[The Spirit of Catholicism] [Previous] [Next]
"Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Mt. xviii, 20).
Behind our inquiry into the nature of Catholicism, there lie necessarily the question of the living God and the question of the mystery of Christ.
It is of course impossible to set forth even roughly, still less to solve, the whole mass of problems connected with these questions. Let it be sufficient to show clearly and simply the way by which the Catholic comes to the living God and to Christ. In this process we shall find that further light will be thrown on the nature of Catholicism, so as to illuminate its manner of seeing, thinking and feeling.
The structure of Catholic faith may be summarized in a single sentence: I come to a living faith in the Triune God through Christ in His Church. I experience the action of the living God through Christ realizing Himself in His Church.
So we see that the certitude of Catholic faith rests on the sacred triad: God, Christ, Church.
How does the Catholic attain certitude about God, and achieve his "I believe"? He comes thereto finally by the way of revelation and grace, but in the first instance and preparatorily by the way of natural reason. The Vatican Council lays it down that God, as the beginning and end of all things, can be certainly known, by the natural light of reason from the visible world. This knowledge of God will be more easily attained, the more clearly we are conscious that the quest after God, the religious inquiry and investigation, is specifically different from any profane inquiry, as for instance an investigation into the habits of insects. The conditional, finite, imperfect character of our being gives the religious inquiry this specific character. If I consider my own nature I readily discover that I am not an absolute being, but utterly and entirely conditioned. Everywhere I find bounds and limits. Everywhere are lines which suddenly break off short. The fact that there is an Absolute is not the laborious product of speculative philosophy, but rather the mediate consequence of a dispassionate consideration of my being. For when I recognize that I am a conditioned being, by that very fact I affirm the existence of the Absolute. Thus I reach without more ado the practical judgment that my utterly conditioned being is ordinated to and postulates an Absolute. I do not stand on the same level with the Absolute. And so my mental attitude towards this Absolute must have a moral and religious character, that is to say that it must be characterized by humility, reverence, purity and love.
When the inquiry is not based upon this moral foundation, when a man enters upon it in full autonomy and with purely profane instincts, as though it were a purely indifferent question and one which did not concern man's vital interests, or even as though he were judge and God a suspected defendant, then he is sadly misconceiving the very basis of his being and in a wholly inadmissible fashion making himself absolute. We sometimes steal into the sphere of the Absolute, as though we stood on a level with It, or as though It were incarnate in us. At the bottom of all uninterested or autonomous thinking about God lies such a secret delusion. And this secret delusion is the real source of error which all too easily makes the inquiry unfruitful. For although God has plainly manifested Himself to human reason in His creation, yet such a natural knowledge of God can enkindle vital religion only if it be accompanied by humility and reverence. All self-assured, proud inquiry is excluded. Reverence only should inspire us and a humble yearning for the truth. If my inquiry has this ethico-religious character, then is my mind free and open to the deepest intuitions; it is no longer imprisoned in the narrow limits of my self, but truly unprejudiced in the best sense of the word. Then only am I thoroughly accessible to all the possibilities of the mystery of the universe and therefore in a position to see natural reality as it is in itself, as it really is, and not as my imperious mind would have it be. I see clearly how thousands of lines of the macrocosm and the microcosm lead concurrently to a single point, by which alone their unity and their ultimate meaning are intelligible. I attain to the recognition of a primal First Cause, to the assumption of an ultimate Idea and an ultimate Will dominating the world; and I reach even further still, for I come to believe in an intelligent Will which realizes Itself absolutely in the world of reality.
But natural reason leads me only so far, only to God as the principle and meaning of all things, to whom I owe adoration and obedience. It leads me to a natural worship of the Most High, but it does not lead me to a supernatural commerce of life and love with this God, nor can it tell me whether such a living intercourse is possible. It is true that creation gives testimony to God's omnipotence, wisdom and goodness; but it does so only so far as these attributes are mirrored in natural things. It does not give testimony to the fullness of His creative love, it does not let us see into the heart of God. Is God only the Creator and Supporter of my being? Or is He more than that, and would He be more than that? The inner world of the Triune God, who "dwelleth in light inaccessible" (1 Tim. vi, 16), remains for us the "mystery kept secret from eternity" (Rom. xvi, 25), unless He reveals Himself to us by His living word, in an act of the most generous personal giving and by a manifestation that passes beyond the dead witness of nature. Thus the inner God, the whole God, the "mystery which had been hidden from ages and generations" (Col. i, 26) is revealed to us men only by the supernatural way, only by the fact that He Himself speaks to us. Such is the Christian's glad tidings: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days hath spoken to us by His Son" (Hebr. i, 1-2).
