the spiritual
jurisdiction, of course, for centuries. Though not authentic, it does
contain an important substratum of truth. It is pretty evident that
the Pope obtained increased jurisdiction in Rome after the transfer
of Imperial authority to the East. It is virtually certain that the
Lateran Palace became his official residence about the same time, and
though we have not sufficient record of the steps whereby the Papal
Government gradually came to administrate the Roman district in the
place of the Byzantine Government, which had less and less real power
there (especially after the Iconoclastic quarrel), yet we do know that
such jurisdiction was exercised long before we find any mention of the
Donation.
But, I repeat, for the purpose of my argument it is better to grant to
our opponents not only what is doubtful, but what is certainly false
in their supposed facts. Granted that the Donation was a forgery, that
it had for its evil purpose the artificial support of novel temporal
powers in the see of Rome, and even of confirming the ancient and
universally admitted spiritual supremacy: what then? How would such
historical facts, if they were true (which they are not), militate
against Catholic doctrine? Catholic doctrine in the matter may be very
simply stated. You will find it expressed everywhere by all competent
authorities over a prodigious lapse of time in words almost identical;
for it is as clear as it is brief. That doctrine is as follows:
Our Lord constituted the Apostolic College. Of that College he gave
Peter the Primacy. This Primacy by divine constitution successively
attached to the sees which Peter founded, first at Jerusalem, then at
Antioch, finally at Rome. Its power lies not in the fact that Rome was
the capital of the ancient world, but in the fact that St. Peter chose
it for his final see. This Primacy of the see of Rome is superior to,
and more universal than, its patriarchate of the West.
Now against that doctrine historical argument must show that Primacy
was not recognised until the Donation, if the Donation be the argument
in force.
There are many other historical arguments, of course, brought to bear
against the original Primacy of Rome; but I am examining the very
strong example of the Donation as a test case. Take any one of the
innumerable textbooks in which the fixed and accredited doctrine is
laid down, and examine the chain of evidence, not indeed as to the
divine institution of the Papacy (for that is a matter of faith, not
of History), but as to the original Primacy of Rome, as admitted by
Christians, which is a matter of History, not of faith.
The chain reaches down to the very beginnings of our society. One of
our most formidable opponents[1] puts what he calls the “first step in
Papal aggression” as early as St. Clement--that is, within a lifetime
of the Crucifixion. Others may propose later dates; but no one with a
pretence to elementary historical knowledge would postpone it to the
ninth century, when the Donation of Constantine (in its present form)
appeared. All Church history is full of Roman Primacy from the moment
when Church history becomes open to detailed examination. It is implied
in the procedure of the earliest councils; it is openly alluded to in
act after act, as the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries proceed. If you
would call it a corruption, you must put the origin of that corruption
very early; indeed, you will be compelled to put it within the lifetime
of those who had talked familiarly with the Apostles and knew their
mind and all the tradition of the very beginnings of the Church. The
Donation of Constantine was no more the foundation of this Primacy of
Rome than the Revolution of 1688 was the foundation of the House of
Lords in England, or than Lincoln’s Presidential pronouncements during
the Civil War were the foundation of the Presidency of the United
States.
But may it not be said that those who spoke for the Church as
historians claimed the Donation to be authentic long after it had been
questioned? Undoubtedly they did. And it would have been astonishing,
or rather incredible, if they had not, for everybody then thought
the Donation genuine. _But no doctrine was based on it._ In the same
way everybody, Catholic and non-Catholic, accepts the ecclesiastical
history of the Venerable Bede as genuine, and we use it in support of
the connection between the English Church and Rome. But if it were
proved a forgery to-morrow, the thesis of union between the English
Church and Rome would remain. But they did not claim it after it
had been definitely proved to be legendary; and the very fact that
they officially admitted their error and confirmed their admission
in final fashion is an excellent example of the difference between
fallibility as expressed in doctrinal falsehood and the misapprehension
of historical fact. It is an excellent example of a universal truth
present throughout all the history of the Church, that the Church
brings reason to bear upon every problem, and regards reason in its own
sphere as absolute.
The first criticisms of the Donation are of the fifteenth century,
coming from Peacock, Bishop of Chichester, and Valla in Italy. They
make no pretence to being heretical; they have no connection with any
effort to destroy the unity of the Church; they are not particularly
convincing--especially the latter.[2] What exploded the Donation of
Constantine as an historical document was a much longer process of
examination and criticism, which does not reach its final conclusions
till the seventeenth century. During that process you will find many
who, after the breakdown of unity in the sixteenth century, were
frankly enemies of the Church from without, not historical critics
from within, using the unauthenticity of the Donation as a weapon for
attacking the whole Catholic scheme; but I doubt if you will find one
case of a believer who regarded the gradual establishment of the truth
as in any way shaking the doctrine of Papal supremacy. Yet you have
plenty of critics within the Catholic Church examining the problem in
full liberty, and permitted to come to a right decision upon it. You
have to-day, and you will have throughout the centuries to come, an
indefinitely large body of men with the fullest historical confidence,
great scholars and experts in this particular point, who are fully
convinced of the legendary character of the Donation, and yet to whose
minds it is inconceivable (as I confess it is to mine) that anyone
should think the establishment of that historical detail a cause for
doubt in the plain and most ancient doctrine of Roman supremacy with
which it was for some six centuries out of twenty adventitiously
connected.
Now for the Galileo case. It is so continually quoted, it is so much
the accepted type of such things, that I might be tempted to go into it
at greater length; on the contrary, I shall deal with it more briefly,
because the points at issue are as restricted as they are evident, and
the complete misunderstanding upon which the accusation is based may be
exposed by the most elementary statement of it.
The accusation runs thus: “Galileo, having discovered by indubitable
physical proof the motion of the earth, was condemned by the Catholic
Church for stating the same, and her condemnation remained in force
until the nineteenth century, when she was compelled to allow the
matter to lapse.”
That assertion, the commonest made in all this department of
historical attack upon the Faith, contains two elementary and decisive
historical errors. First, the error that Galileo was condemned for
teaching a then novel particular doctrine which he proved true;
secondly, the error that Galileo was condemned by authority of the
Catholic Church upon a point of doctrine: that is, that the Catholic
Church affirmed in the seventeenth century by her Infallible Authority
as a point in doctrine that the earth did not move.
In point of fact, Galileo’s condemnation did not turn upon his teaching
a demonstrated truth, for it was not yet demonstrated. It did not
turn upon a novel idea in Astronomy, but upon an hypothesis which was
already hoary before Galileo was born; and the condemnation was not
originated against the idea as an hypothesis, but against the teaching
of it as an established fact. So much for point _one_.
Next, as to point _two_, the condemnation did not proceed from the
Catholic Church. It proceeded from a particular disciplinary organ
of the Catholic Church, with no authority whatsoever for finally
establishing a point in doctrine. To confuse it with Catholic
definition of doctrine would be like confusing the definition of a
New York court of justice with an amendment to the Constitution. The
Pope himself, as it happened, forbade what would have been a grave
error--though not one binding the Church--I mean, a full definition
of heresy by the inquisitors upon the matter. But all that is neither
here nor there. There was no definition binding upon Christians, and
has been none, nor ever will be in such a purely mechanical affair.
What there _was_ was disciplinary action against a man who had done
everything he could to provoke the constituted authorities of religion
by querulous and bitter insult (he was a difficult character), a
man who was unable to support his own statements in court (nothing
he brought forward at his trial came near to being conclusive on
the motion of the earth, and much that he brought forward was
fantastic),[3] and the action came at the end of an upheaval in which,
by exactly this kind of irrational, angry attitude in graver matters,
the unity of Christendom had been destroyed. No wonder the authorities
had grown touchy. Moreover, as anyone may see who reads the trial (and
as Huxley saw), Galileo could not prove his case. It was still only an
hypothesis.
