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Chapter 2 Historical Sketch: The Crises Of The Church 12. The crises of the Church: Jerusalem (50 A.D.). It is a habit of the present day to regard contemporary phenomena as altogether new and as bearing no comparison with past events either in kind or in degree. Thus the present crisis and the present renewal are allegedly without parallel in Church history. We shall see later on how much truth there is in this assertion, but for the moment it is worth drawing attention to previous crises in the Church, recognized by historians. We believe that the Council of Jerusalem, of about the year 50 A.D. should be mentioned first of all. It was the primordial and fundamental crisis, or moment of separation, in religious matters between the Synagogue and Christianity; and since separation is the opposite of syncretism, the famous decree brought by Judas and Silas to the church at Antioch, which consisted of Christians who had come over from paganism, cut off at birth that syncretism of the Gospel and the Torah which would have deprived the new message of its originality and its transcendence. The Council of Jerusalem was critical from another point of view as well; because it separated once and for all theoretical from practical decisions; principles from their application; and did so not by adjusting principles but by adjusting their application to changing circumstances, which adjustment is made in religious matters under the inspiration of charity. The famous confrontation between Peter and Paul at Antioch, which occurred after the two apostles had agreed at Jerusalem that the Jewish law was outdated, that is, had been surpassed, turned not on a principle but on its application or, as Tertullian puts it, on conversationis vitium, non praedicationis.1 What Paul and later, as the event showed, Peter and the whole Church disapproved of, was Peter's practice of making concessions to the ritual instincts of the brethren who had come over from the Synagogue; which differed from his practice regarding those who had come over from idolatry. These were differences about practical matters or, if you will, errors resulting from not seeing, or not seeing clearly, the connection between a principle and a particular situation. They were disagreements and mistakes of the sort which have continued to occur in the Church, from Paschal II when he repudiated the concordat he had signed with the Emperor Henry V, to Clement XIV when he suppressed the Society of Jesus thus contradicting the non possumus2 of his predecessors, to Pius VII when he retracted the agreements he had made with Napoleon, accused himself publicly of having given scandal to the Church and punished himself by not saying Mass for a time. The distinction between the changeable disciplinary, juridical and political sphere, and the unchangeable sphere of the porro unum est necessarium,3 was first drawn by the Council of Jerusalem and constitutes the Church's first crisis: the historical sphere was clearly distinguished from the sphere of dogma. 1.“A
defect in behavior, not in teaching.” De Praescriptione Hereti-corum,
23.
The crisis of Nicea marks the separation of the dogmatic from the philosophical, and thus emphasizes the supernatural and mysterious cast of the Christian religion. Arianism constituted an attempt to deflower the originality of the primitive kerygma by placing it within the great current of Gnosticism. Gnosticism undermined the idea of transcendence and removed the notion of creation, by asset ting that the whole of reality was included in a graded scale of beings ascending from Matter to Intellect. To maintain that the Word was not consubstantial with the Father but like Him, satisfied the yearnings of the human understanding, but it removed the specific content of the Faith, which proclaims the existence of a single subject for the following two propositions: this individual here is a man, and: this same individual here is God. With the conciliar definitions of Nicea, and subsequently of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), the Church distanced herself from the ancient conception of a god as the perfection of the human, and of religion as the cultivation of this-worldly values to the exclusion of anything lying beyond. Jesus Christ could not be a god in the manner of Caesar or the divine Augusti, or of the gods of Epicurus who although immortal, perfect and blessed, were of one substance with the substance of man. He could not be something falling within the limits of previous philosophical speculation; instead He had to be that thing different from everything, but not alien, which no philosophy had ever imagined or which, if it had, had regarded as madness. In short, God ceases to be the most inaccessible grade of a perfection common to both man and god, and becomes instead a nature transcending anything human. Christ is not called the God-Man after the fashion of the pagans, that is, by a maximal approximation to the divine perfection, nor by a moral intimacy with God (Nestorius), nor in the manner of the Stoic paradox according to which the wise man is equal, indeed superior, to God inasmuch as God is blessed by nature but a wise man by his own exertions. Christ is ontologically man and ontologically God, and hence His ontological theandric constitution is a mystery. This mystery does not contradict reason, because of the very concept which the new religion brought with it of the nature of the divine essence; namely that it is a Monotriad, a Three-in-One, in the midst of which the Infinite thinks and loves itself precisely as infinite; and therefore that it stands beyond the limits in which the created intellect operates. If one denies that reason can submit itself to Reason, one denies it access to the supernatural. What is more, by denying this submission, one denies reason a proper knowledge of itself, because one would be denying that it knows itself as limited and that it therefore recognizes something beyond its own limit. The Nicene crisis was thus a decisive moment in the history of religion, and since every crisis separates an entity from what is alien to it, and simultaneously preserves the essential character of that entity, one can say quite simply that the Christian religion was saved at Nicea.