In Christ the condescension of God to our humanity became a permanent and blessed reality. "And the Word was made flesh." This faith in Jesus, in the "Deus Incarnatus," is the second pillar which supports the edifice of the Catholic faith.
But how comes the Catholic to this faith in Jesus, in the Son of God? When we answer this question there emerges to view a characteristic element of the Catholic mind, the overwhelming importance of the Church in the production of the certitude of faith. The Catholic does not come to Christ by literary channels, as by the Scriptural records, but through his sacramental and personal incorporation in the living Church. How is this to be understood?
Certainly he regards the Bible as a sacred book, written by the hand of God and therefore unerring in all its parts. And certainly he accepts with joy and gratitude the luminous portrait of Jesus that is drawn by the Gospels. "Without the Scripture," says Mohler, "the true form of the sayings of Jesus would have been withheld from us. We should not have known how the God-man spoke, and I think I should not be able to live any more, if I ceased to hear Him speak.[1] Yet the Catholic does not derive his faith in Jesus from the Scriptures. For he had this faith already, before the first Epistle and before the first Gospel was written. His faith dates back to St. Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."
In loving converse with Jesus, under the influence of His deep and moving words and His mighty works, but especially through immediate intercourse with His living Person, a new thing matured in the little band of His disciples, the new realization that the Christ was manifested in Jesus. Since men cannot grasp the glory of God in its naked immediacy, but only in a mirror, only "in aenigmate," only in the broken forms of the human and finite, there was needed a movement from God, a divine illumination, a new and profounder vision, in order that man might pierce the created veils and with absolute certainty recognize the divine in Jesus. Hence the words of our Lord to Peter: "Flesh and blood have not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven." Therefore, at the very beginning of the history of the Christian faith, there stands the conviction that not mere reason, nor learning, not even theological learning, conducts us to the mystery of Jesus, but the grace of God alone; and that therefore humble, reverent and loving openness to the world of the supernatural is more effective than all learned reasoning. "No one cometh to the Son, unless the Father draw him" (John vi, 44). In the quest of the infinite God our attitude must be one only of expectation and attention, for the adequate answer comes only from on high. And so there is nothing more preposterous than to seek to demonstrate the Divinity of Jesus with severe scientific exactitude, in the sense that even the religiously and morally indifferent, yes even the morally defective, the egoist and the man immersed in the things of sense, should be able to lay hold of the Godhead of Jesus with their hands and should no longer resist the faith. As though faith were a self-evident thing, as that twice two is four. The infinite and holy God does not allow Himself to be profaned by becoming the object of a purely human investigation. Certainly, by His miracles and signs, He directs any unprejudiced thinker to the faith. But the happy consummation, the victorious affirmation of belief, is given only to those who seek Him with profound reverence. What sort of Christianity would that be, whose principal and most zealous adherents— because of the mathematical demonstrability of the Divinity of Jesus—must necessarily be the wise and the clever of this world, the selfish and the self-satisfied, and not the poor in spirit and the pure of heart! Mystery and grace are of the essence of the divine. Hence the vast significance of the words of Jesus: "Flesh and blood have not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven."