The theory that the earth was not fixed, but turning on its axis and
moving round the sun, had not only been familiar (as I have said)
to educated[4] Europe from long before Galileo was born, but had
been taught with clerical approval _as an hypothesis_ in Catholic
universities; it was taught again in such universities not long after
the Galileo trial as evidence accumulated, and became a commonplace of
all teaching in Catholic schools and colleges long before the expunging
of the Galilean treatise from the Index--always, and necessarily, a
lengthy process.
The whole attack on the Church in connection with Galileo turns upon
these two misunderstandings, of which the first is unessential, but
the second capital: First, that a proved scientific fact was at issue;
secondly, that this proved scientific fact was denied, because it was
novel, and was denied by that authority which alone throughout the
centuries had been held competent to establish points of doctrine,
the Papacy and the councils of the Church over which it spiritually
presides. The first is wrong and the second is wrong. The Copernican
theory was not novel in Galileo’s time; it was still only a theory.
His condemnation accuses him of returning to the _oldest_ conception
(Pythagorean). He was not condemned by the Church, and the instance of
his condemnation, such as it was, by the appointed committee, was his
persistence in teaching as a proved fact what was still only hypothesis.
Before leaving this overemphasised historical detail, I would like
to make clear to the modern reader what our modern confused habit of
mind often fails to grasp: the difference between teaching a thing
as demonstrated fact and teaching it as hypothesis, coupled with the
difference between teaching demonstrated fact and teaching metaphysical
or doctrinal conclusions supposedly, but erroneously, dependent upon
that fact.
For that purpose I will choose a debate familiar to all our
contemporaries: the discussion on the origins of the human body.
In the last eighty years a very large and increasing body of evidence
has been accumulated which points to the probability of the human
body’s having come out of some original sub-human type, a sort of
cousin to (though not descended from) the greater anthropoids of our
own day.
It may be so. There is nothing in such an hypothesis against any
Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, it is not proved. Still less
is it proved that the process was of an inevitable sort unconnected
with divine Creative Will. Least of all is it proved--and indeed, it
cannot be proved, for the thing is manifestly contradictory to our
senses--that man as we know him is not a fixed type, utterly different
in quality from the beasts.
Now this hypothesis is almost universally stated to-day as a
demonstrated fact--which as yet it most certainly is not; indeed, the
guesses at the process continue to change year by year, as anyone can
see for himself by looking up the common manuals of forty, thirty,
twenty and ten years ago.
Further, there is quite commonly tacked on to it a second statement,
that the so-called demonstrated fact disproves a cardinal Catholic
doctrine, to wit, the Fall of Man.
Now then, supposing a professor avowedly subject to the Catholic
discipline, professing in a Catholic society, were to teach (1) that
the descent of the human body was what the last of our many successive
guesses presumes it to be, and were to teach that as now certain and
indubitable fact, comparable to the fact of the rotundity of the earth;
(2) that this origin of the human body destroyed the Catholic doctrine
of Original Sin. That professor would be condemned exactly as Galileo
was condemned. He would be condemned not because the Church desired
to assert that the human body was _not_ of such hypothetical origin,
but because he had taught as certain what was uncertain; and he would
be condemned upon the infinitely more important second point (which
plain reason is sufficient to establish) that even if the hypothesis
were already established by indubitable proof, it could not affect in
any way the dogma of the Fall of Man: they are on different planes and
concerned with totally different subjects.
The doctrine of the Fall of Man is a transcendental doctrine.
It affirms that man in his completed nature was intended for a
supernatural state, that his free-will rebelled against the will of God
and that on this account his nature is _fallen_ from a supernatural
to a natural condition. To such a doctrine the discovery--if ever
it should be made--as to _how_ the body came to be is utterly
indifferent. If I say, “Young Smith was right enough till he took to
drinking,” it is no answer to tell me that Young Smith was once a baby
who could not take to any evil, that he gradually grew up, and the
whole process was one of increase and maturing, a “progress,” and that
_therefore_ Young Smith _can’t_ have taken to drink. That “can’t” is
nonsensical. The process of becoming full grown is no bar to a moral
fall.
So much for the second of the moral arguments drawn from History. Let
me turn to the third: That the Church cannot be divine because it is
highly organised, with defined dogmas, a hierarchy, a whole machinery
of rites and laws, whereas a divinely inspired thing would remain free
and simple.
(c) _That the Church is organised, therefore not of divine character._
This last or third point made against the Church is one which haunts
the greater part of modern minds with singular persistence. It is odd
that it should do so; because, of all historical objections made to the
Church, this is the least reasonable. But it is characteristic of the
day in which we live that emotion should take the place of reason and
a certain emotional bias towards an indefinite enthusiasm (as in music)
is a modern disease.
The objection is that the Church is organised, whereas whatever is
of divine authority on earth must (so it is presumed) be of a vague,
inspirational sort without organisation or framework--loose, attaching
to the heart and imagination rather than to the intelligence. Such is
the premise--and it is an enormity.
For let it be supposed that there be upon earth one particular defined
Divine Authority--such is the Church’s claim--how would it necessarily
act and be? What would of necessity be its structure?
The reply is no _positive_ argument in favour of that claim, but it
is a conclusive _negative_ argument in proof of the contention that
_if_ such a claim be true, then organisation and, as time proceeded,
more and more minute and detailed organisation, would be an absolutely
inevitable condition of action by such an authority.
For consider carefully what the implications of such an authority are?
Here we are on earth, possessed of certain general instincts of right
and wrong--instincts commonly proceeding to very warped effects in
action. We are surrounded by an infinity of varying circumstances; our
lives are brief; our power of intercommunication between individual
minds is limited. Granted that there be some _Corpus_--some definable
get-at-able person, place, or thing--from which absolute conclusions
may be accepted; then that thing must be in the form of a society
or otherwise it could not be continuous; it could not survive among
ephemeral beings; it must have rules, or it could not bind beings
imperfectly communicating; it must have habits, for it must be a living
organism. Societies cannot live without differentiation of function
and definition thereof; separation of one activity from another;
subordination in command; laws more and more defined; known symbols;
ritual. If anything were designed to act as an institution with divine
authority among men--there might be no such design nor any such
institution--but, I say, _supposing_ there be such, then whatever was
to act in this fashion must be a society, for it must be continuous;
must be corporate, in order to overcome the imperfect connection
between individual minds; must tend to more and more complete
definition in its character and being as time proceeds: for otherwise
it would not have a human framework consonant to the human world for
which it would be designed.
Leave men in doubt as to who is and who is not a member of such
a society; let it be uncertain by what tests membership may be
recognised, acquired or lost, and the whole character and personality
of the divinely appointed Thing disappears: with personality disappears
the faculty of diction, of affirmation, for which (by definition) it
was conceived. And, indeed, so you find the Church from its origins:
sacraments at once appearing, communion and excommunion, doctrine more
and more defined as the generations pass and doubts or controversies
arise, ritual embryonically present at its very outset and rapidly
stabilised: from the beginning you have it certainly hierarchic,
disciplined, bound in a strict framework: and still more certainly
(if that be possible) it shows limitation or outline, a frontier, a
boundary--whereby any man may test who is within and who is without the
Church.
And if this be true of structure, it is still more obviously true
of doctrine. Granted that there be such a society with a claim to
infallible pronouncement upon the things essential to the satisfaction
of the human soul, how can it proceed save by exact definition of its
pronouncements?
Begin with the vague and general, though perhaps intense, conviction
that the soul survives death. Regard it not as a product of affection
or of habit. Accept the mere intuition. What then? Does it survive as
a person or not? The thing is debatable. If it does not survive as a
person, what connection is there between its survival and good or evil
conduct in this life? If it does survive as a person, how can such
survival hold of our personality, which, being human, is manifestly of
this changeable and material world?
If it be said that no answer can be given to these questions, then we
deny the existence of such an authority as I here presume. I do not say
that these questions and the replies to them are a proof of the truth
of such authority. I say that on the hypothesis that such an authority
is to be found on earth, then necessarily it must of its very nature
_define_ doctrine upon such matters as these, pronouncement upon which
is its whole reason for being.
