"The truth shall make you free" (John viii, 32).
What is Catholicism? By that question we do not merely ask what is that characteristic quality which distinguishes Catholicism from other forms of Christianity; we go deeper than that, and seek to discover what is its governing idea and what are the forces set in motion by this idea. We ask what is the single basic thought, what is the essential form that gives life to the great structure which we call Catholicism? Regarded from the outside Catholicism has the appearance of a confused mass of conflicting forces, of an unnatural synthesis, of a mixture of foreign, nay contradictory, elements. And for that reason there have been those who have called it a complex of opposites. The religious historian, Heiler, believes that he can discern as many as seven essentially different strata in a cross-section of this vast structure.[1] So enormously rich and manifold and conflicting do the particular elements of Catholicism seem to the student of comparative religion, that he supposes that he must at the outset discard the notion of an organic development of a primitive Christianity which was planted by Christ Himself, and must regard Catholicism as the coalescence of evangelical and non-evangelical elements, of Jewish and heathen and primitive constituents, as a vast syncretism which has simply taken up into itself all those religious forms in which men have ever expressed their religious striving and hope, and has fused them together into a unity. And so, for the religious historian, Catholicism becomes a microcosm of the world of religion.[2]
We Catholics do not quarrel with the methods of the religious historian, so long as he keeps within his proper limits, within the limits of historical data and proved historical fact, and so long as he does not claim in his classification of religious types to pass decisive judgment upon the essential nature of the religious structure which he has under examination. We Catholics acknowledge readily, without any shame, nay with pride, that Catholicism cannot be identified simply and wholly with primitive Christianity, nor even with the Gospel of Christ, in the same way that the great oak cannot be identified with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical identity, but an organic identity. And we go further and say that thousands of years hence Catholicism will probably be even richer, more luxuriant, more manifold in dogma, morals, law and worship than the Catholicism of the present day. A religious historian of the fifth millennium A.D. will without difficulty discover in Catholicism conceptions and forms and practices which derive from India, China and Japan, and he will have to recognize a far more obvious complex of opposites." It is quite true, Catholicism is a union of contraries. But contraries are not contradictories. Wherever there is life, there you must have conflict and contrary. Even in purely biblical Christianity, and especially in Old Testament religion, these conflicts and contraries may be observed. For only so is there growth and the continual emergence of new forms. The Gospel of Christ would have been no living gospel, and the seed which He scattered no living seed, if it had remained ever the tiny seed of A.D. 33, and had not struck root, and had not assimilated foreign matter, and had not by the help of this foreign matter grown up into a tree, so that the birds of the air dwell in its branches. So we are far from begrudging the religious historian the pleasure of reading off the inner growth of Catholicism by means of the annual rings of its trunk, and of specifying all those elements which its living force has appropriated from foreign sources. But we refuse to see in these elements thus enumerated the essence of Catholicism, or even to grant that they are "structural elements of Catholicism" in the sense that Catholicism did not achieve historical importance save through them. For the Catholic is intimately conscious that Catholicism is ever the same, yesterday and to-day, that its essential nature was already present and manifest when it began its journey through the world, that Christ Himself breathed into it the breath of life, and that He Himself at the same time gave the young organism those germinal aptitudes which have unfolded themselves in the course of the centuries in regular adaptation to the needs and requirements of its environment. Catholicism recognizes in itself no element that is inwardly foreign to it, that is not itself, that does not derive from its original nature.
And so, with this consciousness, Catholicism finds in-adequate all those descriptions of its essential nature which are based merely on the study of comparative religion. For such descriptions are superficial, they touch only the hem of its garment. They are in some sort like the naive, childish, not to say silly conceptions of certain heated controversialists, for whom Catholicism is lust of power, saint-worship and "jesuitry." Such people have not discerned that deep source whence its life in all its manifestations flows forth, and which gives the whole an organic unity. "He has the parts within his hand, but not, alack! the spirit band."[3] The attempt of the religious historian is at its best like an attempt to explain the life of a living cell by mere enumeration of all the material that forms it. To describe a thing is not to explain it fully. And so this purely descriptive research calls for something beyond itself, for a scientific investigation into the essential nature of Catholicism.
