IV. The Essence of Catholicism

LET US NOW take up the Catholic, whether Pauline or Athanasian, solution to our inner vital problem, the hunger for immortality.

Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty currents of spirituality, the one Jewish and the other Hellenic, each of which had already influenced the other, and Rome gave it all the stamp of practicality and social continuity.

It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat hastily, that primitive Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after death was not clearly manifested, but that it proclaimed instead an early end of the world and the establishment of the kingdom of God, a belief known as chiliasm. But are not these two beliefs one and the same? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which was not perhaps very precisely defined, may well be said to be a kind of implied understanding, a tacit supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel; and it is only the spiritual outlook of many readers of the Gospel today, an outlook counter to that of the Christians from among whom the Gospel came into being, that prevents them from seeing the obvious. Doubtless all that speculation about the Second Coming of Christ from among the clouds clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the living and the dead, to open the kingdom of heaven to some and to cast others into Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may all of it be understood in a chiliastic sense. And in the Gospel (Mark 9:1), Christ is made to say: “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God,” that is, seen it in their own generation. And in the same chapter, verse 10, it is said of Peter, James, and John, who had gone up the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus and had heard him speak of rising again from among the dead, that “they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean.” In any event, the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and raison d'être of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matthew 22:29-32; Mark 12:24-27; Luke 16:22-31, 20:34-37; John 5:24-29; 6:40, 54, 58; 8:51; 11:25, 56; 14:2, 19; and most especially Matthew 27:52, which tells of how, at the resurrection of Christ, “many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”

And this was not a natural resurrection. No, the Christian faith was born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised him up again, and that this resurrection was actually accomplished. And this was no mere immortality of the soul in the philosophic manner (see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte. Prolegomena, V, 4). In the eyes of the first Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not something pertaining to the natural order. The teaching of the Divine Scriptures, as Nemesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it was, according to Lactantius, a gift—and, as such, gratuitous—of God. But we shall discuss this later.

Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual streams, the Judaic and the Hellenic, each of which had reached, on its own account, if not a precise definition of, at least a precise yearning for, another life. Among the Jews, faith in another life was neither general nor clear; but they were led in that direction by their faith in a personal living God, and their entire spiritual history consists of the evolution of this concept.

Yahweh, the Judaic God, was at first merely one god among many others, the god of the people of Israel, revealed amid the tempestuous thunder on Mount Sinai. He was such a jealous god that He required that worship should be paid to Him alone, and it was by way of mono-cultism that the Jews arrived at monotheism. He was worshipped as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity, and He was the god of battles. But this God of social and warlike origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return later, became more intimate and personal in the prophets, and in doing so became more individual and more universal. He is Yahweh, who does not love Israel for being a son, but takes Israel for a son from love (Hosea 11:1). And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, brings with it faith in the eternalization of the individual man, a faith which already dawned among the Pharisees even before Christ.

Hellenic culture, for its part, finally discovered death, and to discover death is to discover the hunger for immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not of an initial nature but of a final one, marking not the start but the close of a civilization. They represent the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo, the religion of redemption. But always persisting underneath was the popular and inner religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors. “In so far as it is possible to speak of a ‘Theology of Delphi,’ the popular belief in the survival of the soul after death and the cult of the disembodied soul formed two of the most important articles in its creed,” writes Rohde. Both the Titanic and the Dionysiac existed, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a prisoner in a jail (cf. Rohde, Psyche, “Die Orphiker,” 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was no philosophical principle. The attempt by Empedocles to harmonize a hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural science can not by itself corroborate the axiom of the perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support for a theological speculation. The first Greek philosophers affirmed immortality by a contradiction, by abandoning natural philosophy and entering into the field of theology, by affirming a Dionysiac and Orphic dogma and not an Apollonian one. But “an immortality of the human soul as such, by virtue of its nature and composition—as the imperishable force of divinity in the mortal body—never became a real part of the belief of the Greek populace.” (Rohde, Psyche.)