As each controversy of importance arises some new definition will
necessarily be demanded of the authority. Therefore, though doctrine
itself does not grow--for it concerns truths outside time--definition
of doctrine will grow. The time in which we live has so largely lost
the habit of clear thought that I must here admit a digression in order
to emphasise and put in the sharpest light the difference between the
growth of _doctrine_ and the growth of _definition_.
Whenever a new definition is given by the Church--e.g., the definition
of Infallibility in 1870, the definition of Transubstantiation in
1215--confused thinkers, or men who have not read the proceedings,
will assert that a new doctrine has been invented. A little attention
to what passes at the time of such definitions should be enough to set
them right. The whole debate turns upon the proof that the doctrine was
present from the beginning and that innovation lies in the denial of
it. The definition is a new thing to meet a new attack upon an ancient
truth. The truth is aboriginal. Definition no more makes new doctrine
than does a new treatise on geometry make new mathematical truth. Such
matters are expounded and elucidated in increasing volume; they are not
invented. So it is with the Faith.
From this, turn to another consequence of this objection to
_organisation_ in the Church: the objection that its machinery and
instruments of action are continually unworthy, base, insufficient,
affected by worldly motives, and that therefore the claim of the Church
to be divine fails.
That the Church being organised and being human will suffer from
defects inherent to all organisation and to all humanity is equally
certain. There will be bad administrators, wicked men in holy charges,
abuse of powers. But that is no answer to the claim of the Church. For
consider--what is the alternative?
Supposing there be upon earth a definite body of some
kind--corporation, society, officer, what you will: a definable
existent _Thing_ whereto men may turn for ultimate and certain
pronouncements upon the chief matters of their concern (that is, the
nature of man and his destiny). If that Thing, whatever form it were
to be given, were _not_ organised, then must affirmation clash with
affirmation and whatever were common to all would divide into a mere
vague mood.
Now such a mood does not fulfill the requirements of the _Thing_ in
question. You may indeed say (the vast majority of English-speaking
people are saying it to-day) that true religion is of this vague kind;
an instinctive aspiration to unity with the Divine Will; most would
even put it lower still and say “to unity with nature or the universe.”
They therefore feel that all attempts to systematise this aspiration,
to regulate the enthusiasm, to define particular dates and cases, to
set up the machinery of a society with laws, officials and decision,
is a warping of the only true living and direct religious impulse: and
certainly if that original and vague religious impulse in man be the
only true religion and if its value be in proportion to its vagueness,
then organisation is a warping and a lessening of it.
But remember that in making this statement you are denying at the
outset the possibility of an authority and therefore contradicting the
very affirmation you make of some certain common truth in religion. For
any authority beyond mere individual emotion (which changes in each
individual and varies indefinitely among many individuals) must have a
power of definition, must act with a function, and therefore must be
organised in some degree.
The choice is unavoidable between organisation in that which can speak
with authority and the rejection of all claim to authority--which
is the rejection of all common or general certitude on matters not
immediately and universally apparent. In plain words, either you must
admit organisation in your religion or say that no religion is true.
I would like to make this argument quite clear, because the great
majority of our contemporaries, at least in the English-speaking world,
fail to make acquaintance with it. I do not say organisation proves
the truth of the contention that the Church in particular is divine.
I say that _if_ there be such a thing as a divine Church on earth,
that Church will be increasingly organised as the ages proceed, will
perpetually define and re-define, will establish strict tests and will
maintain its vitality by excluding what is not consonant to its nature;
it will operate through differentiation of function as does every other
living thing. It will have a multitudinous co-ordination of detail in
proportion to the exaltation of its status, for only thus can it be
alive with the supremely conscious life of the highest organisms.
I say again, this is not an argument to the effect that organisation is
a witness to divinity in the Church. It is an argument to the effect
that _if_ divinity speaks through any society, _then_ the oracle of
truth will present all the phenomena of organisation; and so far from
these phenomena clashing with the religious instinct, they alone can
give that instinct its full working value.
In other words, you admit or you deny a Church. If you deny it, there
is no certain source of truth present amid mankind; for the religious
emotion of each man changes perpetually, and the emotions of each among
so many millions differ from those of his neighbour. But if there be
a Church, then organisation must necessarily be the very test of its
reality, as it is the test of all the higher forms of life we know.
When, therefore, we Catholics meet, as we do daily and in a thousand
forms, such objections as: “If this dogma were true, it would be
universally apparent”; “If that doctrine were part of the universal
truth, it would not be arrived at by special conclaves of particular
men fulfilling highly defined functions and even dressed in a peculiar
manner of their own”; “This elaborate definition of the Real Presence
jars with true devotion to the Eucharist, which is a thing of the heart
and a mystery beyond analysis,” and so forth, in a myriad different
forms of objection, we reply: “If, of mysteries such as the Eucharist
or the continued life of man after death, or of the more familiar
mysteries of personality, of time, of eternity, we have no definitions,
then falsehood can be present and received as truth. There is indeed no
need to define, so long as all are implicitly agreed; but the moment
one says (of the Eucharist, for instance), ‘There is a Presence here
but it is spiritual only; the bread remains,’ then must, of necessity,
the claimer to infallible truth (unless she is to nullify her own
claim) lay down whether that proposition be true or not: whether the
bread remains, or does not remain, after consecration. Otherwise
two members of a society existing to teach true doctrine will, on a
fundamental and essential doctrine, be holding two contrary views, one
of which at least must be false.”
It would be easy to point to any number of other cases of more interest
to the average modern man than the case of the Eucharist, in which he
has lost all communion; for instance, to the mystery of immortality,
and the discipline rather than the doctrine of our attitude towards
the dead. Two members of this society claiming infallibility are
faced with the practice of necromancy, the calling up of the dead (a
favourite pastime of our day among the wealthy). The one feels in the
strongest fashion that in this exercise he is upon the confines of
positive evil. He smells the Pit. The other is convinced that it is
indeed the blessed dead who visit him and with whom he is in communion.
Which is right? The infallible authority cannot abdicate in such a
crux without denying its own claim. There is no reconciliation of such
a contradiction: it is Hell or Heaven. It must define and it does
define; and we know on which side its definition lies. Necromancy--or
Spiritualism as its modern name goes--is of Hell.
In general, then, the moral arguments against the Church as drawn from
History--that is, from the record of its action--fail from one of two
causes: either they misconceive the nature of the Church (_what_ it is
that speaks with Infallible Authority; _on what_ it has spoken with
Infallible Authority), or they are confused as to the implications of
religion, not perceiving that, if you are to admit any criterion of
truth other than that of common experience, you must admit external
authority; and that, once you admit an external authority in the final
and all important questions, you admit a Church.
Such considerations do not establish the claim of the Catholic Church,
but they destroy certain particular objections to that claim, drawn
from the supposed clash between the moral character of the Church’s
claim and the historical record of the Church making such a claim.
From these I turn to what I have called the major objection of modern
times: the intellectual objection; the objection that History shows the
structure of the Catholic Church to have proceeded from man.
II. THE MAJOR OR INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT
The last and much the most important division of the arguments based
upon History against the Catholic claim is, in general, the argument
that the Church cannot be the divine thing it claims to be because it
is in its essence demonstrably man-made: it is in its essence, and can
be proved by History to be, of human institution, betraying all those
characteristic illusions which man conjures up and imposes upon himself
in all his efforts to reach out to the unknowable and unattainable of
his desire.
This--by far the most serious historical form of attack upon the
Faith--falls into two distinct branches, which I will call for the sake
of brevity (without pretence to the full accuracy of the terms and
certainly with no intention of using them abusively) the _Protestant_
and the _Pagan_. I mean by the _Protestant_ argument that argument
against the Faith drawn from History which maintains that the Church
has suffered fundamental corruption and has lost some presupposed
original character through the increasing delusions of the human mind.
I call the _Pagan_ or purely Sceptical argument that which denies, on
the testimony of History, that there ever has been a divine Church at
all, or any clear revelation of divine things to men at any time or in
however simple a form, and proposes to prove that all the doctrine of
the Church is of man’s own making.