The Catholic of a living faith, and he alone, can make this investigation. Our investigation goes only so deep as our love goes. An attitude of mere neutrality, or a cold realism is of no use here. Or, rather, only the man who himself lives in the Catholic life-stream, who in his own life daily feels the forces which pulsate through the vast body of Catholicism and which make it what it is: only he can know the full meaning and complete reality of it. Just as the loving child alone can truly know the character of its beloved mother, and just as the deepest elements of that character, the tenderness and intimacies of her maternal love, cannot be demonstrated by argument but only learnt by experience, just so only the believing and loving Catholic can see into the heart of Catholicism, and feeling, living, experiencing, discover with that "esprit de finesse" of which Pascal speaks, that is with the comprehensive intuition of his innermost soul, the secret forces and fundamental motive powers of its being. And so an investigation into the nature of Catholicism inevitably becomes a confession of faith, an expression of the Catholic consciousness. It is nothing else, and seeks to be nothing else, than the simple analysis of this consciousness, and becomes of itself an analysis of the Church's self-consciousness. It is the answer to the question: How does the Catholic experience his Church, how does it work on him, where lie for him the creative forces of Catholicism, the intimate center of its creative being?
It is no mere accident that this question has become at this very hour so much alive, and that the answer to it is occupying the attention of others besides those who belong to the household of the faith. Friedrich Heiler points in emphatic terms to this growing interest in, and understanding of, Catholicism. "The Roman Church," he writes, "is exercising today a very strong attraction on the non-Catholic world. The German Benedictine monasteries, especially Beuron and Maria Laach, have become places of pilgrimage for non-Catholics, who find inspiration in the Catholic liturgy there practiced. The rising high-church movement in German Protestantism is drawing nearer and nearer to the Roman Church, and one of its leaders has already returned to her bosom. More considerable still is the conversion movement in England. Whole Anglican convents and monasteries are going over to the Church of Rome. A vigorous Catholic propaganda is promoting and intensifying the existing trend towards Catholicism. The Roman Church is today making powerful efforts to win back all Christians separated from her, in the East and in the West. There has been founded over the tomb of St. Boniface a society for the re-union of the Christian churches.... Catholic voices are already proclaiming with assurance of victory the imminent collapse of Protestantism."[4] Heiler is correct in discerning a revival of the Catholic Church even in the souls of non-Catholics. But he is wrong in speaking of that "assurance of victory" with which Catholics are alleged to be proclaiming the imminent collapse of Protestantism. The phrase is a profane and unholy one. It degrades religion and makes it a party affair. When we are treating of religion we should have humility, reverence, thankfulness and joy, but no dogmatical assurance of victory. The future of Protestantism: that is God's business. And it rests with Him whether the West is to return from its diaspora, from its dispersion and disintegration, home to the mother Church, in whose bosom all were once united as one family. All that we can do is to give testimony to the truth, to pray God to open all hearts to this truth, and to make it ever more manifest to the best minds among us, that the great and urgent task of the West is to close at long last the unwholesome breach that has divided us for centuries, to create a new spiritual unity, a religious center, and so to prepare the only possible foundation for a rebuilding and rebirth of Western civilization. We thankfully recognize that there is a daily increasing appreciation of the urgency of this task, and that the times are past in which men regarded Catholicism as a compound of stupidity, superstition and lust of power.
Two reasons may be given for this revival of the Catholic ideal in the Western soul, the one external the other internal. The first reason lies in the direct impact on our minds of the appalling consequences of the Great War. We have witnessed the collapse of great states and traditions of culture. On the battlefields of the Great War lie strewn the ruins of former political and economic greatness. The eye turns inevitably from this sight to that world-embracing society which in the midst of this ruin stands out like some unshaken rocky peak, serene and untouched by the catastrophe, and which alone of all the political, economic and religious structures of the world has suffered no collapse, but is as young today as on the day of its birth. We are experiencing today before our very eyes, we are seeing realized before us, that irresistible, unconquerable, living might of the Catholic Church, which the great English historian, Macaulay, once described in the eloquent words: "There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheater. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila.... Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's?"[5] That is the vision that amid the desolation of the present holds our gaze spellbound. We discern the immortality, the vigorous life, the eternal youth of the old, original Church. And the question rises to many lips, and to the lips of the best among us: What is the source of this strong life? And can the Church impart it, and will she impart it, to the dying western world?
The second reason which especially moves the modem man, the man of the Great War and the revolution, to take note of the Catholic Church is a more inward one, derived from reflection and intimate self-examination. It is the mark of the modem man that he is tom from his roots. The historian of civilization must tell us how he came to that state. The sixteenth century revolt from the Church led inevitably to the revolt from Christ of the eighteenth century, and thence to the revolt from God of the nineteenth. And thus the modem spirit has been torn loose from the deepest and strongest supports of its life, from its foundation in the Absolute, in the self-existent Being, in the Value of all values. Life has lost its great meaning, its vital strength and high purpose, its strong, pervading love, that can be enkindled only by the divine. Instead of the man who is rooted in the Absolute, hidden in God, strong and rich, we have the man who rests upon himself, the autonomous man. Moreover, this man, because he has renounced the fellowship of the Church, the "communio fidelium," the interrelation and correlation of the faithful, has severed the second root of his life, that is to say, his fellowship with other men. He has lost that closely-knitted union of self and others, that communion with the supra-personal whole, which proves itself in joy and in sorrow, in prayer and in love, and by means of which the individual can ever renew and regulate his strength, and without which he becomes dry and sterile. Nowhere else, in no other society, is the idea of community, of fellowship in doing and suffering, in prayer and love, and of growth and formation in and through such fellowship, so strongly embedded in doctrine, morals and worship, as in the Catholic Church. And so the rupture of Church unity has of itself loosened the bonds of social fellowship and thereby destroyed the deep source and basis of a healthy, strong humanity, of a complete humanity. The autonomous man has become a solitary man, an individual.
