PREFACE
The Letter which is here translated is but one expression of a movement which aims at vindicating the claims of the Roman Church to be the authoritative teacher of faith and morals to the Western world. The conviction which inspires this movement is that Rome, if she will but be true to her mission, inherits the duty and the power of proclaiming to the modern world all the truth which it needs to subdue the riotous energy of its life into obedience to the Divine purposes. The leaders of the movement believe that Rome has been the permanent witness to that Catholic temper in religion which was never so necessary in the interests of real religious influence and growth as at the present day; that even under all the aberrations of her momentary policy she has cherished it as the pearl of great price. And their sole desire is to remind her of the conditions under which alone she can continue to uphold that witness among Western peoples.
They are not rebels against authority. They would but remind authority of its nature, its origin, its purpose. They would remind those who are for the moment the guardians of authority in their Church that it consists, not in the imposition of arbitrary fiats, but in the recovery and crystallization of the faith which is vaguely diffused throughout and revealed in the common life. They would remind them that authority proceeds from the Holy Spirit—i.e., from all those movements of thought and action towards a higher human ideal which are the authentic effects of the operation of the Divine Spirit. They would remind them that authority exists to constitute a brotherhood of all men of goodwill, and not merely to procure formal order or enforce unquestioning submission in an exclusive society.
It is with this conception of authority that they approach the present head of their Church in order to justify their action and their methods. If they are attempting to apply a new and unfamiliar mode of apologetic, it is not in any light or frivolous spirit of innovation, but for high and serious reasons. It is, on the one hand, because the new learning has provided them with an instrument for more vividly presenting the traditional faith, and they dare not refuse this gift of God; it is, on the other, because all around them a world is coming to the birth which, if it is ever to accept the faith, must have it offered through the medium of its own fundamental presuppositions and certainties.
Neither this apologetic inspiration nor this apologetic necessity is a new thing. The Church has always in her moments of vigorous life hastened to appropriate to her high uses the knowledge to which the contemporary habit of thought had given a clear sanction. And she has equally at such moments gone out with unhesitating instinct to recognize and satisfy the genuine claims of contemporary life. She has learned from the world in order that she might teach the world. She has felt, even beyond her own power of analysing the fact, that the Divine revelation was given confusedly in great human movements of thought and action, and that it was her duty to elicit and order this revelation according to the Divine norm which she held in trust. In her practical use of that norm there has been at least a general consistency. In her theory of its explicit nature and character there has been much variation. The theory has varied not only from age to age, but among theologians of the same age. The norm has been represented now as a fixed deposit of miraculously revealed truth, and, again, as a miraculously guided expllcitation of that deposit; now as a rigid tradition to which growth was unnecessary, for which it was indeed impossible, and, again, as a tradition which had to grow in order to live. For the modern apologist this norm is also a tradition, and a growing tradition. But it is the tradition of the concrete logic of actual religious experience, not a tradition of the mere abstract logic of theological deduction. It is through the life of the risen Christ really lived in the Church that she, as the kernel of moral and religious humanity, becomes the witness to truth and the dispenser of it. She has no merely magical and miraculous power of conserving the truth so that it may magically and miraculously minister life. Her infallibility is not a magical and absolute gift, but a vital and therefore relative acquisition. And so it is that her methods of apologetic must vary if her claim to be the religious teacher of mankind is not to prove itself a vulgar deception haunted by the retribution of speedy exposure.
It is with this view of the nature of the religious tradition of Christendom that the authors of this Letter face the problem of justifying Christianity to the modern world. The reader will notice how anxiously they aim at placing themselves at the point of view of the student and thinker of to-day. In the spirit of true apostleship, they endeavour throughout to understand how the claim of Christianity to be the truth must present itself to the scientist and the critical historian. They trace the stages by which alone he will be able to recognize the validity of that claim. They understand that truth cannot be merely imposed and passively accepted, but must be actively sought and found. They see what the initial attitude of the critical historian towards the Bible and the Church must be. They know the process by which alone he can come to accept the Christian estimate of their value and significance. It is that attitude which they have here adopted, that process which they have here described. No apologetic which fails to take account of both can be really fruitful in our day. An apologetic is not needed for those who believe already. It is by its very nature intended for those who do not believe. The traditional apologetic is a superfluous demonstration of the positions involved in the antecedent belief. The true apologetic is the demonstration that the belief is the necessary outcome of positions which seem to be quite independent of it—positions which are given immediately in the profoundest experience of life and sincere reflection upon it.
It is the same apologetic preoccupation which determines the attitude of the authors towards metaphysics. They do not deny the need of a metaphysic, the craving of the human mind to conceive somehow of the ultimate reality. What they do deny is the sufficiency of any metaphysical explanation of the universe. For such explanations proceed on the assumption that it is the province of the intellect to establish an absolute conception of reahty which will be valid before all experience, and even apart from all experience. Experience must either be juggled with till it fits into this preliminary conception, or be finally left outside it as inherently irrational. But the modern habit of mind cannot be satisfied with either an arbitrary dogmatism or a despairing scepticism. It admits, indeed, that there is something prior to all experience, or, rather, that there is a governing element involved in all experience. But this element is not knowledge, but faith, the life-attitude which instinctively trusts human experience as determined by ultimate reality, and as making for a fuller expression and a clearer vision of that reality. The intellect works upon the data of this experience, under the guidance of the faith involved in it, to project a metaphysic which must be satisfied with being provisional and perfectible. The ultimate metaphysic can exist only in the infinite mind surveying infinite experience. And in religion especially the influence of an abstract metaphysic ought to be distrusted. There, especially, a metaphysic must be in constant and vital touch with experience. What we know of God and the whole world of ultimate reality is but certain effects wrought in the soul of man. It is only by observing those effects and the laws of their production that we can hope to clarify our meagre intellectual concepts of God and the world of ultimate reality. Religion is the original and independent form of experience through which alone a satisfying metaphysic can be gradually established. But the prejudice of theologians has been to regard rellgion as dependent for its existence and preservation upon the guarantee of a previously revealed metaphysic. The authors of this Letter have very shrewdly pointed out that in practice religious teaching has always dispensed with its supposed metaphysical basis, and grounded itself in experience. Even the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Eucharist, the most metaphysical in their precise definition of all the doctrines of the Church, cannot be taught to simple souls save in terms of that actual religious experience out of which the doctrinal definitions originally grew.