These two I will take successively, maintaining the order I have
throughout, to wit, attending to the least important before approaching
the more important.
I take it that in the times in which we live the Protestant objection,
even in its vaguest form, is the less formidable. I shall take it
first. I shall conclude with what is, in my own judgment, far the most
formidable attack at this moment, and likely to become still more
formidable in the near future, the Pagan or purely Sceptical attack:
the argument from History that _all_ religion is man-made, that the
Catholic Church must be included in the category of man-made things,
and that therefore the Catholic Church has no claim to Divine Authority.
(a) _The Protestant argument from History._
Throughout the story of the Catholic Church, i.e. during all the last
nineteen hundred years,[5] there have continued recurrent protests
against this or that doctrine: recurrent affirmations that some other
doctrine, contrary to the authoritative definition, is true, and that
the authoritative definition is itself false. From these denials and
affirmations have proceeded what are called, in Catholic terminology,
the various heresies.
But towards the end of the Middle Ages these protests gathered together
in a new form, which was essentially an appeal to History, and to
their general character was applied the term “Protestant.” We need not
quarrel over the term or its derivation. It has been, by universal
agreement, applied during the last four hundred years.
The Protestant challenge to the Catholic Faith is essentially a
challenge based upon History. It proposes to show by historical
evidence that whereas there was some original body of true revelation,
this has been distorted, corrupted and overlaid, and that the Catholic
Church with its perpetual accretions of doctrine, ritual and office is
more and more divergent from, or even contrary to, the divine original
thus presupposed.
The Protestant argument still exists even when it is put in its most
vague and tenuous modern form. Even those who say, as do so many to-day
(believing themselves to be pure sceptics), “I accept the mission of
Jesus Christ as salutary to mankind and as containing eternal verities,
which it is essential that man for his good should know; but I reject
all supernatural statements in connection with this mission,” are still
essentially Protestants.[6] They presuppose some original nucleus,
however restricted on content and in time, which they postulate as good
and true.
The most extreme case--and to-day the most common one--the case of the
man who says he takes the four canonical Gospels, and these alone;
that he rejects Pauline theology as a corruption, a man-made thing
proceeding from the man Paul; that he rejects in the Gospels themselves
every element which affirms or implies the miraculous powers of Jesus
Christ, His claim to divinity, His Resurrection and the rest, is still
a Protestant case. He affirms that the Sermon on the Mount (to which
he is oddly attached) and sundry general propositions upon humility,
charity and other Catholic virtues, are good: and in saying that they
are good he is saying that they are true. His quarrel is not with the
whole Catholic scheme, but with everything in the Catholic scheme
beyond what he has chosen for himself out of the mass of Catholic
teaching.[7]
Now let us put down at the beginning of the debate one common element
upon which all should be agreed: there _has_ been development; and in
so far as development involves change, there has been in that sense,
and in that alone, change. What is more, the development continues, and
in so far as the word “change” may be applied to development, change
continues.[8]
The definitions of the Council of Trent are immensely more elaborate
than the Apostles’ Creed; the Apostles’ Creed (probably dating from the
earliest origins of the Church though it does, and at the latest, in
its essentials, a second-century Roman form) has more exact definition
in it than the Gospel; the ritual of the Mass is not identical in every
place; it is not identical through time. The Liturgy at once expanded
and crystallised as the generations proceeded. Even within the brief
space of a few centuries it is possible to point to portions of the
Roman Mass (to take but one form) which began as voluntary or optional
prayers and which became incorporated in the regular structure of
the Sacrifice. One might even say that certain slight additions of
quite recent origin may, in the near future, follow the same course.
The bishop, the priest and the deacon of the original Church formed
a far simpler body than does the vast organisation of the Hierarchy
to-day, and new special worships of this saint or that, new shrines,
and all the rest continually arise. The argument in no way turns upon
either side (for men of intelligence or information) on so obvious and
elementary a truth as that such development exists. It is common ground
upon which both must proceed. Where they differ is upon the point
whether or no such development has introduced a fundamental change of
character into the Catholic Church with the passage of the centuries.
A parallel will explain what I mean. Two men observe a tree. One says,
“It is an oak, in full vigour”; the other says, “No, it was of oaken
origin, but there has been grafted upon it another growth and the whole
is thus not only warped and transformed, but in my eyes diseased. It is
not an oak.”
The first man, who says, “It is a living oak consonant in all its
parts,” does not deny that the acorn is different from the mature tree:
the young sapling different in form from either the original acorn or
the tree as it now appears. He does not deny that in a hundred years
the form of the tree will seem to have changed still more; that in the
fifty years past it has changed. What he denies is that there has been
any change in that by which an oak is an oak. It is essentially the
thing which it has always been. That is his contention. Its growth is
normal to its nature, and in so far as growth involves change, such
change is the very proof of identity.
His opponent denies this. He says it was an oak once, long ago, but
other plants grafted on it have so changed its nature that it can be
called an oak no longer.
The appeal of the one is not to a supposed dead mechanical rigidity;
it is not an affirmation that he has before him an acorn rather than
an oak; it is to that principle of one-ness by which any thing is what
it is. The appeal of his opponent is not to the mere fact of change
(at least he must be very unintelligent if that process destroy in
his eyes all essential unity in the developing thing); it is rather
to the proposition that the changes were of a disfiguring and (to
borrow a foreign word) “denaturing” kind. The one says, “Here is the
same original organism, in full health and strength, growing and
vigorous before our eyes.” The other says, “These changes, which I can
substantiate by the consultation of old pictures and written records of
the thing, are a proof of disease and of corruption.”
It is therefore quite beside the mark for the opponents, upon
historical grounds, of some particular institution essential to the
Catholic Church--for instance, the Primacy of Peter--to prove by
elaborate reference to record that the Papal power under St. Clement
was embryonic compared with the Papal power under Innocent III. It is
quite beside the mark to bring forward, at too much pains, evidence on,
say, the doctrine of the Real Presence to prove that its definition in
the Council of Trent is far more elaborate, exclusive and exact than
the statement of it in Justin Martyr, fourteen hundred years earlier.
The point is that the one party to the controversy regards such
change--if you like to call it change--as an inevitable and salutary
phenomenon of life and a very proof of unity in character and time:
the other, as a phenomenon opposed to the true life of the thing and a
proof of its loss of identity with its original principle of life.
Now in my view there are two tests which one may apply to what I have
called the Protestant argument from History: two tests by which one may
discover that it rings false. And these I would tabulate as follows:
(1) The test of Innovation.
(2) The test of Critical Date.
By the test of Innovation I mean an historical examination to discover
whether orthodox doctrine--not points doubtful or still controversial
within the Catholic body, but defined truth--as propounded by the
Catholic Church upon any given matter, at any given moment, had the
character of an innovation, contrasting in essence with the development
of the past; or whether on the contrary it was the denial of such
doctrine, the counter-affirmation provoking such definition, which bore
this character of innovation and novelty. If the first view be the true
one, then the Catholic Church, false or true, has at least been in
all its life one personality consistent with its own essence, and the
successive definitions have all been in the line of tradition. But if
the opposing view be established, then indeed corruption and error and
therefore the absence of her Infallible Authority have been proved.
As to what I have called the test of Critical Date, I mean (what should
be surely an obvious truth) that if the story has been a process of
warping and corruption, there should be some discoverable stage at
which this deflection began, and if the fixing of this stage be not
only doubtful, but disputed in a hundred forms and set at widely
separated epochs, differing by centuries, then the objection is
ill-founded.
I would not be so pedantic and at the same time so logically weak as to
demand of my opponent the fixing of a particular instant in which he
discovers error originating. All such things, whether true developments
or corruptions, take place in time; none springs up apparent in a
single moment. All grow. But I do say that if a plain historical
phenomenon of corruption has taken place in this or that--for example,
the doctrine of the Eucharist--its inception must be observable within
at least a certain range of years, a generation at the most. Such is
the test of Critical Date.