But the process of uprooting went further still. After the age of "enlightenment" had dethroned reason and dispossessed that power of thought which grasps the whole in one comprehensive view, to replace it by the power which pursues detail and difference, the interior economy of man, his spiritual unity, broke up into a mere juxtaposition of powers and functions. Men spoke now not of their souls, but of psychic processes. The consciousness of being a personal agent, the creative organ of living powers, became increasingly foreign to the educated. And after Kant and his school had made the transcendental subject the autonomous lawgiver of the objective world and even of the empirical consciousness itself, after man instead of holding to the objectivity of the thing and of his own self began to speak of an objectivity which possessed none but a purely logical validity, and of a purely logical subject, then the whole consciousness of reality became afflicted with an unhealthy paralysis. The "As If" philosophy here, and solipsism there, like vampires, suck all the blood out of resolution and action.[6] The autonomous man, cut off from God, and the solitary man cut off from the society of his fellow-men, isolated from the community, is now severed also from his own empirical self. He becomes a merely provisional creature, and therefore sterile and unfruitful, corroded by the spirit of "criticism," estranged from reality, a man of mere negation.
This bloodless, sterile man of mere negation cannot ultimately live. For man cannot live by mere negation. The impulse to live is strong within him; and that impulse is stronger than any unnatural, gray philosophy. Man cries for life, for full, whole, personal life. He is sated with negation and desires to affirm. For only in decisive affirmation and strong resolution lie action and life.
Is it wonderful, then, that this very state of mind should have aroused an interest in Catholicism that is no mere academic interest? We shall have to show in detail that Catholicism—regarded in its special character and as contrasted with non-Catholic Christianity—is essentially decision and affirmation, an affirmation of all values where-so-ever they may be, in heaven or on earth. All non-Catholic bodies originate, not in unconditional affirmation, but in denial and negation, in subtraction and in subjective selection. The history of Catholicism is the history of a bold, consistent, comprehensive affirmation of the whole full reality of revelation, of the fullness of the divinity revealed in Christ according to all the dimensions of its unfolding. It is the absolute, unconditional and comprehensive affirmation of the whole full life of man, of the totality of his life- relations and life-sources. And it is the unconditional affirmation, before all else, of the deepest ground of our being, that is to say of the living God. And Catholicism insists on the whole God, on the God of creation and judgment, and is not content with any mere Father-God of children or sinners, still less with the miracle-shy God of the Enlightenment and of Deism, a sort of parliamentary deity. And it would have the whole Christ, in whom this God was revealed to us, the Christ of the two natures, the God- man, in whom heaven and earth possess their eternal unity, and not the mere romantic Christ of the dilettante or the ecstatic Christ of the critic. And it would have the complete community, the "orbis terrarum," as the medium wherein we grasp this Christ. For the fellowship of men is a fundamental fact, and through it alone comes the growth of personality. And Catholicism calls for the whole personality, not merely pious feeling, but also cool reason, and not reason only, but also the practical will, and not only the inner man of the intelligence, but also the outer man of the sensibility. Catholicism is according to its whole being the full and strong affirmation of the whole man, in the complete sum of all his life relations. Catholicism is the positive religion "par excellence," essentially affirmation without subtraction, and in the full sense essentially thesis. All non-Catholic creeds are essentially anti-thesis, conflict, contradiction and negation.[7] And since negation is of its very nature sterile, therefore they cannot be creative, productive and original, or at least not in the measure in which Catholicism has displayed these qualities throughout the centuries. The modern man feels this positive character to be something that he needs, and therefore his gaze is turning towards Catholicism, if perchance it may do something for him.