Recall Plato’s Phaedo and, later, the Neoplatonic lucubrations. The longing for personal immortality is already clear, a longing which, not altogether satisfied by reason, led to Hellenic pessimism. As Pfleiderer so well observes: “No people ever appeared on earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence . . . but no people changed so completely their notion of the value of life. The Hellenism which ends in the religious speculations of neo-Pythagorism and Neoplatonism came to view the world, which at one time had seemed to it so joyful and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period of trial never to be quickly enough traversed.” Nirvana is a Hellenic idea.

Thus, Greek and Jew, each in his own way, arrived at the true discovery of death, a discovery which causes nations, as it does men, to enter upon spiritual puberty, the awareness of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that humanity engenders the living God. It is the discovery of death that reveals God to us, and the death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, the death of the man who should not have died and did die.

Such a discovery, the discovery of immortality, prepared by Judaic and Hellenic religious developments, was the specifically Christian contribution. And its achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, that Hellenized Jewish Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus, and therefore he revealed him as Christ. “It may be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For Paul it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, a substitute for his not having known Jesus personally,” as Weizsäcker says. He did not know Jesus, but he felt Jesus born again in himself, and thus he could say: “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). And he preached the Cross, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23); and the central doctrine for this convert apostle was the resurrection of Christ. For him the important thing was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what He did in life: not His ethical teaching, but His religious and immortalizing work. And it was Paul who wrote those immortal words (1 Cor. 15:12-19):

Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. . . . Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

And it may be affirmed that thenceforward whoever does not believe in the carnal resurrection of Christ may be a Christ-lover but not strictly speaking a Christian. It is true that Justin Martyr could say that “all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they be taken for atheists, like Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks, and others such”; but is this Martyr a martyr, that is, a witness to Christianity? No, he is not.

And it was around this doctrine, inwardly experienced by Paul, the doctrine of the resurrection and immortality of Christ—which provides assurance for the resurrection and the immortality of each individual believer—that the whole of Christology was formed. The man-God, the Word incarnate, appeared on earth so that in his own way man might become God, that is, immortal. And the Christian God, Father of Christ, a necessarily anthropomorphic God, is the God who created the world for man, for each man—as the catechism of Christian Doctrine that we were made to memorize at school tells us. And the end purpose of redemption, despite all appearances caused by ethical deviations from a dogma rightly religious, was to save us from death rather than from sin, or from sin insofar as sin implies death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for me, for each one of us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His creature. Malebranche asserted that the first man fell so that Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us because man had fallen.

After Paul, the years and the generations of Christians followed one another, and they developed the central dogma and its consequences toward assuring faith in the immortality of the individual soul; and then came the Council of Nicaea, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose name had now become a battle-standard, an incarnation of the faith of the populace. Athanasius was a man of little learning but great faith, of the people’s faith above all, and driven by the hunger for immortality. And he stood against Arianism, which like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism threatened, even though unwittingly, the foundations of his faith. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher, a teacher of ethics, the most perfect man and therefore the guarantor that we may all attain to supreme perfection. But Athanasius felt that Christ could not make us as gods if He had not first made Himself God; if His Divinity had been communicated, He could not have communicated it to us. “He was not first man and then became God,” he said, “but rather first God and then became man, the better to deify us (Orat. I, 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored. And thus he established the separation between nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological, or even, strictly speaking, the ethical Christ; he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, Harnack says that he is essentially docetic—that is, apparential—because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Could it possibly be the so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in the form of myth or of a social atom?

This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have meant the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it merely served as a bridge to carry the initiated to Christianity, that is, from reason to faith. In the eyes of this same learned historian of dogmas it is a sign of a perverse state of affairs that a man like Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of the living communion with God, should at the same time have effaced the historical Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was personally unknown to Paul or to Athanasius—or to Harnack, for that matter. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subject to the scalpel of exegesis; the Catholic Christ, meanwhile, the truly historical one, lives on, and He is the one who lives through the centuries, guaranteeing faith in personal immortality and salvation.

Athanasius possessed the supreme audacity of faith, that of affirming mutually contradictory propositions: “The complete contradiction that exists in the brought in its train a whole army of contradictions, which multiplied as thought advanced,” says Harnack. Yes, thus it was, and thus it had to be. And he adds: “Dogma took leave for all time of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the contra-rational.” What it did in actual fact was to get closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Value judgements are not only never subject to rationalization, they are anti-rational.