I will now examine the matter by both these tests: Innovation and
Critical Date.
(1) As to the first test, it is historically true--and once again, a
very strange thing--that in every single case it is the protest against
orthodoxy which has had the character of an innovation, and never the
orthodox affirmation which has appeared as a novelty.
I will explain in a moment how an attempt might be made by our
opponents to get over even this difficulty; but at any rate, as far
as plain History is concerned, that remarkable fact which I have just
stated is true.
You may take the whole list, from Cerinthus, who was a contemporary
of the Apostles, down to Brigham Young and his Mormons, or to the
latest Modernist, and you find in every case without exception the
test working true. The heresiarch (as we Catholics call him) or the
reformer, or prophet, or whatever other flattering term you may like
to use in contra-distinction to heresiarch, appears as an innovator
to the generation whom he disturbs, or to which he appeals. His
doctrine comes as a _new_ doctrine, with all the shock and also all
the appeal of novelty. There is not any one case in the long story
of the Church where we can trace a steady protest against _any_ one
of her fundamental doctrines, a protest appearing at the origins
and increasing as the doctrine is more and more clearly defined. Nor
is there any one case of a definition of orthodox doctrine appearing
suddenly and with all the effect of an innovation. No doubt each
reformer makes the claim that he has rediscovered the old original
truth, long overlaid, but my point is that, when he and his doctrine
appear, it is _they_--not the things they oppose--which invariably
appear as sharp and, to most men, offensive novelties.
I have called that phenomenon in the story of the Catholic Church
remarkable; it is even startling. I know of no other society to which
this aspect of reform or re-action applies. If you will consider for
a moment the psychology of the affair, judging it by your personal
knowledge of the way in which your own mind works, and the minds of the
men about you, you will, I think, perceive its unique character.
After all, what happens in our minds with regard to any form of
degradation? For instance, what happens to-day with regard to a
misquotation in literature or a warping of function in politics?
The first misquotation takes place, and is challenged. The bad habit
grows, but it is still challenged here and there: the challenge is
maintained. Each time it is challenged the error is admitted, but
unfortunately spreads. Sometimes there comes at the end of the process
a violent re-action; literary men swarm together (as it were) and
insist upon the misquotation being driven out; and sometimes they
succeed.
Or again, as to the warping of a political institution. Representative
institutions were founded to be representative. People soon find out
that they are only imperfectly representative: that they tend to
represent the avarice or vanity of the individual delegates much more
than the mandate of those who sent them to the representative assembly.
What happens? Immediate protest; repeated protest; attempts at reform.
Sometimes the reform makes good, the fear of God is put into the
politicians, and the representative institution is purged and brought
up with a round turn, and compelled to do its duty.
You may take the whole range of human action in this respect, and you
will invariably find a process of this kind. It is common sense. Men do
not allow their conception of a thing to be deflected by falsehood or
laziness or illusion without sharply re-acting against that deflection.
All History is full of the corruption of institutions--and of men; but
all History is most emphatically _not full_--in fact, in all History
you will not find an example--of the corruption taking place without
its being noted and resisted.
Now here, in the case of Catholic doctrine, you have the singular fact
that the process is the other way about. There is no protest till after
the doctrine has become fixed. Take the case of the doctrine of the
Incarnation. Whether true or false, it is certainly present before
Cerinthus. The man who most violently combats Cerinthus’ statement
that Our Lord suffered as man and not as God is one of our Lord’s own
companions, St. John--a witness who had known Our Lord on earth, which
Cerinthus never had. That is no proof that the doctrine is true; but it
is proof of the historic fact that Apostolic society believed in the
doctrine and that the first heresy in the matter was an innovation.
Or take the doctrine of the Eucharist. For centuries the Real Presence
was accepted; in general terms, it is true, but accepted none the less.
You get it unmistakably from the Words of Institution right on for
a thousand years. You can argue against the _intention_ of the early
statements based upon the words of institution. You can say that those
who first alluded to the Eucharist did not intend the full doctrine of
later times. You can say that the Words of Institution in the Gospel
were only used by Our Founder metaphorically. You may say that the
famous description of the Mass in Justin Martyr nearly eighteen hundred
years ago did not connote the exact doctrine of Transubstantiation. You
may quote (as Cranmer did) passages from St. Augustine which permit the
special pleader to use them (if he leaves out the context and refuses
to mention other passages) as evidence of a subjective rather than an
objective Presence. But the plain historical fact remains that there
is not one single protest heard during all the centuries during which
the Christian Church did take the Real Presence for granted, and built
up round that accepted doctrine the whole mass of the Liturgy in East
and West. It remains true that you can find no resistance against this
universal attitude. Though there is metaphysical discussion, there is
not a case of a man saying, “The original doctrine was not that of
Real Presence: such doctrine is a corruption only just introduced, and
I protest against it.”
When the protest comes it is after thirty generations, at the end of
the Dark Ages; and it produces a violent effect of innovation, of
novelty.
I submit that no matter what particular defined doctrine in the
Catholic scheme you may select, you will find without exception
this most notable character attaching to it, that when denial of it
was made within the Christian community--as when Arius denied the
consubstantiality of the Son, or as when Nestorius denied the divine
motherhood of Our Lady--it had the effect of a stone thrown at a pane
of glass and breaking it: the startling effect of a shock; of something
quite unexpected and exceedingly and unpleasantly new.
I myself who am writing this did, when I was a young man and very
imperfectly instructed, take for granted the opposite. I thought, for
instance, that the doctrine of the Trinity had very slowly arisen,
that an original ignorance of Our Lord’s full divinity was gradually
dispelled by the development of the doctrine; that the earlier the
evidence was, the less it would confirm the doctrine; and that Arius
was fighting a sort of rear-guard action: defending a cause which
had once been vigorous but was lapsing through the process of time. I
thought that; and I fancy most ordinary educated men who have not had
the leisure or desire to read the evidence in detail think something of
that sort with regard to the story of almost any one of the Christian
mysteries. For, after all, the process is exactly what one would
expect. One would expect any original statement in human affairs to be
commonplace and straightforward, and the supernatural interpretation of
it to come in by a process of accretion and illusion such as creates
the innumerable legends and myths of mankind: first the teacher is
a revered man, then vaguely thought to have something in him of the
divine, then to be some sort of divine being, and, lastly, a God.
It was when I came to read the evidence and look closely into the
matter for myself that I began to feel the surprise which I record here
and which any one of my readers will also feel if he will read the
actual evidence instead of guessing at what sounds most probable. The
evidence is clear that the Trinitarian doctrine, growing in definition,
was never put forward with novel and protested accretions. It was the
Arian challenge which was new and immediately resisted.
It is the same with the mystery of the sacrament. Let anyone who
believes the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist to have
grown up very gradually as a sort of legend or myth, an accretion
overlaying some originally straightforward and in no way mysterious
ceremony, read the words in which the earliest writers who refer to the
matter at all speak of it. Let him not only read the way in which they
speak of it, but the way in which they acted. When that young boy in
the streets of Pagan Rome allowed himself to be killed rather than show
to the profane What he carried veiled in his hands, it is evident that
he did not think it common bread. When we find in all the very earliest
evidence of Liturgy insistence upon and repetition of the mystery, it
gives us to think. I say again, for the twentieth time, as I have said
at so many other points in this debate, all this is not a proof of the
truth of the doctrine, but it is a proof that the historical process
with regard to the doctrine is not that of corruption and essential
change which our opponents have presumed it to be. It is a proof that,
true or false, the mystery of the sacrament now held was originally
held, and that the attack upon this doctrine, as upon any other, came
as a novelty.
I have said that even this phenomenon, unparalleled as it is in the
tale of human thought, was capable of explanation by an opponent. But I
think if we examine that explanation we shall find it to fail.