The many grave disturbances which the Church experienced in the Middle Ages were not true crises since through them all the Church was never in danger of changing its nature or dissolving itself into something else. Low moral standards among the clergy and lust for riches and power disfigure the face of the Church, but do not attack its essence by attempting to alter its foundations. It is appropriate here to formulate the law of the historical conservation of the Church, a law which also constitutes her ultimate apologetic criterion. The Church is founded on the Word Incarnate, that is, on a divinely revealed truth. She is also given sufficient energies to conform her own life to that truth: it is a dogma of faith that virtue is always possible. Nonetheless, the Church is only in danger of perishing if she loses the truth, not if she fails to live up to it. The pilgrim Church is, as it were, simultaneously condemned to imperfection in her activity, and to repentance: in the modern phrase, the Church is in a continual state of conversion. She is not destroyed when human weakness conflicts with her own teaching (that contradiction is inherent in the Church's pilgrim condition); but she is destroyed when corruption reaches the level of corroding dogma, and of preaching in theory the corruptions which exist in practice. So it was that the Church combatted the movements that disturbed her in the Middle Ages, but condemned them only when, for example, the practice of poverty became a theology of poverty which would have completely disqualified the Church from owning any earthly goods. For the same reason, the decay in clerical morals, which the eleventh century reforms so vigorously combatted, was not a true crisis. Nor was the conflict with the Empire, despite the fact that the Church was trying to free herself from the feudal servitude implicit in clerical marriage and in political domination over the bishops. The Catharist and Albigensian movement of the thirteenth century, and the further ramification of the Fraticelli, were not true crises either. These movements, which were begotten of huge overflows of feeling, and compounded with economic and political movements, were rarely translated into speculative formulae.4 When they were so translated, as for example in the regressive doctrine foretelling a return to apostolic simplicity, or in the myth of the equality of all the faithful at the level of the priesthood, or in the theology of the Third Age of the Holy Spirit following on the age of the Son, which had itself followed on the age of the Father, such doctrinal deviations found the hierarchical Church ready and able to exercise its office of teaching and correcting, in which it was often helped by the temporal power which held the structure of society together. The truths of faith were contested but not corrupted, and the teaching office of the Church did not cease to function. 4. This is not the case with the Catharists. [Translator's note.] 15. The crisis of the Lutheran secession. The breadth of the Christian ideal. The great
eastern schism left the whole structure of the Catholic faith untouched.
The Byzantines did not even directly deny the primacy of the Bishop
of Rome, and an act of reunion could be signed at The historical
reasons for the great movement of religious revolution in With powerful mystical sentiment, mediaeval civilization certainly expressed an essential aspect of religion, namely the relativization of all earthly reality and its projection towards a heavenly goal. Some would say, however, that the force with which that aspect was lived out went beyond due limits, and led to the setting aside or mortification of values which do not need mortifying, but coordination among themselves and subordination to heaven. I would say the same. The mediaevals seem unable to conceive of an ideal Christian except in the form of a Franciscan friar.5 When, by contrast, we remember the breadth of the Christian idea, it becomes clear that the Renaissance was a revival of that breadth, leading the Christian religion to realize the kinship uniting it to past civilizations within which, buried in sleep, there lay the values of natural religion, ideal beauty, the civic life and such treasures as the Phaedo, the Metaphysics, the Venus of Cnidos, the Parthenon, Homer and Virgil. Religion has
an expressive capacity much greater than can appear in any one period:
it comes out in successive developments which are not always complete
in themselves but which, taken as a whole, tend towards a progressive
perfection. This growth is hinted at in the Gospel parables of the
seed, and in Nor should it be thought that this assimilation of classical culture began with the Renaissance and the flight of Greek refugees from Islam, since it was in fact begun long before, in the midst of the Dark Ages, by the monastic preservation of Greek and Latin authors. They were preserved not because the monks found incentives or nourishment for their devotion in Virgil and Horace, but because, quite distinct from the all-pervasive ascetical inspiration of that period, the monks appreciated another ideal which although not ascetic, was nonetheless religious if Christianity does, as I have maintained, acknowledge the value of earthly things while directing them towards heaven. Furthermore, the blending of ancient civilization with the Christian idea had already happened before the Renaissance in the primordial form of intellectual development, namely poetry; especially in Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the myths, thought and aspirations of the classical world are powerfully combined with the Christian outlook in a daring synthesis. The limbo of the pagans, for example, in which the light of natural wisdom, while not bringing salvation, nonetheless preserves man from the fullness of damnation, is an outstanding intuition of the mediaeval genius, which was well aware of the spiritual spaciousness of the Christian ideal that both includes, and extends beyond, the ascetic world of the cloister. 5. Luigi Tosti, Prolegomeni alia storia universale della Chiesa, Rome 1888, p.322. 16. Further breadth of the Christian ideal. Its limits. This breadth of the Christian idea, due to its possessing latent aspects destined to be made manifest through historical developments, is a teality running through the whole of Christian thought and is linked theologically to the unity which exists between the cycle of the creation and the cycle of the Incarnation, the same divine Word being present in both. Even without considering the theological causes of this breadth, an examination of historical events is enough to make its existence apparent, inasmuch as contrasting schools and styles have coexisted in the same place. Bellarmine and Suarez lay the foundations of democracy and popular sovereignty while Bossuet justifies royal autocracy; Franciscan asceticism preaches the casting aside of all earthly goods whether material or intellectual while Jesuit realism builds cities, organizes states and mobilizes all the goods of this world ad majorem Dei gloriam. The Cluniacs decorate even the pavements of their churches with colors, gold and gems while the Cistercians reduce sacred buildings to their bare architecture. Molina makes much of the freedom and autonomous power of the human will, asserting it capable of checking divine predestination, and lowering the divine knowledge to the level of dependence on human events, while Thomists exalt the absolute efficacy of the divine decree. The Jesuits proclaim a broad way to salvation while the Dominicans proclaim the fewness of the elect. The casuists enlarge the role of the individual conscience when confronted with a law while the rigorists give the law preponderance over human calculation about the circumstances of an act. Franciscanism itself, with its founder's blessing of both Friar Elias and Friar Bernard, contains two spirits which, by their separations and reconciliations under the influence of a higher inspiration, explain the internal struggles in the order.6 If one forgets this essential