Yet it may naturally be felt by some by some that the authors of the Letter have, in their anxiety to place themselves at the modern point of view, especially in philosophical questions, conceded to it more than was absolutely necessary—more, even, than it itself demands. "It is our mind," they say in the name of modern critical philosophy, "which by its operation creates the things whose aspects only at a given moment we know" ("È il nostro spirito che agisce e crea le cose delle quali noi conosciamo solo gli aspetti in un dato momento"). There may seem, here and in the passage which follows, to be a denial of anything immediate and objective in our knowledge of reality. Such a representation of the results of critical philosophy can hardly be justified. That the mind in its operations is from the very beginning in immediate and vital touch with a permanent and objective reality, that its subjective representations are consistently determined by the character of that objective world as once and for all given, that the categories of the understanding are in their last analysis the forms of a necessary relation between our own minds and the world of fact, and therefore possess something of an objective character—these are positions which critical philosophy not only does not deny, but increasingly tends to affirm. Yet with this reservation—and it is a reservation which probably the authors of this Letter would themselves make—it remains true that our knowledge is "subjective, relative, and susceptible of transformation and variation according to the evolution of the human mind."
Liberals outside the Roman Communion are still a little bewildered by the boldness and courage of this movement within the Roman pale. They are still haunted by the invincible prejudice that no good thing can come out of Rome. They believe that a crusade on behalf of truth and freedom, undertaken under the conditions which communion with Rome imposes, is chimerical and foredoomed to failure. But, after all, no project is chimerical for which men are willing to fight and to suffer, and no project is worth much which does not impose upon its champions this double necessity. The men who are resisting absolutism in the Roman Church know well that it is a mountain they are attempting to remove. But they have not set their hands to the task without counting the cost and remembering the conditions of its successful accomplishment. If they are fighting absolutism, they are fighting it in the unhesitating faith that it is the last and worst of heresies. We who are outside the Roman Communion are too ready to believe that absolutism is the indispensable dogma, the normal and necessary form, of Roman religion. We may, indeed, be pardoned for holding that behef, for a triumphant Ultramontanism has for a whole century been dinning it into our ears. It is, as a Liberal Catholic has recently affirmed,[1] the very triumph of Ultramontanism to have created that belief. But these men are fighting this particular form of heresy, and they will continue to fight until their Church has been delivered from the grip of the monster which is now strangling its spiritual life.
Nor, apart from the present decisive influence of the absolutist idea a absolutist party within the Roman Church, is it unnatural that the attempt to revive in Christianity the temper of Catholic intelligence and sympathy should be made within that Church, just as it is being made elsewhere. Rome is still the vital nucleus of that society which exists as an instrument for the making of the kingdom of God. She alone reaches out into all lands, speaks through all languages, reconciles all differences of human condition and circumstance in the unity of one great human hope. Her dissolution would be the dissolution of organized Christianity over a large part of the Western world. Even Protestants ought to recognize that Protestantism is but her provincial ally, witnessing for a season in certain outposts of her dominions to the claims of truth and freedom which she, in her perverted conception of the method of unity, has for a moment forgotten or denied. Whatever she may think, Protestantism has something to teach her which it has learned through four centuries of stern and relentless struggle against her arrogant and overbearing mood. The truth is that the merely controversial struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism is a thing of the past. The real present struggle between them is a struggle for mutual assimilation. Each needs the other, each has begun to feel that need, and, as is perhaps natural, each is unwilling to admit it too frankly. But it is to the honour of the Liberal Catholics that they believe enough in their own Church to face courageously and sincerely the character and the measure of her needs, and to seek to supply them whencesoever it may be possible.
Yet it is not from Protestantism in its narrow and ecclesiastical sense that the Roman Church can derive that which she most needs, just as it is not in an ultramontane Romanism that Protestantism can find that Catholic spirit and temper after which it longs. The world of religious reality, the world of moral aspiration and endeavour, has widened out beyond the range of these two conflicting forces. They both alike have to reconquer a world which is steadily slipping away from their grasp. And to reconquer that world they must understand it and help it to understand them. The Church cannot effectively accomplish her work of apostolate in a world which she has cut off from her sympathy and intelligence. The weapons of excommunication and anathema may avail in a society which believes in their power, which acknowledges the authority of him who wields them; but it is as ludicrously futile to utter an anathema against an unbelieving world as it is to try to frighten a man of mature years by calling "Bogie!" The authors of this Letter are but attempting to remind their Church of the conditions under which alone she can hope to accomplish successfully her mission to this generation. And even if some may think that they have occasionally conceded more than the actual conditions of thought and knowledge require, yet all generous minds will gratefully recognize the high nobility of their aim and the general wisdom and insight of their actual attempt.
July, 1907.
⁂ I have appended to my translation an occasional footnote in explanation of allusions which might be obscure to the English reader.
- ↑ See The Nation of June 15, 1907, p. 597