The explanation is as follows: You are dealing with a body of fervid
believers. As time proceeds the excesses, the delusions, the vagaries,
proceeding from their very enthusiasm, permeate their body insensibly,
and it is only when the process has gone a considerable length that,
with a shock, some strong and lucid brain confronts the deluded
with reality. Hence (it is said) the novelty of each heresy and the
startling effect produced by the first statement of each heretical
proposition. This is certainly true of abuses, as for instance the
abuse of image worship, when it came to such a pitch that men accepted
without question a mass of images, supposed to have appeared in some
miraculous fashion without human workmanship. And if it be true of
abuses which are recognised to be abuses by all, why should it not be
true of fundamental doctrines, considering the blind fervour of which
I have spoken and the natural consequences of such fervour?
My answer to that explanation is that the cases are not sufficiently
numerous to establish a rule. It is true that you do get some few
cases, very few, of abuses which proceed some way before they are
abolished. But they do not go on long without being pulled up, nor are
they so general and manifold as to militate against our judgment that,
almost in proportion to its importance, the doctrine or mystery, when
it is challenged, is challenged by a new force.
Moreover, there is this consideration. In the few cases where there is
the analogy of an admitted abuse somewhat tardily reformed, all in the
Church ultimately accept the reform. But this is not at all the case
with regard to the main orthodox doctrine--quite the other way.
In every historical case of abuse, whether it be the erroneous
acceptation of a false document (as in the case of the Donation)
or an abuse of excess, as in the case of the exaggeration of image
worship, the traditional forces of this Sacred Society admit the moral
or clerical error, and usually they begin to admit it in increasing
numbers from the moment of the first challenge. But in the case of
orthodox doctrine it is not so. It is just the contrary. It is the
doctrine that stands and the heresy which gradually dies out.
Of specific heresies which have attempted to maintain but a part of
truth while rejecting the rest, all without exception have gone through
a process of rapid growth, culmination and decay, and nearly all have
at last wholly faded. That is not true, of course, of pure scepticism.
That we shall always have with us, for it is native to the human mind.
A complete denial of the whole Catholic scheme, that is, a complete
rejection of all that is unfamiliar and does not repose upon evident
proof immediately acceptable to everyone; a denial of all mystery and
especially of specific doctrinal affirmation, is as natural to man as
breathing, for faith is of grace and is exceptional to Nature. But the
heresies, as distinguished from such general rationalist denial, never
have in them the vitality which continues to urge orthodox tradition.
That is historical fact; and it is an historical fact which should
give every man who is seriously examining these things grave food for
thought.
Take the example which is most familiar to the older members of the
present generation in English-speaking countries other than Ireland: I
mean, the attitude towards Holy Writ.
Here heresy began by setting up the literal interpretation of Scripture
(and the personal judgment of the reader upon it) in opposition to the
authority of the Catholic Church. The Catholic tradition in the matter
was that (1) Scripture was the Word of God; but (2) given us not as a
record of science, or even History, so much as a witness to the Church
and particularly to the Incarnation; and (3) was only to be accepted in
the sense which the authority of the Catholic Church admitted.
As against that ancient Catholic attitude towards the Bible came, as a
novelty, the fierce affirmation of its absolute and literal authority
and of its being plainly interpretable for himself by every reader.
We are all witnesses to what has happened in that particular example.
The heresy, after nearly three hundred years of vigour, has gone to
pieces. The Bible outside the Catholic Church has lost authority. The
original Catholic position remains. Indeed, there is a comic irony in
noting that it is we Catholics to-day who are thought old-fashioned in
maintaining our respect for the text of Scripture and in being slow to
admit all the modern guess-work in derogation of it. So much for the
test of Innovation.
(2) I turn to the second test, the test of Critical Date.
If it be true that the Catholic Church is the warping and corruption of
an originally delivered truth, then that warping and corruption must
have had an origin.
I am walking by night along a road which is laid out upon the map for
miles due east and west; but after so walking for some time I begin to
notice by the stars that the road is bending. It turns more and more
southward. The map has misled me. In such a case I can, when daylight
returns, retrace my steps and I shall find the point of flexion. I may
not be able to establish it to a yard, nor even, if the process be at
first very gradual, to a quarter of a mile; but I shall at least be
able to say, “Up to this point it was dead straight, pointing west.
After this point (say, as much as a mile further on) it is clearly
bending south of west, and I find it bending more and more southward
as I proceed.” If not a point at least a section of flexion can be
established.
Now there is this remarkable historical fact about the process of the
Catholic Church--that its Protestant opponents, all agreeing in its
loss of direction, cannot agree as to when that loss began. There is
not and apparently cannot be any general conclusion upon so simple
an historical matter as to even the main historical section--first
century, second, third, fourth, eleventh--in which this point of
flexion lies. For one body of Protestant thought it is found in what
they call “Counter-Reformation” of the sixteenth century. It was then
that the Catholic Church went wrong, with its exaggeration of Papal
power, of Eucharistic ritual, its more mechanical organisation of the
Sacrament of Penance, and all the rest of it. In the fifteenth century
the Church of England, of France, of Castille were all (rightly) in
communion and their common authority was sound. By 1600 it was lost.
For another set of Protestants the change was the opening of the Middle
Ages--what is called the “Hildebrandine Movement” of 1050–85. Until
then Christendom was proceeding in consonance with its tradition.
The see of Peter had Primacy indeed, but had not developed a highly
detailed jurisdiction over a vast number of personal and national
affairs. The discipline of celibacy among the clergy in the West (so
they tell us) had been optional; its universal enforcement was a
corruption. The monastic institution had been free and sincere; it
slowly became, after that date, enslaved to the Papal power and to
Mammon, and was more and more a scandal of insincerity. Others would
find the point of departure in the ignorance and loss of material
powers which mark the entry into the Dark Ages. The fifth and sixth
centuries are the wide sections in which to seek the point of flexion
and of decline. Others are willing to accept as traditional and on
the right line the Christendom of Gregory the Great and St. Augustine
of England; but the ninth century is a breaking point and the tenth
a final collapse; by the time of Marozia the Church had clearly lost
an original character which it never recovered, and that new and
degraded thing, the mediaeval Church, had begun to appear. The Church
was never more the same. For some few of my own acquaintance the
dreadful moment is 1870; the right way was lost with the definition of
the Infallibility of the Pope. For others again it is the thirteenth
century, with its developing organisation for the repression of heresy
and its too strict definition of the sacrament. For a very great body
of men in the immediate past (now a smaller number) things began to
go wrong with the freedom of the Church under Constantine. Then did
lay and state corruptions, imitations or influences of the old Pagan
society, begin to thwart the divine scheme.
The most popular of the latest Protestant theories is that the thing
went wrong almost at once between Pentecost and the predication of St.
Paul, and that St. Paul was the author of the evil transformation into
a mystery religion of what had before been an ethical society upon the
suburban model. As their phrase goes, “Nothing can bridge the gulf
between the Gospels and the Pauline writings.” A lifetime ago the point
of flexion was put later. In the Protestant thesis of the mid-Victorian
day the corruption began about the end of the second century. St. Paul
was accepted, but already there was trouble beginning, as revealed in
the authentic epistles of St. Ignatius; and manifestly things were
becoming Catholic (and therefore corrupt) by the time of the African
Martyre, and were hopeless by the time of the Thirty Tyrants. For
these scholars the Catholic taint is the natural accompaniment of the
decline of civilisation after the Antonines.
Now I am not saying that because there is dispute upon the moment of
flexion in any directive scheme, because there are debate and diverse
opinion upon the point where an upright original began to go wrong,
that therefore one may conclude it never did go wrong. But I am free
to maintain that such enormous disparities of opinion, and such a
ceaseless shifting of it, would be impossible if a plain historical
process were at work.
When we consider, for instance, the popular monarchy of the English,
that is, the government of England by a king, aided indeed by other
powers, but having in his own hand the main force of the executive,
there may be some debate as to the moment in which these powers began
to fall off, until they reach the purely symbolic or nominal situation
in which they are to-day, when the king no longer governs at all but is
the neutral chief of society. I myself should put it as early as the
reign of Edward VI, and I should say it had become marked under the
elder Cecil at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. It is more usual to
say that the great change came under Charles I, and certainly it was
clinched by the civil wars. There are even perhaps some who maintain
that monarchy was still in the main more powerful than any other
political factor until the Dutch invasion of 1688. But at any rate it
lies within these two lifetimes--1550 to 1690. No one will deny that
the process had begun in the latter half of the sixteenth century; no
one will deny that it was thoroughly accomplished before the end of the
seventeenth.