spaciousness of Catholicism, the distance between one form of orthodoxy and another will seem as great as that between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. This is exactly how it did seem to the authors of opposed and mutually accusatory schools of thought, but it was not how it seemed to the magisterium of the Church, which always intervened to forbid mutual accusation and to safeguard religious unity at a higher level. Because this breadth was not grasped by Sainte- Beuve, it seemed to him too amazing que le même nom de chrétien s'applique également aux uns et aux autres (he had in mind the laxists and the rigorists). Il n'y a pas d'élasticité qui aille jusque là.7 Chesterton very perceptively made this breadth the main criterion in his apologetic for Catholicism. Jacob's prophetic saying should be remembered: Vere Dominus est in loco isto et ego nesciebam.8 It is nonetheless necessary to indicate the limits of this large view of the Catholic religion, which we too regard as a decisive historical criterion. The large view must not lead to an all embracing Pyrrhonism9 which consumes and syncretizes contradictories, rather than things which merely differ. It is legitimate to talk in terms of a broad view when several ideas are seen as a coherent whole, in which there is a genuine plurality of ideas: that is, when one idea is not destroyed by the contrasts it has with another. It is, however, impossible for a human, or any other mind, to make contradictory terms, that is, true and false, hold together. A coexistence of that sort would be possible only on an impossible condition; namely if thought were not oriented toward the being of things, or if being and non-being were equivalent. Catholicism grants logic precedence over every other form of mental activity, and logic embraces a plurality of values within its own truth, but it cannot embrace a plurality consisting of values and anti-values. A spuriously broad view of religion leads to theoretical and moral indifference, that is, to an inability to create an order in living. 6.
A.
Gemelli, // Francescanesimo, 3rd ed., 17. The denial of the Catholic principle in Lutheran doctrine. It is therefore a question of seeing how Luther's doctrine could not be included in the broad ambit of the Catholic system, and how his attack called into question the principle of the whole system, rather than this or that corollary. Inasmuch as
it is a rejection of Catholic first principles, Lutheranism is theologically
irrefutable. When confronted with Lutheranism, Catholic apologetic
finds itself in the position neatly outlined by Luther, on the other hand, places both the Bible and its meaning in the hands of the individual believer, rejects any mediating role for the Church, entrusts everything to the individual's private lights and replaces the authority of an institution by an immediacy of feeling which prevails over all else. The conscience is detached from the teaching office of the Church, and an individual's impressions, especially if they are vivid and irresistible, are made superior to any other rule and are held to establish a right both to believe, and to proclaim what is believed. What the ancient Pyrrhonism does to philosophical knowledge, Protestant Pyrrhonism does to religious knowledge. The Church, which is the historic and moral continuation of Christ the God-Man, is deprived of its native authority, while the liveliness of an individual's impressions is called “faith” and declared to be an immediate gift of grace. The supremacy of this individual conscience removes the foundation of all the articles of faith, because they stand or fall according to whether the individual conscience assents to, or dissents from them. Thus divine authority, which is the sustaining principle of Catholicism, is extirpated and with it go the dogmas of the faith: it is no longer the divine authority of the Church which guarantees them, but subjective individual impressions. Thus, if heresy consists in holding a truth to have been revealed, not on the authority of its having been revealed, but because it accords with a subjective perception, one can say that in Lutheranism the whole concept of faith is converted into the concept of heresy, because the divine word is accepted only inasmuch as it receives the form of an individual conviction. It is not the thing which demands assent, but assent which gives value to the thing. If then, by an internal logic, this criticism of divine authority as a theological principle becomes a criticism of the authority of reason as a philosophical principle, that is no more than might have been expected a priori, and it is also confirmed a posteriori by the historical development of German thought, right up to the fully developed forms of immanentist rationalism. 10. Summa Theologica, l,q.l,a.8. 18. Luther's heresy, continued. The bull Exsurge Domine. The germ of
the formidable religious revolution occasioned by Luther is all
contained in the 41 articles condemned by Leo X in the bull Exsurge
Domine of In this series of condemned propositions, it is difficult to tell which ones the bull intends to reprove as actually heretical, because, in accordance with Roman curial usage, after having listed the 41 propositions, the bull condemns them one and all collectively tamquam respective haereticos, aut scandalosos, aut falsos, aut piarum aurium offensivos vel simplicium mentium seductivos.11 This lack of distinction makes it difficult to discern how the censures are to be distributed, and opens the field to debate among theologians: an heretical assertion that injures Catholic doctrine is an altogether different thing from a saying that might mislead the simple, as the latter constitutes a sin against prudence and charity, but not against faith. The propositions contain, in a developed form, Luther's doctrine of penance, in which he teaches that the whole efficacy of sacramental penance rests on the feeling the penitent has of being absolved. Some articles invalidate the idea of the freedom of the will, which is said to be moved entirely by grace and to remain de solo titulo.12 Others deal with the supremacy of a Council over the Pope, the uselessness of indulgences, the impossibility of good works, and the death penalty for heretics, which Luther held to be contrary to the will of the Holy Spirit. There is, however, one article, No.29, in which the heresy of private judgment in the choice of beliefs is openly professed by Luther. This article, stating the true principle of the whole movement, remains as the only really memorable one: Via nobis facta est enervandi auctoritatem Conciliorum et libere contra-dicendi eorum gestis et confidenter confitendi quidquid verum videtur.13 Here the fundamental root, the ultimate criterion, is made plain: it is private judgment that gives authority to whatever seems to be true. Of the two sides of a mental act, the one which apprehends objective being and the other, which is the subjective act of apprehension, it is no longer the objective being apprehended, but the act of apprehension itself which predominates. To express myself in scholastic terms, it is id quo intelligitur14 that predominates over id quod intelligitur.15If in article 27 Luther proceeds to remove the fixing of articles of faith and moral law from the hands of the Church, he does no more than translate article 29 from the individual to the social aspect of religion. In conclusion, the soul of the Lutheran secession was not a question of indulgences, the Mass, the sacraments, the Papacy, priestly celibacy, or the predestination and justification of the sinner: it was an intolerance that the human race carries about fixed fast in its heart and which Luther had the daring to manifest openly: the intolerance of authority. Because the Church is the collective historical body of the God-Man, it draws its organic unity from a divine principle. In such a context, what could man be, but a part, living by unity with that principle and by obedience to it? The man who breaks that link loses the forming principle of the Christian religion. 11.