At Nicaea then, as later at the Vatican, victory was with the idiots—using this word strictly in its primitive and etymological sense—with the simple-minded, with the unpolished and headstrong bishops, representatives of the authentic spirit of humanity, of the spirit of the people, of the spirit that does not want to die (whatever reason may say) and that seeks a guarantee, the most material guarantee possible, for its desire.

Quid ad aeternitatem? That is the capital question. And the Creed ends with the phrase resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi, the resurrection of the dead and the life to come. In the abandoned cemetery of Mallona, in my native city of Bilbao, there stands a tombstone with the following words engraved:

Though we lie here turned to dust,

In you, Our Lord, we place our trust

That we will live again all clothed

In the flesh and skin we used to wear.

Or as the catechism has it: “With the same bodies and souls that they had.” This feeling is so strong that orthodox Catholic doctrine goes so far as to say that the happiness of the blessed is not altogether perfect until they have recovered their bodies. Fray Pedro Malón de Chaide, of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque, tells us that there is “lamentation in heaven, and their lament is due to the fact that they are not altogether whole in heaven, for only their souls are present, and, although they can not suffer pain inasmuch as they see God, in whom they take ineffable delight, nevertheless they seem not entirely satisfied. And they will be so only when they are clothed in their own bodies.”

And corresponding to that central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ is that central sacrament and axis of popular Catholic piety, the sacrament of the Eucharist. In this sacrament, the body of Christ, the bread of immortality, is bestowed.

This sacrament is authentically realistic—dinglich, as they say in German and which could be translated without undue violence as “material,” “concrete.” It is the sacrament most authentically ex opere operato, virtuous in itself; something for which the Protestants substitute the idealist sacrament of the Word. It is a matter, in the end—and I say it with all due respect, but without relinquishing the expressiveness of the phrase—of eating and drinking God, the Eternalizer, taking sustenance from Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was receiving Communion one day, at the monastery of the Incarnation, during her second year as Prioress, a week after St. Martin’s day, the priest, who was St. John of the Cross, broke the Host in two, in order to divide it between Teresa and another nun, and Teresa recalls thinking it was not for lack of Hosts that he did it but only so as to mortify her, “for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size, though I knew that even in the smallest piece the Lord is present in His entirety.” Here we see how reason goes one way and feeling the other. And, as far as feeling is concerned, what difference does it make that a thousand and one problems arise from reflecting rationally on the mystery of this sacrament? What is a divine body? Was Christ’s body, qua body, divine? What is an immortal and immortality-making body? What is a substance separated from its accidental properties? What is the substance of a body? Nowadays we have become very subtle in the matter of materiality and substantiality; but even some of the Church Fathers did not find the immateriality of God Himself to be as definite and clear as it is for us. The Sacrament of the Eucharist is the eternal-life-giver par excellence, and therefore the axis of the piety of the Catholic populace, and, if it can properly be so stated, the most specifically religious.

The specifically Catholic religious quality is immortalization, and not justification in the Protestant mode. The latter is, strictly speaking, a matter of ethics. It is in Kant—however orthodox Protestants may dislike the notion—that Protestantism reached its penultimate conclusion: religion rests upon morality, and not, as in Catholicism, morality upon religion.

