existential order; and that it is just because the Modernist has so great respect for historical accuracy, that he carries his critical apparatus even into the holy places of the Christian origins. But with what object is the historical form retained for Faith, when it is rejected as fact? For whose benefit does the Modernist priest go on praying to the Queen of Heaven, whom he believes to be a purely mythical personage? Not for his own surely. It would be a strange attitude of mind to be able to offer petitions to a being whom, at the time of praying, one conceived of as non-existent. Then it must be for the sake of the uninstructed laity. But, putting aside the moral objection that might be raised, is it not significant that those who can find comfort and help in such devotions are entirely convinced of the historical facts which the Modernist finds himself unable to accept? Would any simple Catholic feel that the foundations of his Faith were not assailed by M. Loisy's Les Évangiles Synoptiques? It may be asserted with confidence, that 'dogmatic symbols' are only helpful to those who can find in them an actual bridge between the spiritual and material worlds-just that kind of bridge which the Modernists, as critics, reject as impossible. 'The historian,' says M. Loisy, 'does not remove God from history; he never encounters Him there.' Now this assumption (for it is of course an assumption to say that God never manifests Himself in history) is absolutely fatal to Catholicism as a living and working Faith. Whatever changes the Roman Church may make, to adjust itself to changing circumstances, it is safe to predict that it will never accept a God who never intervenes in history.' The whole system of Catholicism-its sacraments, its discipline, its festivals, its priesthood, is bound up with the belief that God does intervene in history. Those who think otherwise seem to be liable to the reproach which they most of all dislike—that of scholastic intellectualism and neglect of concrete experience. 6 The authors of the Programme of Modernism seem to be right in saying that the philosophy of the movement grew out of its critical studies. There are many intelligent priests in the Roman Church who have become keenly alive to the immense difficulties which historical criticism has raised in the way of traditional beliefs. They can no longer believe what the Church requires them to believe. And yet they are conscious of no rebellion against the spirit of Catholicism. They are ardently loyal and enthusiastic Catholics. Their faith is unimpaired, but it no longer rests on the old base, or carries with it conviction that whatever the Church teaches is true. In this dire perplexity (and we must all sympathise with them in an impasse which by no means confronts the Roman Church alone) they turn eagerly to a popular and confident school of philosophy which seems to interpret the situation for them, and to offer them a way of honourable escape from it. The separation of truths of Faith from truths of fact; the primacy of will and feeling over discursive thought; the right to believe what we wish to believe 'at our own risk '—what is this but the very solution they were craving for? And now they find this position maintained by philosophers of repute, who have no personal reason for wishing to justify it. We cannot wonder that voluntarism and pragmatism have made many eager disciples among the liberal clergy. And yet they are wrong. This philosophy, which seems to promise them an honourable truce between the old Faith which they love and the new knowledge which they cannot ignore, would in reality, if followed up seriously and not merely grasped at in controversial straits, lead them far outside Christianity. It rests on a very deep-rooted scepticism-on a psychology which tries to be a self-sufficing philosophy, independent of objective truth. It is Kantianism without the moral absolutism which gave Kant a Tоû σT. It is a mere experimental opportunism which can never rise to a high spiritual level, because it acknowledges no fixed eternal standard to which our actions can be referred. Even God, if the idea of God is retained, can be only an ideal projected by the mind, not an objective fact. The scepticism is of a peculiarly intractable nature, because it involves the instrument of thought. We are hardly allowed to form concepts, because all is in a state of flux, and nothing remains the same while we are thinking about it. Such a philosophy would never have attracted Christian priests except at a time of exceptional difficulty and perplexity. The aid which it brings is illusory; it enables a priest to blow hot and cold with the same mouth and feel no qualms, but it offers no solution of the problem; it leaves the tension between Faith and fact as great as before. The Pope was quite right in condemning Modernism; he could not possibly have done otherwise; though we may regret that he fails to realise the severity of the crisis, and suggests no way out of it except the impossible one of return to tradition and St. Thomas Aquinas. The treatment of the Modernists is ungenerous; the total failure of the Vatican to understand the loyalty and distress of these unwilling 'heretics' is not a good omen for the future. The consideration of these current controversies has provided, I hope, an illustration of what is the main subject of these two lectures-the results of the attempt to separate Faith entirely from scientific or theoretical knowledge. The conclusion which I maintain is that Faith is not independent of the intellectual processes, and that whatever form dualism takes-whether, with Kant, we separate the theoretical from the practical reason, or, with Ritschl, judgments of fact from judgments of value, or, with Loisy, the Christ of Faith from the Christ of history-the result is profoundly unsatisfactory. M CHAPTER XI FAITH AND REASON We have now to consider the place of the intellect in religious belief. The view that the subject-matter of religion is a system of facts and laws, which can be studied and known like any other subject of knowledge, is called rationalism. The word is often used by religious people as a synonym for scepticism or infidelity. But in fact rationalism has quite as often been orthodox as heretical. The scholastic (especially the Thomist) theology, which is still officially recognised by the Roman Catholic Church as the philosophy of the Christian religion, is mainly1 rationalistic, within certain prescribed limits. God has revealed certain truths to mankind; but the authority of the revelation, though not its contents, has been guaranteed by signs offered to the reason. Moreover, the existence of God is not only known by revelation, but can also be demonstrated by reason. Nor does official Rome show any disposition to recede from this position. When Brunetière, some years ago, announced the bankruptcy of the sciences,' and, in the interests of Catholic orthodoxy, separated Faith from knowledge, the Archbishop of Paris reprimanded him, and referred him to St. Thomas Aquinas, who says that 'Faith presupposes natural knowledge, though that which in and for itself can be proved and known may be an object of Faith to those who cannot understand the proof.' A 1 The Summa Theologiae contains many sound statements about the province of the will in determining belief; but St. Thomas does not, like so many moderns, set the will against the intellect in order to disparage the latter. Papal decree of 1855 declares that 'rational conclusions can prove with certainty the existence of God, the spiritual nature of the soul, and the freedom of the will.' 1 The Vatican Council of 1870 decreed: 'Si quis dixerit Deum unum et verum naturali rationis lumine certo cognosci non posse, anathema sit.' The Modernists are blamed for abandoning this position. Again, the evidential school in England, long held in special honour at Cambridge in the person of Paley, is crudely rationalistic. Paley, who expresses his surprise that in Apostolic times more stress was not laid on the arguments from miracle and prophecy, which seemed to him so convincing, is equally confident of the irresistible cogency of the argument from design, which he thus enunciates. 'The marks of design are too strong to be gotten over. Design must have a designer. That designer must be a Person. That Person is God.' Speculative idealism, as a philosophy of religion, gives us examples of intellectualism-one can hardly say of rationalism—of a very different kind. Speculative idealism substitutes truth of idea for truth of fact; or rather, it regards ideas as the real facts. I have already quoted Fichte's dictum that we are saved by metaphysics and not by history. Hegel's absolute idealism, or Panlogism, as it is sometimes called, the most imposing philosophical edifice ever reared, belongs to this type. But Kant was also a rationalist on one side-the side on which his modern admirers do not follow him. Among Christian apologists Newman is sometimes thoroughly rationalistic in language, as when he says: 'What I mean by theology is simply the science of God, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology.' This, however, is not Newman's real position. He belongs, like Pascal, to the type of sceptical orthodoxy. 2 1 Höffding, The Philosophy of Religion, p. 387. |