“As respectively heretical, or scandalous, or false, or offensive
to pious ears, or seductive of simple minds.” 19. The principle of independence and abuses in die Church. Once the crisis is seen in these terms, the consideration of the moral faults of the clergy and the institutional corruption that followed from it becomes a secondary question, even though it remains important as the historical cause that touched off the assertion of the principle of private judgment. There were certainly enormous abuses of the sacred on the part of the Church's ministers: one could cite the monstrous example of Alexander VI threatening his concubine with excommunication unless she returned ad vomitum.16 Nonetheless, quite apart from the fact that an abuse does not justify rejecting the thing abused, there is also the fact that the reform of the Church could only happen, and in the event did happen, in an orthodox way, thanks to men who were always convinced that Catholics could not be acting rightly unless they had the seal of approval of those same churchmen whose vices they continued to castigate, even while recognizing their authority: and in this they were like their predecessors St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena and the founders of religious orders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The reason why the corruption of shepherds caused only a dispersal of sheep, rather than a true crisis, was that malpractice was not erected into a dogmatic theory as it was by Luther. A theory is unlimited, since it contains in its universality a potential infinity of acts, whereas acts themselves are always limited. Thus if the theoretical dogma is preserved, the health-giving principle remains undamaged, and through it the whole of practical action is saved. 16.
“To her old sins.” Cf. II Peter, 20. Why casuistry did not create a crisis in the Church. We cannot pass on without saying a word about the phenomenon of casuistry, although it did not create a true crisis in the Church. Gioberti and some modern authors maintain that it was a real crisis and indeed the cause of the decline of Catholicism.17 First and foremost it was not a crisis because fundamentally casuistry is entirely reasonable and necessary. As the discipline which tells man how to apply to individual actions ethical tules which of their nature are universal, theological casuistry has a function analogous to legal casuistty, or jurisprudence, and is begotten of the necessary and ever present imperatives of moral action. Its further development was encoutaged by the Council of Trent which, by declaring that the priest exercises his office in the sacrament of penance per modum iudicii,18 emphasized the need for a body of teaching, dealing with individual cases, which would translate the Church's precepts and the moral law into practical application. Thus far, there is nothing reprehensible about casuistry. What was reprehensible was its tendency to remove the difficulties of moral obligation and to make the observance of the gospel law easy, by accommodating it to human weakness. Equally reprehensible was the wholly philosophic and rational principle of probability, which placed free will and individual judgment above the imperatives of the law. So, according to Caramuel, whom St. Alphonsus Liguori called “the prince of the laxists,” one ought to make room for a variety of opinions about what is good and evil, all of them admissible and helpful provided they have some degree of probability about them, because in his words divina bonitas diversa ingenia hominibus contulit, quibus diversa inter se homines indicia rerum ferrent, et se recte gerere arbitrarentur.19Here there is some trace of the Lutheran principle of private judgment, as opposed to the Catholic one of authority. On the other hand, casuistic theories which gave pride of place to subjective impressions in determining one's moral choices were moderated by the penitent's submission of his conscience to the authority of a confessor, and thus in some sense to the authority of the Church. Casuistry was more a science among the clergy, because of their role as moral advisors, than a moral decline in the popular conscience. The great bulk of books of casuistry published at that period were Praxis Confessariorum, and only rarely Praxis Poenitentium.20 It was, however, easy to drift from benign criteria for evaluating past actions, which is what casuistry was to begin with, to relaxed criteria about actions to be performed in the future. Casuistry did not amount to a crisis, because the principle that one is free to choose what law one is bound by was never expressly formulated. Thus the many propositions condemned by Alexander VII in 1665 and 1666 contain solutions to cases rather than any error of principle. Therefore it does not follow, as Pascal thought it did, that the Church's censure of casuistry proves the latter was capable of inducing a fully blown crisis in Catholicism. 17.
L.R. Bruckberger, Lettre a Jean Paul II, Paris 1979, p. 101. The revolution
in Many people maintain that a rich and abundant mixture of ideas collided with Catholicism during the revolution and that the causes of the latter were not all philosophical and religious. I would agree, just as I would about the Protestant reform. If I conceive of the revolution's disorderly combat of ideas as being not a proelium mixtum22 but a combat of spirits, a battle of essences, it is because I see in it a vast and fundamental shift which, in Lucretius's stupendous image funditus bu-manam...vitam turbat ab imo.23 All Catholic
authors of the nineteenth century, not least among them those usually
classed as liberals, took up the task of criticizing the principles
of the revolution. Manzoni does it in his essay Sulla Rivoluzione
Francese, which modern historiography attempts to discredit
and cast into oblivion. Father Francesco Soave does it in his acute
little work Vera idea della Rivoluzione di Francia ( 21.