Preoccupation with sin has never been a matter of such anguish, or at least of such apparent anguish, among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this situation. And it may be that we conserve, more than they do, the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan concept of sin as something material and infectious and hereditary, to be cured by baptism and absolution. All of Adam’s descendants sinned when Adam sinned, and they sinned almost materially, and his sin was transmitted almost as a material illness is transmitted. Renan, who had a Catholic upbringing, was right therefore when he turned against Amiel, the Protestant, who had charged Renan with not giving due importance to sin. Protestantism, on the other hand, obsessed with the notion of justification—taken more in an ethical sense than in any other, though the ethics are dressed out in religious terms—in the end neutralizes and almost obliterates eschatology, and abandons the Nicene symbology, falls into confessional anarchy, into pure religious individualism and vague aesthetic, ethical or cultural religiosity. What we might call “otherworldliness,” Jenseitigkeit, gives way to “this-worldliness,” Diesseitigkeit. And this happened despite Kant himself, who wished to preserve “other-worldliness”-—after ruining it. The religious coarseness of Lutheranism is due to its earthly vocation and its passive trust in God. It was almost at the point of expiring in the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of the Aufklärung, when it was galvanized somewhat by pietism, which infused into it some of the religious sap of Catholicism. Thus the appropriateness of Oliveira Martins in his History of Iberian Civilization (IV, 3), when he writes: “Catholicism produced heroes. Protestantism produced sensible, happy societies, rich and free in respect to institutions and external economy, but incapable of great actions because their religion had begun to destroy in the heart of man that which makes him prone to daring and noble sacrifice.”

Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolution, that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example, and note to what extent eschatology is reduced. Ritschl himself tells us:

The question regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that Divine operation. But if the ideal of eternal life be applied merely to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind. Hopes and presentiments, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes, or has a presentiment of. Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything, i.e., of understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is possible now.

All this is most rational, but . . .

In the first edition of Melanchthon’s Loci Communes, 1521, which is the first Lutheran theological work, the author omits all Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr. Herrmann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian’s commerce with God (Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott)—a book whose first chapter deals with the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, a book which Harnack feels is the most perfect Lutheran manual—tells us, in another work, with regard to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that “the effective knowledge of God and Christ, wherein faith lives, is something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian doctrine that cannot help man to recognize his sins, attain the grace of God and serve Him truly. Until that time [that is, until Luther], a good deal that in no wise could contribute to give man a free heart or a clear conscience had been accepted in the Church as doctrina sacra.” For my part, I cannot imagine liberty of heart or tranquility of conscience where there is no surety of their continuance after death. “The desire to save one’s soul,” Herrmann continues, “should finally lead men to know and comprehend the effective doctrine of salvation.” And in his book on the Christian’s commerce with God this eminent Lutheran doctor repeatedly comes back to talk of trust in God, of peace of conscience, of a certainty of salvation that is not strictly speaking certainty of everlasting life but rather of a remission of sins.

And I have read in a work by a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that the highest reaches attained by Protestantism in the conceptual order have been in the art of music, where Bach has given it its most forceful artistic expression. This, then, is what Protestantism comes down to—celestial music! On the other hand we could say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is to be found in the most material, tangible, and permanent of arts (for sounds are carried off by the wind), namely, in painting and sculpture, in the Christ of Velazquez, that Christ who is always in the death throes and never stops dying—so that we may be given life.

And it is not a question of Catholicism abandoning ethics. Not at all! No modern religion could ignore ethics in any case. But our religion is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics—though the learned doctors may protest—or eschatology put at the service of ethics. What else are those outrageous and eternal pains of Hell which so ill accord with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind the words from the Theologia Germanica, the mystic manual that Luther read, which are put in God’s mouth: “If I am to reward thee for thy evil and wickedness, I must do it with goodness, for I am and have nothing else.” And Christ said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; and there is no man who knows what he does. But it has been necessary to turn religion into a kind of police system, for the benefit of the social order, and hence the idea of hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological while Protestantism is predominantly ethical. Catholicism is a compromise between the two, with the stress on the eschatological. The most authentic Catholic morality, monastic asceticism, is an eschatological morality directed toward the salvation of the individual soul rather than toward the maintenance of society. And, may not the cult of virginity conceal a certain obscure notion that the perpetuation of ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation? Ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly speaking, the important thing for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. There is no need to take literally, but only as a lyrical, or rather rhetorical, effusion of words the famous sonnet which begins

I am not moved, my Lord, to love Thee,

by Thy promised heaven. . . .

The real sin—perhaps the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no remission—is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for ourselves. We have already heard it said in Spain that to be a liberal, that is, a heretic, is worse than to be an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

Still and all, why should the infallibility of a man, the Pope, give rise to scandal? What difference does it make whether we say a book—the Bible—is infallible, or a society of men, or the Church, or a single man? Does it in any way change the essence of the rational difficulty? Inasmuch as the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is no more rational than that of a single man, this latter concept, the supreme outrage in the eyes of reason, was bound to be affirmed.