Influential writers of our time encourage this attitude, or at least recommend a more sympathetic appreciation of Catholicism. Soderblom, the distinguished religious philosopher and Protestant Archbishop of Upsala, would have had his co-religionists recognize "that Roman Christianity is essentially something other than lust of power, saint worship and jesuitry. In its deepest essence it connotes a type of piety, which is not Protestant piety, and yet is perfect in its kind. Nay, it is more perfect than Protestant piety.... We have too little developed Schleiermacher's great plan of an apologetic devoted to the study of the essential nature of the various religions and sects known to history, and of a polemic which, utterly devoid of all sectarianism, should in the name of that essential nature fight against those degenerations which everywhere assail it."[8] And Heiler has recently lamented the insufficient understanding of the nature of Catholicism by non-Catholic theologians. "Generally speaking, Protestant polemic sees only the outer walls of the Catholic cathedral, with their cracks and crevices and their weather-beaten masonry; but the wondrous artistry of the interior is hidden from it. The most vital and the purest aspects of Catholicism remain still, even in this our day, practically unknown to Protestant theology; and for that reason it is denied any complete or intimate appreciation of Catholicism."[9]
And if the learned theologian fails to comprehend the essence of Catholicism, can we wonder that among the Protestant masses who are not theologians, whatever their degree of education or lack of it, there is an ignorance of Catholicism which is deeply deplored by the more farseeing minds on their own side, and which as the cause of the worst kind of prejudice produces indifference and dislike, nay, even contempt of Catholic piety, and intensifies continually the lamentable cleavage between the Catholic and Protestant sections of our people? That great Protestant scholar and historian of dogma, Adolf Harnack, remarks of this ignorance. "I am convinced from constant experience of the fact that the students who leave our schools have the most disconnected and absurd ideas about ecclesiastical history. Some of them know something about Gnosticism, or about other curious and for them worthless details. But of the Catholic Church, the greatest religious and political creation known to history, they know absolutely nothing, and they indulge in its regard in wholly trivial, vague, and often directly nonsensical notions. How her greatest institutions originated, what they mean in the life of the Church, how easily they may be misconceived, and why they function so surely and so impressively: all this, according to my experience, is for them, apart from a few exceptions, a "terra incognita."[10]
It shall be our task to lead into this unknown land those students also who have not been familiar with it from their youth, who have not lived in its sunlight and eaten of its bread. It is unnecessary to say that all controversy and any sort of disparagement of the religious feelings of others shall be scrupulously avoided. On the other hand you should not forget that it is the highest and noblest privilege of a German scholar to be a "professor" and to proclaim the faith that is in him. A scholar cannot but profess that truth which he has discovered in the depths of his own soul by using all the scientific means at his disposal and by practicing an absolute honesty. He must profess the truth which he recognizes as the decisive truth and reality. And so he may not put us off with vague hypotheses, or with undecided alternatives; he must define and he must decide. Such is the spirit in which these lectures were written, and it is in that spirit that I would have you accept them. There is light and guidance for us all in the words of St. John; the truth will make us free.
Endnotes
1. In "Der Katholizismus, seine Idee und seine Erscheinung" (1923, p. 12), a new and much enlarged edition of his "Das Wesen des Katholizismus" (1920), six lectures delivered in Sweden in the autumn of 1919. Friedrich Heiler is Professor of the Comparative History of Religion in the University of Marburg and a distinguished non-Catholic religious writer in present day Germany. His theological position is a highly individual one, but he may be said to have affinities with the late Archbishop Soderblom on the one hand, and on the other with that "High Church" party (possessing an organ with the title "Una Sancta") which is one of the most interesting phenomena of post-war German Protestantism. Heiler's book above cited, though containing much severe criticism of alleged defects in Catholic teaching and practice, is yet characterized by a profound sympathy with Catholicism.
2. Harnack, "Reden und Aufsatze" (1904), Vol. II, p. 170.
3. Goethe, "Faust," Pt. II.
4. Op. cit., p. 8.
5. Essay on L. von Ranke's "History of the Popes."
6. The "As If Philosophy," or "Fictionalism," regards our intellectual conceptions as nothing better than fictions. It admits that they are useful; but, unlike Pragmatism, regards this usefulness as no criterion of truth. The founder of this thorough-going skepticism is Hans Vaihinger. His book, "Die philosophie des Als Ob" (Berlin, 1911), has been translated into English as "The Philosophy of 'As If' " (London, 1924).
7. cf. Tertullian's judgment on the heretics of his time: "Nihil enim interest illis, licet diversa tractantibus, dum ad unius veritatis expugnationem conspirent.... Schisma est enim unitas ipsa" ("De Praescriptione," c. 41, 42). Similarly St. Augustine: "Dissentiunt inter se, contra unitatem omnes consentiunt" (Sermo XLVII, 15, 27).
8. Quoted by Heiler and set in the forefront of his work. Archbishop Soderblom was the apostle of a reunion of Christendom on a Protestant basis. The nearest approach to his conception of a Protestant Catholicism is perhaps to be found in that "Free Catholicism" which has some advocates in this country.
9. Op. cit., p. 5.
10. "Aus Wissenschaft und Leben" (Giessen, 1911), Vol. I, p. 97.
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