“Spirit moving the whole.” 22. The principle of independence. The Auctorem Fidei. Anyone who glances through Denzinger's famous Enchiridion might be surprised to find that among the doctrinal documents of the period in which the great convulsion of the French Revolution occurred, there are none which directly concern the theoretical presuppositions underlying the reforming legislation passed by the succession of assemblies which preceded the Consulate and the Empire. Bonaparte, the mediator between two ages, finally abolished the most arrogant and anti-Catholic features of the seven successive constitutions of the 1790s, but left intact the fundamental informing principle of the modern age, which underlay all the innovations. That principle, as I have remarked several times, is the setting up of human values on a purely human, independent and self-subsistent basis, and the consequent overthrow of authority. The God-Man,
Who is ontologically an individual, becomes a social individual
in the Church. The latter, according to The political independence of man taught by the revolution was contained in the religious independence taught by Luthet and later by the Jansenists. In this regard Pius VI's constitution Auctorem Fidei (1794) condemning religious independence, has an importance equal to Pius X's encyclical Pascendi (1907). When they reproduced the two documents entire in their famous Enchiridion Symbolorum, the Jesuit Denzinger and his coeditors displayed a far-sighted grasp of doctrine. In the Auctorem Fidei too, there are only a few articles of fundamental importance, and a good many more which apply these fundamentals as a kind of added ornament. The fundamental articles are the ones condemned as heretical; the others receive lesser censures. Setting aside the universal Church, the Pistoians made the particular church the mediator between the individual and the divine Word, thus allotting it the place Luther had given to subjective impressions; and although this pluralized and dispersed the principle of authority somewhat less than did Luther's much vaunted principle of private judgment, it effected a shift in authority from the universal to the particular just the same. As generally happens in calls for reform, the Pistoians alleged that there had been a general obscuring of important religious truths in the Church in recent centuries (Proposition 1). This allegation was contrary to the nature of the Church, for in her, truth is indefectible and can never be obscured in her official teaching. This proposition, which could fundamentally be considered as an historical judgment, is followed by others also condemned as heretical, which state that authority to teach doctrines of the faith and to govern the ecclesial community resides in the community itself and is communicated by the community to its pastors. This time it is not the private judgment of an individual person, but of an individual church which is set up as the ultimate authority: a universal authority is replaced by an authority which, although still social, is nonetheless individual. There is still an obedience to the divine Word, but only insofar as that Word is conveyed through the medium of what might be called the private judgment of the diocesan church. That the pope is head of the Church as its minister, deriving his authority from it rather than from Christ, is also condemned as heresy; it is a corollary of the principle that authority resides in the community. 23. The crisis of the Church during the French Revolution. Prior to the revolution of the masses, royal absolutism had already effected its own revolution and had freed itself from its moral obedience to the Church, renewed the despotism of the lex regia whereby quidquid principi placet vigorem habet legis,25 and had reinforced itself by imbibing the spirit of Lutheran freedom of conscience. On the one hand the new Caesarism had asserted the ruler's independence of those laws of the Church which had hitherto strengthened and tempered royal power for the protection of the people. On the other hand, it had absorbed the privileges, franchises, immunities, and immemorial customs which had guaranteed the liberties of the subject. Few writers attempt to establish to what extent the huge revolutionary disturbance was simply a reaction of the social mechanism, and to what extent philosophical aspirations or conspiracies played a part in it. In any case, events proceeded on an enormous scale and eradicated principles and convictions like a ventus exurens et siccans;26 defection and apostasy took a third of the clergy, compensated for by instances of unvanquished resistance even to the point of martyrdom; priests and bishops contracted marriages (subsequently convalidated by the Concordat of 1801, except in the case of bishops); churches and religious houses were profaned and destroyed (of three hundred churches in Paris, only thirty-seven remained as churches); religious symbols were rejected, scattered or banned (so that Cardinal Consalvi and his suite wore lay dress when they came to Paris to negotiate the Concordat); dissoluteness in manners grew and there were licentious and wayward reforms in public worship and instruction, and sacrilegious compoundings of the patriotic with the religious. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy adopted in July 1790 and condemned by Pius VI in the March of the following year, contained a real error in principle, in that it secularized the Church and abolished it as a society prior to, and independent of, the state. If it had remained in force, it would have wiped every Catholic influence and institution off the face of French soil; but it succumbed to the rejection of almost all the bishops and the vast majority of priests, and to the policies of compromise adopted by Bonaparte. Hence the condemnation of the Civil Constitution of the Cletgy is a doctrinal document concerning the very substance of the Catholic teligion. It is surprising that Denzinger omitted it. The total separation of Church and state was deemed an error by the framers of the Syllabus, but at least it allows the two societies, theocratic and democratic, to continue to exist, each with its own nature and aim. How much more fatal then is the error of absorbing the Church into the state, and of identifying the latter with human society in all its aspects. The French Revolution, reduced to its logical essence, represented a genuine crisis of Catholic principle, because even though it did not succeed in ttanslating the principle of independence into social practice, it did implant that principle, which removes the religious, moral and social orders from their center, and tends towards the complete dislocation of the social organism. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to doubt that this violent shock to Catholicism really did constitute a crisis, if one remembers there is no true crisis when the mystical body is attacked, so to speak, in its sensitive soul but not in its intellectual or mental one, and when the nucleus, being endowed with the charism of indefectibiliry, remains undamaged, even though confusion may be spreading through all the physiological operations of the body. 25.