The vital principle asserts itself, and, in asserting itself creates, making use of its enemy rationality, a whole edifice of dogma, and the Church defends it against rationalism, against Protestantism, against Modernism. The Church is defending life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right, for his discovery, at its inception and until it became assimilated to the economy of human thought, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. The Church opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal expressly created to be made eternal. Lastly, Pius IX, the first pontiff to be declared infallible, declared himself irreconcilable with modern civilization so-called. And he did right.

Loisy, the ex-Catholic abbé, wrote:

I simply say that the Church and theology have not favored the scientific movement, but have hindered it rather, insofar as it lay in their power, on certain decisive occasions. Above all else I say that Catholic education has not associated itself with or accommodated itself to this movement. Theology has acted and still acts as if it were in itself in possession of a science of nature and a science of history, together with that general philosophy of nature and history accruing to it as a result of its scientific knowledge. It might be supposed that the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even by Vatican Council definition, must not be distinct in practice. Everything goes along almost as if theology had nothing to learn from modern science, whether natural or historical, and as if it was in a position and had the right to exercise a direct and absolute supervision over all the activities of the human spirit.

And thus the Church must be, and thus it does in fact act, in its struggle against the Modernism of which Loisy was the learned leader.

The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle for life. Would it indeed be possible for life, life seeking assurances of survival, to tolerate a Loisy, a Catholic priest, in his assertion that the resurrection of the Savior is not a fact of historical order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone? And then, on the other hand, if you read an explanation of the central dogma, of the resurrection of Christ, in such a first-rate work as Dogme et Critique, by E. Le Roy, where will you find any solid ground upon which to build our hopes? Is it not obvious that the question is not so much the immortal life of Christ, reducible perhaps to one life in the collective Christian consciousness, but rather the guaranteeing of our own personal resurrection in body and soul? This new psychological apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, even as the Jews, seek for a sign, something that can be grasped with all the powers of the soul and all the senses of the body—and with hands and feet and mouth too, if possible.

But, alas, we perceive no sign! Reason attacks, and faith, which does not feel secure without reason, must come to terms with it. And thus appear those tragic contradictions and lacerations of consciousness. We need security, certainty, a sign, and they give us motiva credibilitatis—motives for credibility—-upon which to build the rationale obsequium; and, although, according to St. Augustine, faith precedes reason, fides praecedit rationem, that very same doctor of the Church and bishop sought to go from faith to understanding, per fidem ad intellectum, and sought to believe in order to understand, credo ut intelligam. How far it all is from that superb expression of Tertullian: et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile est!: “and he was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible!”; and his sublime credo quia absurdum!: “I believe because it is impossible,” an outrage to the rationalists! How far St. Augustine’s thought is from Pascal’s il faut s'abêtir and from Donoso Cortés’ “human reason loves the absurd,” which he must have learned from the great Joseph de Maistre!

The authority of tradition and the revelation of the word of God was quarried to find a cornerstone, and the principle of unanimous consent was arrived at. Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est erratum, sed traditum, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries later, that “certitude, the principle of life and intelligence, . . . is, if I may be allowed the expression, a social product.” But here, as in so many other instances, the supreme formula was provided by that great Catholic and representative of popular, vital Catholicism, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: “I do not believe it possible to point to a single universally useful judgement which is not true.” Here is the true Catholic norm: the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is of greater, of more sovereign, utility than the immortality of the soul? “Since everything is uncertain, either we must believe all men or none,” said Lactantius. But that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Henry Suso, the Dominican, asked the Eternal Wisdom for a single word to indicate what love was, and when the answer was given: “All creatures proclaim that it is I,” Suso, His servant, replied: “Ah, my Lord, that does not suffice a yearning soul.” Faith does not feel secure either with consensus or with tradition or with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason.