It is so with all other historical phenomena of the kind. You can
put within the limits of a lifetime, and not a very long lifetime,
the transformation and decline of the Roman Empire during the third
century. You can see clearly that feudalism was a living social system
under Henry III of England and even under Edward I, but that it was no
longer the spiritual motive of society after the Black Death. You may
take any process you like throughout History, and you will find this
to be true; not that you can always put your finger upon a particular
year or event, let alone a particular moment, but that you can say,
“Within this comparatively narrow limit of time the change takes
place, certainly the institution was living within its traditions and
in the direction determined by its originals as late as such and such a
moment; certainly after such and such a moment, not long subsequent, it
is as clearly failing to keep that original direction.”
But here, in the case of the Catholic Church, her opponents can say
nothing of the kind. If they could, not only would scholarship be
roughly agreed among our opponents as to the Critical Date, but we
ourselves should at last be agreed, as we are agreed with regard to
attack upon abuses, in the long run--though never with regard to the
attack on doctrine.
But there is no such agreement, and can be none; for the simple
reason that the Catholic Church has not thus warped or veered but has
remained herself. So by this second test I conclude that the historical
objection is false.
It seems to me that an impersonal observer, say some historical
student from the extreme Orient, to whom the whole Catholic scheme was
indifferent and who cared nothing whether the original institution of
the Catholic Church had failed (because he had no affection for that
institution and no belief in any of its doctrines nor any respect
for Jesus Christ nor any attachment to the idea even of a personal
God)--it seems to me, I say, that such a wholly neutral observer
would, upon the general historical evidence, decide that the Catholic
Church was founded with a certain directive nineteen hundred years
ago, to be correct, about the year 29, and had remained throughout
the successive centuries consonant with itself. I think he would say
of it what we may say with regard to many an ancient state, “Its
personality has survived, its soul is still the same, its essential
unity has not been lost.” He would add the qualification “yet”; he
would conclude, “The personality _yet_ survives; the continuous life
has not _yet_ been lost.” We of the Faith of course affirm--but not
upon historical evidence--that the word _yet_ does not apply; that it
shall remain to the consummation of the ages. But for the purposes of
the particular argument which I am here examining, that is neither here
nor there. I say that a mere historical examination with no reference
to the truth or falsehood of the Church’s claim will conclude that
that claim has been continuous from the beginning, and that the Thing
to-day is essentially what it was when the strict organisation,
the unique phenomenon, appeared in Syria under the principate of
Tiberius. There is nothing left contemporary with that still vigorous,
still well-favoured, ancient Thing. It has seen the disappearance of
everything in Europe save itself, and its spring still copiously flows.
(b) _The Sceptical or Pagan objection from History._
I have said that much the most important form of historical attack upon
the Catholic position, the most formidable, and to-day the most hardly
pressed, the most lively and the most universal, is the Pagan or purely
Sceptical, the definition of which I will here repeat.
It is maintained that the claim of the Catholic Church to Divine
Infallible Authority is baseless, because it is manifestly man-made.
The process of reasoning is as follows:
Man is to be discovered in history perpetually making gods, erecting
religious themes, constructing cosmogonies. It is in his nature thus
to project himself upon the universe and to take his imaginations for
realities. His gods are but large reflected images of himself; his
religious doctrines, from the petty myths of a small savage tribe to
the majestic fabric of Catholicism, are one and all upon the same
model. Each is false, for each differs from the rest; and all are
false, for all are compact of the same stuff as the others: a stuff
bearing plainly the marks of human emotion and human construction.
Now this prophet is deified, now that chief, now that other imaginary
figure, half legendary or perhaps wholly without historical existence;
and what is true of any one of these is true also of the Catholic
scheme. The deification of its Founder is an example of deification
like any other. Its elaborate theology is but a somewhat more developed
specimen of what men have done before us and will do after us--a
spinning of logical systems into the void on premises that are without
substantial basis. Its affirmations of the miraculous are of the same
legendary sort as those to be discovered in a thousand other forms;
its ritual can be proved to have cousinship in this point or in that
with many another ritual of sacrifice, expiation and the rest; the
very details of its liturgical life, the mere ornaments, the host of
practices, the great monastic institutions, the pretty small devotions
of light and ornament--all these are of one material. That material has
been exhaustively examined and is now historically known. A vast mass
of evidence has been accumulated and continues to accumulate. The more
it is co-ordinated the more clearly this conclusion appears.
That is the position we have to meet. That is the main historical
argument against the divine origin and authority of the Church of God.
Our fundamental answer to such a position is of course not historical
at all. It is the answer of faith; as though a man should say, “Yes,
this stone is a stone and there are multitudes of stones, but I believe
this particular stone to be a talisman.” Or as though he should say,
“Yes, this Man was a man, and there have been countless millions of
men; but this one Man, and this one Man only, was also God.” The
rational basis (not the positive proof) of such a reply is based upon
spiritual experience--upon our judgment after noting the world, its
reactions towards the Faith, and the effects of the Faith upon it,
that here if anywhere is the divine; a conclusion coupled with our
further judgment that somewhere there must be present upon earth the
visible action of the divine acting in corporate fashion through some
institution, some society, some body.
But this main argument does not concern the little essay which you are
reading. I am dealing only with the value of the historical argument
against the Faith, as I have put it, I think fairly, into the lips of
one of our typical, modern, well-read opponents.
Now what is our reply?
Our reply is that the generalisation is hasty and inaccurate, and that
the more you examine it the more you discover upon what a false and
superficial basis it reposes.
There is not a great number of religions, nor has there been in the
past a greater number, apparent to men of different nations and
temperaments, of which hotchpotch the Catholic Church is but one. There
is not a multitude of systems of theology falling under the one general
category “theologies,” of which the Catholic scheme is but a single
specimen. Upon the contrary, there is, and has been for these centuries
past, a social and religious phenomenon _unique and comparable to
nothing else_, called the Catholic Church. Its spirit, quality, voice,
personality is such that the line of cleavage does not lie between it
and pure scepticism, leaving on the one side _all_ religions (including
Catholicism) and on the other the free uncertain mind; the line of
cleavage lies between the Faith upon one side and all other human
opinions and moods upon the other. And this unique character of the
Catholic Church is as plain an historical truth as the astronomical
truth of the reverse rotation of Uranus is unique among the planets. It
claims what no other society has ever claimed. It affirms its Founder
to have been what no other society claims its founder to have been.
It functions as no other society has functioned: by an unsupported
authority, absolute in its affirmation.
It may indeed be granted that in pure theory at least there is an
equal alternative to the unique thing. One might say that, outside
the Catholic Church, the human mind can stand quite unattached,
examining all things by no criterion save common experience and the
deductive power of the intelligence. In pure theory there might be a
whole society of such detached (but also quite unrooted) minds with no
certitudes, no ethical predicates, living upon the void.
In practice that is not so. There is not one of us that can point to
any mind of his acquaintance, or to any mind appearing through the
pages of a book which occupies such a position. All without exception
betray an ethical theory of some kind, that is, doctrines which, though
the holder of them may refuse to formulate them, appear in his actions.
Every man is a theologian. Every man has his philosophy of the world.
And viewing man thus as he is, always a member of some group, we do
not discover as an historical phenomenon any group save that of the
Catholic Church which possesses the unique character of authority.
Conversely, we find in all other groups the well-known marks attached
to men in all forms of worship--rites, doctrines, disciplines: we find
in Catholicism similar phenomena; but we do _not_ find in any of the
other groups, into which men’s attempts at satisfying this religious
sense may fall, that particular mark in which Catholicism is quite
different from all the rest.