“Whatever pleases the prince has the force of law.” The famous
list of modern errors annexed to the encyclical Quanta Cura of
Disputes and
differences arose at once concerning the import of the Syllabus
in relation to Catholic doctrine. Monseigneur Dupanloup, the
Bishop of Orleans, restricted the scope of its condemnations. On
the other hand the Civilta Cattolica, which then enjoyed
great authority, put forward a strict interpretation, recognizing
that the Syllabus condemned the principle upon which the
whole of the modern world rests. Anti-religious writers, who on
the essential point were no less clear sighted than the Jesuits,
opposed the Syllabus because they saw it contained a condemnation
of modern civilization. Some of the condemned propositions gave
rise to disputes in the area of practical moral conduct. Such were
No.75 on the incompatibility of the papacy's temporal and spiritual
powers, and No.76 maintaining that the abolition of the A feature clearly proclaimed on the very title page of the papal document is, however, more important than the opinions of moral theologians on the extent of the obligations the Syllabus imposed on the faithful. It intends to enumerate praecipuos nostrae aetatis errores.28 In the last of the articles however, which constitutes a synthesis of the whole papal condemnation, these errors are identified with the very substance of modern civilization, which is thus totally condemned in its principles, but not in the totality of its parts. Because it contains very few condemnations of particular theological points, and a very sweeping condemnation of the dominant errors of the age, it would seem that the Syllabus should be taken more as a denunciation of the state of the world than of the condition of the Church, and that the gist of its teaching lies in its condemnation of the spirit of the age. Of the eighty articles in the document, few stand out for anyone looking for matters of universal importance, but these few are indeed decisive. An independent reason, which makes no reference to God, recognizes no law but its own (autonomy), rests on no force but its own immanent strength, and deems itself capable of carrying man and the world to the fulfillment of their destiny, is condemned by the censure of the third proposition. The fifth condemned proposition makes reason an absolute norm, and describes the supernatural as a product and stage of natural thought: it therefore denies the dependence of the created word on the uncreated Word standing infinitely above it; the perfection of divine revelation thus consists in human consciousness of the divine, and in the reduction of dogmas to rational theorems. Proposition No.58 is of equal importance, because it proclaims the individual's ethical decisions to be independent of any absolute norm transcending his own mind, hence the proposition constitutes the reflection in practical reason of these same errors. The juridical application of No.58 is condemned in No.59; namely that human law is duly constituted by human action alone, prescinding from any relation to a moral law; the event is the foundation of justice, and its principle is not the divine Idea, but contingent reality. Thus, taken as a whole, the Syllabus can be seen more as a denunciation of the modern world than as a symptom of a crisis in the Church, because the propositions which it draws together relate to a contradiction between the world and Catholicism rather than to an internal contradiction between the Church and its own principles, and, as we saw at the outset, it is precisely the latter which constitutes the definition of a crisis. It was grasped both by the world and by the Church that this was the meaning of the Syllabus. The condemnation
of modern thought proceeds from the Syllabus to Hence, the difference between the state of affairs envisaged by the Syllabus, and that of the Church in the present confusion, lies precisely in the fact that the demands and claims of the world, which were then external to the Church and opposed by her, have now been internalized within her, and the antagonism between the Church and world abandoned, whether by keeping quiet about it, and thus renewing the mediaeval adage tace et florebunt omnia,30 or by softening it to render it tolerable, or, most commonly, by weakening the force of Catholicism through making it so broad as to embrace not the totality of truth, but a syncretistic totality of truth and falsehood. The condemnation of the spirit of the age is certainly undeniable, and can be neither avoided nor softened, since that spirit is essentially marked by the errors here condemned. The enormous silence within the bosom of the Church which is intended to extinguish the papal pronouncement of 1864, and thanks to which it was acceptable that Vatican II should not mention it even once, can never annihilate the Syllabus of Errors, even though it has succeeded in making its very name a thing to be derided or abhorred. 27.