And thus was scholastic theology wrought, and, with it, its handmaiden—ancilla theologiae—scholastic philosophy; and then this handmaiden turned against her mistress and answered back. Scholasticism, a magnificent cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanics were resolved for all time, but still an adobe cathedral, gradually gave way to so-called natural theology, which is merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was made, where possible, to uphold dogmas by the use of reason, to demonstrate at least that though they were superrational they were not contra-rational, and they were furnished with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy: such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII. It is no longer a question of forcing the acceptance of dogma, but of its medieval and Thomist philosophical interpretation. It is not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must also negotiate the difficulties of transubstantiation and of substance separated from accidents, breaking with the whole of the modern rational conception of substantiality.

But over against this stands implicit faith, the faith of the charcoal burner, the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (Life, Chapter XXV, 2), do not wish to fall back upon theology. “Do not ask me the reason of that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will know how to answer you,” as we were made to learn in our catechism. And it was for this, among other reasons, that the priesthood was instituted, so that the teaching Church might be the depository, a “reservoir instead of river,” as Phillips Brooks said, of theological secrets.

“The victory of the Nicene Creed,” says Harnack,

was a victory of the priests over the faith of the Christian people. The Logos-doctrine had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Nicene-Cappadocian formula as the fundamental Confession of the Church, made it perfectly impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the Christian Faith taking as their guide the form in which it was presented in the doctrine of the Church. The thought that Christianity is the revelation of something incomprehensible became more and more a familiar one to men’s minds.

And so, in truth, it is.

And why so? Because faith, that is, life, no longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed: it wanted to rationalize itself. And it sought to establish a foundation, not against reason, which is where it stands, but upon reason, that is, within reason itself. The nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus, which maintains that law and truth depend on the free and inscrutable will of God rather than on any essence, accentuated the supreme irrationality of religion and endangered its position among the majority of believers, who were people endowed with adult reasoning powers rather than with the faith of charcoal burners. And hence came the triumph of Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to believe in the existence of God; anathema falls on anyone who, though he believe in His existence, does not believe it is demonstrable by rational arguments or believes it has not so far been irrefutably demonstrated by rational arguments. In this connection, however, perhaps we should cite the words of Pohle: “If eternal salvation were to depend on the axioms of mathematics, we should have to expect that the most odious human sophistry would have already attacked their universal validity with the same forcefulness they now use against God, the soul, and Christ.”

The fact is that Catholicism oscillates between mysticism and rationalism: mysticism which is the intimate experiencing of the living God in Christ, an untransmissible experience, in which there is a danger, however, of our own personalities’ being swallowed in God, thus losing our vital drive, and rationalism, which is its opponent (see Weizsäcker, op. cit.); Catholicism oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion. Apocalyptic enthusiasm gradually changed to Neoplatonic mysticism, which theology then thrust into the background. The Church was apprehensive at the imaginative excesses which were taking the place of faith and creating Gnostic extravagances. But it had to make a kind of pact with Gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason was easily vanquished. And thus was Catholic dogma made into a system of more or less harmonized contradictions. The Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism; and in Christ humanity and divinity made a pact, and nature and grace covenanted, and grace and free will, and free will and divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as Herrmann says, that “as soon as a religious idea is developed to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other ideas belonging in equal measure to the life of religion.” And it is this conflict which lends to Catholicism its deeply vital dialectic. But at what price?

The price paid, it must be said, is the suppression of intellectual demands in believers who possess adult reasoning power. They are required to believe all or nothing, to accept the totality of dogma or face the loss of all merit if the smallest part is rejected. The result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, is that in France and Spain there are many who have passed from rejecting Papism to absolute atheism, because “the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.” Here lies, in all truth, the terrible danger of believing too much! Or no! The terrible danger lies in another quarter: in attempting to believe with one’s reason rather than with one’s life.

The Catholic solution to our problem, to our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of our own soul, satisfies the will, and, therefore, satisfies life; but, in attempting to give a basis in reason by means of dogmatic theology it fails to satisfy reason. And reason has its own exigencies, as imperious as those of life. There is no use trying to force ourselves to take for super-rational what clearly strikes us as contra-rational, nor is it any good wanting to be a charcoal burner if one is not one. Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is essentially a rationalist category.

Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution—or rather, dissolution—of our problem.