Let us turn to the historical evidence on the matter and see how
true this is, prefacing that examination by the reiterated remark
that such unique quality does not of itself and unsupported by other
considerations determine the mind to accept the authority of the Faith,
but remarking that it does provide a presumption stronger than our
modern world, even its small educated part, is generally aware of.
In the first place, is it true that there are a mass of religions
bearing for their chief characteristic that which is the chief
characteristic of the Catholic Church--a secure, unfailing and constant
affirmation of Infallible Authority?
No; it is not true. There have been many restricted, some (very few)
widespread religious systems; to-day there are two in especial--the
Buddhist, the Mohammedan, occur at once to mind; but not one of them
makes this particular Catholic affirmation. Mohammedan society, not
a new religion but essentially an offshoot and degradation of the
Christian, taking the Catholic doctrine and simplifying it to its
last rudiments (with the exception of all in it that demands faith in
mystery), is passionate for a certain way of life and intolerant of
others. It creates a very marked and special culture which no doubt
could claim in its own way to be historically unique, just as the
culture of the Chinese is historically unique. But Islam does not
come forward with the statement, “I am a society of divine foundation
possessed of the power to reply to question after question upon the
only things that really matter, to which questions man has never yet
of himself attained an answer.” It says indeed, “This is the way to
live; and in this way of living we are content. A disturbance of it
is odious to us, and we desire as much as we can to turn all others
into our own image--not only the religious, but the social habits of
men offend us where very different from our own.” But it does not and
cannot of its nature say, “Here alone through this defined organisation
is the voice of God perpetually speaking, settling controversies,
defining and re-defining in ever-expanding area of thought whatever
truths may be challenged.” It is alive, but it is not alive with a
life of development; and so far from presenting any organisation
through which its doctrine can be developed as well as affirmed,
it is specifically repugnant to such organisations. In a phrase,
Mohammedanism is essentially anti-clerical.
If it be true of Mohammedanism (the chief historically active opponent
of the Faith) that it has not the peculiar marks which make the
Catholic Church different from any other society in the world, that
it has not some major quality by which all religions are distinct and
which is also the major quality of the Catholic Church, that statement
is still more true of Buddhism.
Buddhism never pretended to make, and does not make to-day, an
affirmation to be accepted corporately by the universal world. It
presents a certain philosophy--which I cannot but call the philosophy
of despair, and which is quite certainly a philosophy of negation. It
presents this gloom for acceptation by the individual mind. But it
claims no corporate rule; it affirms no divine authority: it enjoys
no functional power of excretion nor any of assimilation. You cannot
say of Buddhism, “Here is orthodoxy and the living tradition searching
out heresy and denouncing it, maintaining its life triumphantly by
insistence upon a personality of its own and by a corresponding power
of attack against whatever would diminish or threaten that life.”
If we turn from the great systems to the local worships we find another
character, wholly separate from that apparent in Catholicism: that
they do not pretend to certitude; they pretend to no more than the
satisfaction of emotion and to a corporation tradition. They have their
myths, but will readily accept them as myths or compare them unoffended
with the myths of others. They have their sanctities: but their
sanctities make no pretence at all to be universal. There was one, and
only one, historical phenomenon, which in this point did compare with
the Faith--the phenomenon of the Jewish religion; and that is precisely
why we Catholics call the Jewish religion the forerunner of our own and
the preparation of the world for its Incarnate God.
But is it not true that there are countless ceremonies and also major
doctrines, comparable to and some even nearly identical with those of
the Faith?
It is; and to that we answer that if there is to be such a thing as the
Faith on earth, it could not but be so. If men must worship, they will
worship in places. If men feel the pull of a religious emotion, at once
the sacramental idea must enter in. There cannot but be a connection
between the physical life of man and any religious system whatsoever,
true or false, with which he is inmixed. And so surely as the ministers
of the true religion will breathe and eat and walk upon their feet,
each as much as the ministers of the false, so surely you will find
in a true religion, if true religion there be, habits, practices,
doctrines, which (not all combined, but here one, there another) men
have groped for or arrived at in systems which attempted or adumbrated
the truth, but did not even claim to be the full truth.
It is not an historical argument against the divinity of this one
thing that it has the qualities which human things must have. Upon the
contrary, it is an argument in favour of its claim.
That the unique object here displayed, the Catholic Church, is divine
cannot on this account be affirmed; but it can be affirmed that if such
a unique object exist, then it will have these characters attaching to
it.
A man making a survey of what little is known of the old religious
experiments and perversions of mankind, and being asked, as a pure
hypothesis, “Suppose a divine society, corporate, distinct, highly
organised, and therefore of highly differentiated function, were to
arise on earth to bear witness to the Living God: suppose such a
thing for the sake of argument only, what, think you, would such a
body present by way of appearance, action and thought?” could not but
answer that it would have of necessity present within it not only vital
truths, but also practices discoverable wherever man had groped at or
half remembered a revelation.
This man, with no knowledge of such a society, but considering what
his fellow beings were, what the human mind is, what questions it
poses, what answers it demands, would reply: “In that society you would
discover the worship of a Creator, the affirmation that he had revealed
himself; a mysterious link between the divine and the human, comparable
to the link between the unthinking matter of our bodies and the living
essence within. It would have sacrifice and veneration combined. It
would sanctify objects, places, persons and rites; it would have
central institutions, and in proportion to its vitality a multitude of
lesser activities; it would have symbols which it would distinguish
from realities and forms of reality which it would attach to symbols;
for man without a soul is a corpse, and man without a body is a wraith.
This supposed society which you bid men imagine would certainly present
in their highest form such elements as History has also discovered,
disjointedly appearing, often perverted, often degraded, in the various
(and ineffective) spiritual experiments or lapses of mankind.”
Then, one might say to such a man, such a general scholar and observer
of the unique animal, man, at prayer, “Should there conceivably be
such a home upon the earth, how otherwise would you know it?” He could
but answer, “Its nature would be such that it would satisfy to the
full the demands of men; it would be unique so as to correspond to man
himself who is unique on earth, and it would grant him fulness and
repose.”
Such and such alone is the Catholic Church. If it be not what it claims
to be, then all is void.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Anglican authority and scholar, Dr. Lightfoot.
[2] For instance, he says there cannot have been a dragon under the
Capitol because dragons are only found in Africa!
[3] For instance, the absurdity about the tides, and the argument from
the phases of Venus.
[4] “Educated” Europe meant a far larger body in Catholic times than
it does now. Universities were then popular institutions and their
attendance was from every class.
[5] Taking the date of Pentecost as A. D. 29.
[6] Thus, a man who says, “While rejecting all dogmas and creed I
revere the vaguer part of the traditional moral teaching of Jesus” is
essentially a Protestant, not a sceptic, or Pagan: for such do not
revere any part of our morals. Protestant also, not Pagan, is the
man who confines himself to “the authentic teaching of Jesus” freed
from all later stories of the marvellous and all the sophistries of
Theology, which “authentic teaching” he picks out of the heap by his
own infallibility. For the true sceptic or Pagan has no more use
for the “authentic” fragments than for all the rest. He is equally
indifferent to the whole.
[7] Heresy = Αιρεσις--“Picking and choosing.”
[8] Thus we say of a man of twenty-five that he “changes” into the man
of forty. We also say of a man gone mad that he has “changed.” But the
word “change” has two very different meanings in the two cases. In the
one case it is change within the framework, of unity, of one character
and personality. In the other it is the change _against_ that unity, a
rupture of it.
Transcriber’s Note
Some inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have
been retained.
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Small capitals
changed to all capitals.
p. 37: changed “phenomenom” to “phenomenon” (That such a phenomenon)
p. 48: deleted duplicate word “the” (condemned by authority of the
Catholic Church)
p. 71: changed “eraliest” to “earliest” (the earliest origins of the
Church)
p. 83: changed “men” to “man” (first the teacher is a revered man)
p. 96: changed “cay” to “may” (what we may say with regard to)
p. 96: changed “here” to “there” (neither here nor there)
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