The "mighty wind" of Pentecost kindled that pure glow which was in the breast of Peter into a blazing fire and the fire seized upon all those who surrounded Peter. What they had believed only faint-heartedly before, became now an unshakable certainty, a certainty stronger than the certainty of Jewish persecution and Roman tyranny. They knew that "this Jesus hath God raised again . . . and He is exalted to the right hand of the Father" (Acts ii, 32, 33). That was the hour of the birth of the new faith and of the new Church. Why did the apostles believe? Because the Holy Spirit opened their eyes and they understood what had gone before: the manifestation of Jesus, His life, death and resurrection. The human form that veiled His Divinity became transparent to them, and now for the first time they all of them in a comprehensive and overwhelming intuition saw "the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus." All that they had guessed, and hoped, and believed of His mystery during His earthly career: all that was still overshadowed by doubt, uncertainty and worldly cares. Only at times, as at Caesarea Philippi (Mt. xvi, 16-17), had a deeper insight come to them. But it had not gripped the whole man, and under the influences of everyday circumstance, especially under the terrors of Good Friday, it soon fled into the remotest recesses of their consciousness. But now, in the fiery glow of their Pentecostal experience, their faith became a blazing flame. Then all those small and scattered rays combined to form one great radiance, a sure and certain realization of the Person of Jesus and all that that implied. So clear was this intuition and so strong this certainty, that those disciples were utterly changed men. Before, they had been men of little faith, with their continual questioning and their childish egotism; but now they went out into the civilized world full of the spirit of self- sacrifice and strong in soul. And they carried the new fire to the hovels of slaves and into the palaces of emperors. Twelve simple, uneducated fishermen revolutionized the world, and that with no other instrument than their new faith and their readiness to die for that faith.
So the new faith entered upon the stage of history, not as a human work, but as an elemental experience of the spirit, as the power of God. The historian will estimate this experience differently, according to his fundamental standpoint. But he cannot contest its actuality. And if he should happen to interpret it otherwise, then the psychologist intervenes and points out that the experience of Pentecost did not remain an isolated event, but has worked on the history of the world with unexampled power, and that a permanent religious union of minds has resulted from it. Such a permanent union of minds would be psychologically inexplicable, had not man's fundamental aptitude for the divine found, and did it not continually find, precisely in this experience its fulfillment and its satisfaction. So the experience of Pentecost corresponds to a basic fact of the human spirit, its ordination to God, and thereby has an importance that transcends the particular experience, an importance as wide as humanity. All other individual religious experiences, such as those of Simon Magus, of Dositheus, of Elchasai, are lacking in this distinctive quality of effecting a permanent union of minds. They vanish from history as quickly as they come, and by that very fact prove themselves false experiences, possessing no human and universal importance fundamentally rooted in the spirit of man.
The experience of Pentecost was a torch which was never again to be extinguished in humanity. That is the decisive fact which the historian may not ignore. On his own principles the psychologist can conclude that this is no case of mass-suggestion or hallucination, but a genuine, religious experience, a permanent grip of the soul by powers which are not of this world. While the historian examines this psychological fact in the light of historical knowledge and ascertains in detail what enormous opposition that Pentecostal experience encountered in the Jewish and pagan world, how the Christian faith had to struggle not only with political forces but also with religious and cultural enemies, nay with the very desires of the heart in the martyrdom of the body and more bitter trials of the soul, how the gospel of Christ crucified, so incredible and paradoxical in itself and proclaimed by such simple, poor and unlettered men, yet in a few centuries conquered the world (cf. St. Augustine, "De civ Dei," xxii, 5), he passes out of the region of mere psychology on to the plane of historical reality and attains the highest degree of historical certainty. Thus an unprejudiced appreciation of the psychological and historical results of the miracle of Pentecost may even provide a rational basis for St. Paul's testimony to the Gospel: "It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone that believeth therein" (Rom. i, 16).
The Pentecostal experience of the first disciples, because it was effected by God, has two characteristics: its comprehensive catholicity and its compact unity. Catholicity, universality, belongs properly to God's redemptive activity. Where God is at work there can be no respect of persons. It cannot be that the reality manifested in Christ should be only for some men and not for others, only for the Jews and not also for the Greeks, only for the civilized world and not also for barbarians. Christ's redemptive work belongs to all, and therefore also in a certain sense it requires all. So the Pentecostal experience bears this distinctive mark of catholicity in its miracle of tongues: "How have we heard every man our own tongue wherein we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappodocia" (Acts ii, 7). In the same moment that the new faith entered the world it was a faith that embraced all mankind, a Catholic faith. The church that was to be, was proclaimed in all tongues.[2] And this catholicity was a catholicity of unity. They were all assembled around the apostolic college, around the one Peter. And they all understood one another. One God, one Christ, one faith, one language. Fullness in unity, unity in fullnessso did the new faith enter the world.