See on this point the cited edition of the Morale Cattolica,
Vol.III, pp.340-3. 25. The spirit of the age. Alexander Manzoni. In the second part of his Morale Cattolica,31 in a chapter called in fact “The Spirit of the Age,” which is the most troubled not only in that work, but in the whole of his writings, Alexander Manzoni32 is confronted with the same problems as ourselves: that is, whether the spirit of the age is compatible with the Catholic religion or not. He finds his solution by a process of analysis and discernment. Rejecting a false systematization which would accept all or condemn all, Manzoni examines article by article the various parts of that heterogeneous compound of ideas; true, useful, sound, false, irreligious and harmful. Having extracted the good elements, he shows that they were contained in religion and are derived from it and that the fault, if there had been one, had lain in not drawing them out, but leaving it to the enemies of religion to do so. Thus, the analysis of the spirit of one age should not be made by the light of the spirit of another, whether past or present, but by the light of religious truth, which illuminates changing intellects as generations take their course, while itself standing, changeless, above all periods by a kind of ucronia.33 By comparing the dominant opinions in a society at a given time, it is possible to effect that philosophic rather than charismatic discretio spirituum34 which does not accept or reject a composite whole en bloc, but discerns merits and demerits by a transhistorical criterion. But here a doubt arises. Is the spirit of an age a compound that can be broken up into its component parts, or is it something (I am not going to define it) which holds a compound together and gives its parts an existence other than they have merely as parts? Is not the spirit that quid which informs the parts, and thus brings them out of multiplicity and division into a definite and unmistakable unity, as an individual undivided in itself and divided from everything else? The point Manzoni makes in those pages remains certain at any rate; that the spirit of an age should not be judged historically, but by a timeless criterion, that is, by religion and not by history. Of course, this criterion will not be accepted by someone holding an axiology which tejects true, noumenal values; but it is the Catholic criterion, and we intend to use it here in order to discern where the crisis lies. That kind of criterion is therefore not only a legitimate one, but the only one legitimate. Judgments which Catholicism and systems opposed to it make about the worth of the same object, for example the value and dignity of the human person, may seem identical; but the identity is only apparent, since Catholicism finds the reason for this dignity where the other systems do not. In both cases man is loved, but in the one he is deemed lovable in himself, while in the other he is not; it is rather a higher principle, Lovable in Itself, which makes him lovable in turn. By this example one can grasp what it is that constitutes the spirit of an age, a society or a system. It is the ultimate ground, irreducible to anything further back, which renders each moment of the system or the age intelligible; the caput mortuum,35that is, that final idea in which the whole is resolved and which is not itself resolvable into anything else. Thus the spirit of an age is not a complex of ideas, but what unifies such a complex, and cannot itself be broken up. The spirit of the age is the analogue in social life of what the Bible calls the tree or heart in the life of an individual person;36 the place whence spring a man's thoughts, good or evil, saving or damning, and whence the good or bad fruit proceeds, according to whether the tree or heart be good or bad itself. From the religious point of view, man is radically good or radically bad, and his destiny turns on the moment of death.37 31.
See
op.cit. Vol.11, pp.413-59 and Vol.111, pp.323-9. 26. The modernist crisis. The second Syllabus. The crisis
stated in the Syllabus was a crisis of the world more than
of the Church. The crisis stated in the second syllabus, constituted
by the decree Lamentabili of That is also made plain by the fact, noted in the encyclical, that the modernist plures agit personas ac velut in se commiscet,40 being at once an historian, a critic, an apologist and a reformer. I do not believe that Pius X was making a moral condemnation of trickery or hypocrisy (plurality of masks) when he noted the existence of this variety of characters, even though traces of a certain Achitophellian41 deception are perhaps to be seen in some of the propagators of the doctrines in question; as they are, are they not, in some of their opponents? I believe rather that the multiplicity of characters or masks shows that the document is not condemning separate limbs, but a single spirit, which is ultimately the spirit of independence. To proceed in the same manner as we did in the case of the first Syllabus, we will examine some of the document's principal articles in order to show its condemnation of this spirit. Proposition No.59 condemns the error that man subjects unchanging revealed truth to his changing judgment, thus subordinating truth to history. This sort of reduction of the truth to an advancing human sentiment, which proposes and reproposes the datum of religion as a kind of unknowable noumenon, is also rejected in article No.20, as it removes the “religious sense” from its dependence on the authority of the Church.42 It is expressly admitted that the Church is reduced to the task of merely registering and sanctioning opinions dominant in the Ecclesia discern,43 which is in reality no longer being taught at all. By denying that revealed truth can oblige one to give an internal or personal assent, as distinct from a merely external assent as a member of the Church, proposition No.7 asserts the existence in each individual of an intimate core of independence from truth; so that truth is binding by virtue of being subjectively apprehended, rather than by virtue of its being true. Proposition No.58 is no less weighty: Veritas non est immutabilis plus quam ipse homo, quippe quae cum ipso, in ipso et per ipsum evolvitur.44Two sorts of independence are proclaimed here. First, man as an historic being is made independent of man as a nature, the latter being entirely absorbed in the historicity of the former. The proposition amounts to a denial of the existence of the eternal idea containing the exemplars of real natures, a denial of that indisputable element of platonism without which the idea of God collapses. The second independence proclaimed is, more generally, that of reason from Reason. Human reason, which we know is the greatest container in the world,45 is nonetheless itself contained in another container, which is the divine mind. This second container is denied in proposition No.58. The assumption made in the condemned article to the effect that truth develops with, in and through man, is therefore false. It does develop in that way, but not wholly. It is not true that truth comes to be as man comes to be: it is created intellects that undergo change, even the intellects of believers, even those of the social body which is the Church; they all tend towards the same truth, by their own activity which varies from individual to individual, from generation to generation and from civilization to civilization. This alleged independence of the mind from immutable truth tends to confer a kind of mobilism on the entire content of religion, as also on its container, the mind.46 Proposition No.65 seems to me to be of great interest and to provide much food for thought when compared with the last proposition of the Syllabus. Pius IX declared Catholicism incompatible with modern civilization. Pius X condemns whoever says it is incompatible with modern science. So the Church then is incompatible with modern civilization, but modern civilization is not to be identified with science. Religion is compatible with human thought, not in the sense that it passively submits to all the forms, some of them mistaken, through which the history of thought may wander, but in the sense that it is always compatible with that truth at which thought's wanderings are directed. The document expresses this difference by proclaiming religion compatible with true science. In any event, we have two condemned propositions: Catholicism is compatible with modern civilization (Pius IX) and Catholicism is incompatible with true science (Pius X). From a comparison of the two condemnations, it becomes clear that modern civilization and true science do not correspond. While the Church distinguishes between modem civilization and true science, she does not cease condemning the spirit of the age. There can be knowledge which is true in a civilization which is false, but it is then garbed in a false spirit of which it must be stripped, by a kind of reclaiming action, so that it can be reclothed in the truth which is found in the Catholic system and so be regulated by its true principle. 38.