And how did it go through the world, how did it come to us, to me? Not otherwise than as it came to the apostles: through the living word and through the quickening Spirit.
We know that Jesus prepared His disciples for the miracle of Pentecost through His living word. And His disciples too wished to be nought else but "eye-witnesses and first ministers of the word" (Luke i, 2). We see them at once, after the miracle of Pentecost, proclaiming the Gospel and giving testimony to Christ "in Jerusalem and Judea and in Samaria and even unto the ends of the earth" (Acts i, 8). Certainly some of them composed historical records of the life of Jesus and of the acts of the chief apostles. And they wrote also letters to single persons and communities, wherein they set forth the Christian teaching and the Christian life according to the inquiries and the special circumstances of those to whom they wrote. Yet these written communications were only supplementary to their oral preaching, sometimes in confirmation of it or preparatory to it. Even the Epistles to the Romans, Ephesians and Hebrews, in spite of their more general range, are concerned particularly with the special needs of the people to whom they are addressed, and make no sort of claim to be an exhaustive exposition of the Christian faith. So little thought was given to any final literary expression of the Gospel, that some apostles left no writing whatever after them and that apostolical writings could even disappear (1 Cor. v, 9; Coloss. iv, 16).
Therefore above all it was the living word which was to bring the new faith to mankind. "The things which thou hast heard of me before many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men who shall be fit to teach others also" (2 Tim. ii, 2). Such was St. Paul's charge to his disciple Timothy. But even the living word did not achieve the work of itself. For it worked, as St. Augustine expressed it, only on the outer and not on the inner man. It reached only "to the ear, and not to the heart." The supernatural, final, highest certitude came from the working of the Spirit. And since the Holy Spirit, since the divine of its nature communicates itself to all men, to the collective whole, and is of its very nature creative and enkindling life, therefore the Holy Spirit of its nature works only in and through a comprehensive, living community, through the unity of love, through the unity in fullness. The catholicity and unity of the Pentecostal miracle were permanently embodied in the spirit of love and fellowship of the Christian communities, animated by Christ and gathered round the apostles and Peter especially. These communities were "one heart and one soul," planted by one apostolical preaching, brought to interior growth by one Holy Spirit. This Spirit was sacramentally guaranteed to them in the visible signs of Baptism and Confirmation. Baptism gave admission into the new spiritual fellowship, and the sacrament of Confirmation sealed and perfected this admission. This Spirit deepened the natural effect of the apostolic preaching and led to the intuitive experience that "the Lord is a Spirit" (2 Cor. iii, 17).
Therefore it was not literary records, incontestable documents, which were the primary means of bringing the message of Jesus to men, but the broad stream of the uniform life of faith of the primitive Church, a life based on the preaching of the apostles and animated by the Holy Spirit. How could it have been otherwise? A living thing, in all its depth and in all its extent, cannot be comprised within a few written sentences. Only that which is dead can be adequately delineated in writing. The living thing is continually bursting the temporary form in which literature must perforce embody it. At the very moment that literature is endeavoring to arrest and fix it, the stream of life is escaping and moving swiftly on. Therefore all literature, and even the Bible itself, is stamped with the character of its time, and bears a form which, however vital its content remains, yet all too easily seems stiff and strange to later generations.