“The
leading errors of our age.” 27. The pre-conciliar crisis and the third Syllabus. In this brief historical overview our intention is to outline cursorily some previous crises in the Church. We are almost entirely ignoring their political aspects, saying nothing about theit social repercussions, and are hardly touching on disciplinary changes, since the Church's discipline depends on its doctrine. Examining
crises in the Church, we have found that they only occur when a
contradiction of the constitutive and governing principles of the
Church arises within the Chutch itself, rather than in the world
outside. This kind of contradiction of principle is the “constant,”
as mathematicians put it, of all crises. The crisis which had arisen
in the world outside the Church and been demonstrated in the first
Syllabus, and which, at the beginning of this century, had
again been identified by Pius X when it began to spread into the
Church's internal life, was recognized yet once more by Pius XII
in a third syllabus, when it had become widespread within the Church
towards the middle of the century. The third syllabus is the encyclical
Humani Generis of In the formation of the Church's collective identity, there are moments of memory, when certain parts of the deposit of faith are brought to attention, and moments of oblivion, when certain parts of the Catholic system are not adverted to and ate left in obscutity.47 This is an effect of the limited attention of the mind, which cannot concentrate on everything all the time, and the mind's capacity to be directed to one thing ot another is the great fact on which the art of education, and at a lowet level that of propaganda, is based. Since it is a necessary part of human nature, it can neither be regretted nor eliminated. A relative inadvertence of this sort must not, however, be allowed to turn into the abolition of parts of the Catholic system. This or that aspect of the whole is highlighted or obscured by the course of history, but these aspects are not created or destroyed in the consciousness of the Church by such prominence or the lack of it. When the main current of opinion in the Church drifts towards obscuring certain truths, the teaching Church must forcefully uphold them so as to preserve the Catholic system whole and entire, even if the main current is not much interested in the truths concerned. Thus the undeniable fact that the three syllabuses are at present ignored does not rob them of the outstanding importance they intrinsically have. One cannot help noticing in this connection that it is precisely the coherence and continuity of these papal pronouncements which constitute tlieir chief fault in the eyes of the innovators, since the Church's emphatic reiteration of its teaching is held to block further development. In fact the Church dwells in a timeless truth by which she judges time. The Church's motto is bis in idem, or pluries in idem, or even semper in idem,48because she stands in a continual and unbreakable relationship with the first truth, so that when she judges the changing events which are truth's escort through time, it is the truth, not the events, which drives her on. 47.
We
will discuss this forgetfulness in paragraph 330ff. The categorical character of the encyclical's title immediately attracts attention by not employing the more reserved expressions of other doctrinal pronouncements. Instead of the usual formula non videntur consonare49 or something similar (which is in fact used here regarding polygenism), it is declared at the outset that the opinions to be dealt with are of a kind quae catholicae doctrinae fundamenta subruere minantur.50 It is only a threatened or prospective ruin, but the threat is real: not subruere videntur,51but subruere minantur. The errors are such as to threaten Catholic doctrine, even if they have not overthrown it completely. In the introduction to this catalogue, one characteristic of the crisis is mentioned which signals its importance and marks its novelty. The error which once came ab extra, from outside the Church, now comes ab intra; it is no longer a case of an external assault, but of an intestine evil; no longer an attempt to demolish the Church, but, in the famous phrase of Paul VI, a self-demolition of the Church. But there should be no room for false opinions in the Church, because in it human reason, without prejudice to its natural capacities, is always strengthened and widened in its scope by Revelation. The fundamental error however is precisely the postulate of independence from Revelation, and the errors which the encyclical is to describe are merely forms or denominations of it. So the Pyrrhonism essential to the modern mentality will mean our knowledge is not a grasping of the real, but merely the product of ever changing impressions of an ever elusive reality. Knowledge is independent of truth. Existentialism is also based on this principle of independence. For it, existing things have no relation to the divine ideas, those prior essences which participate in the absoluteness of the divine being. The encyclical reproves the modern mentality, not inasmuch as it is modern, but inasmuch as it claims to detach itself from that firmament of unchangeable values, and to give itself over wholly and solely to present existence. Even with corrections, this mentality cannot be reconciled with Catholic dogma. The following articles trace the descent of further errors, relating them all back to the error of creaturely independence. Historicism, being the consideration of existence detached from any fixed essence, finds reality only in movement, and gives rise to a universal mobilism. Indeed, once one does deny the transtemporal element in every temporal thing, which consists precisely in its fixed nature, being dissolves into becoming, to the exclusion of any abiding reality, even though in fact the latter is necessary in order to conceive of the very notion of becoming.53 The condemnation of sentimentalism too,54 is simply a condemnation of feeling when not viewed in the context of man as a whole. At the core of man is an essential relation to his own reason, and at the core of reason is an essence which, though created, participates in the absolute. The theoretical core of Pius XII's document is that Pyrrhonism, existentialism, mobilism and sentimentalism all draw their origin from a principle of independence, opposed to the principle on which Catholicism rests. The censure of particular errors deriving from this fundamental error is purely secondary and accessory, be they the denial of the possibility of metaphysics (whether Thomistic or not), the assertion of a universal evolutionism, scriptural criticism, religious naturalism, and other specific religious errors (among the most important being the denial of transubstantiation); and one should set these apart at a secondary level when one is trying to establish just where the very principle of Catholicism itself is being attacked. That principle is that everything anthropological depends on the divine, and that to deny this dependence is, as the document declares, to dissolve the foundations of every possible axiology.55 49.
“Do
not appear to harmonize.”
|