And so the writings of apostles and evangelists point beyond themselves to the supernatural life of faith of the primitive Church, whence they themselves grew. The New Testament, although as the inspired word of God it claims its special divine authority guaranteed by the Church's teaching office, stands within this life, for there were many Christian communities already in existence before any apostle took up his pen. Having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the New Testament as the unique document of the faith proclaims no other truths than those which were already living in the Church before it was written. Through all its chinks and crevices we descry the gleam of the living waters of the broad stream of the primitive faith, and the realization of this contributes not a little to a complete understanding of the Bible. For the Gospels present us with only a fragmentary record of Jesus, from which it is impossible to construct an exhaustive picture. And so I learn the complete Christ, not from the Bible, but from the uniform life of faith of the whole Church, a life fertilized by the teaching of the apostles. Without the living, uniform tradition of the Church, essential elements in the picture of Christ would remain either enigmatical or hidden from me. And without it I could achieve neither an historical nor a religious sympathy with Jesus. Such is the meaning of that profound saying of St. Augustine: "I would not believe the Gospel, did not the authority of the Church move me."[3]
The new life, flowing out from the apostolic communities, spread ever wider and wider, and impregnated the world. The preaching authority was taken over from the dying apostles by disciples who had been commissioned by them and appointed as presidents and overseers of the Christian communities. This fact is plainly attested by history. And from these disciples right down to our own day there runs a continuous line of preachers holding this apostolical commission. And along with this authoritative line there arose the space-time fellowship of the faithful, that is the Church. The unity of the apostolic preaching was maintained by steady contact with the churches founded by the apostles, especially by contact with Rome, where Peter proclaimed his message and was buried in his martyr's grave. With the unity of the apostolic preaching was conjoined the unity, the space-time community of the Holy Spirit. The Pentecostal community broadened out into the universal Church. Certainly, in the rude struggle for existence, its external forms became more rigid and it became more fully organized. But, for all that, it remained with new members ever the same Spirit and the same Body. The same apostolic authority preaches through its bishops the same Christ, and it is the same fellowship of the Holy Spirit in which we receive this preaching, not outwardly merely, but inwardly also.
And so I find the living Christ by means of the living Church. That is as true today as it was on the first day. My faith in Christ is given me basically and preparatorily by the living apostolic word, perfectly and fulfillingly by the living Pentecostal Spirit. Like the apostles, the Church in her living teaching sets before me the image of the Lord, as the Bible luminously portrays Him, and as she has borne Him still more lovingly and radiantly for centuries in her heart. In a full and true sense she can say that she herself has seen this Jesus, that she stood beneath His Cross, and that she heard His Easter greeting: Peace be to you. Therefore she brings me into the closest historical relation to Jesus. She eliminates time from His picture, and she puts me in religious contact with Him. She can point out that the message of Jesus is not only recorded in lifeless parchment, but is embedded in world history by imperishable signs and wonders, that it is confirmed by a Life and Death of unsurpassable purity and innocence and by a Resurrection of dazzling glory, that it has been sealed by the life-blood of thousands and has given countless multitudes of her sons and daughters a new heart and a new conscience. She can assert further that no other religion has ever approached even distantly the moral and religious sublimity of Christianity. And she can maintain that the radiance of this divinity flashes forth and is externally manifested today also in noble saintly figures, that it attests itself in graces that appear ever and again with new brilliance, and in miraculous gifts.
Since her apostolic word proclaims and attests this and much else, the Church can make credible to me the supernatural mystery of Jesus. Her preaching prepares the way for my faith in Jesus. Her testimony becomes in that measure a motive of credibility, as the School expresses it, but is not yet a true motive of faith. It gives me human faith, a certitude which is not as yet absolute, which is still frail.
But to living word is added the Spirit, the inspiration of the one divine Spirit in the communion of the faithful. The Holy Spirit alone gives our will the power and our understanding the light that we may be able to pass from the mere judgment of credibility to the unconditional affirmation of the mysteries of the faith, that is to true divine faith, and so come to the experience of Pentecost. The more closely the Catholic then gets into touch with his Church, not merely externally, but internally, with her prayer and sacrifice, with her word and sacrament, the more sensitive and attentive will he be to the inspiration of the divine Spirit in the community, the more vitally will he grasp the divine life that flows through the organism of the Church. For "in proportion as a man loves the Church, so has he the Holy Spirit" (S. Aug. "In ev. Joann." xxxii, 8). And when he thinks and prays, suffers and strives with the living Church, then he experiences a broadening, deepening and fulfilling of his whole being. And so the logical certitude of his faith becomes progressively a psychological, living experience that it is the very Life of all life by which he is sustained, that verily, as St. Paul expresses this experience, "the Lord is a Spirit" (2 Cor. iii, 17). This certitude is a personal experience, the most personal experience that he has. He may delineate and describe it in rational language, though very crudely and imperfectly, but he cannot impart it to any other. For it is derived from that complete personal contact of his soul with the Spirit of Jesus that inspires the Christian community. But because it is a certitude that he has tested for himself, no man, no doubt, no ridicule can deprive him of it. Therefore, to be absolutely exact, I do not believe the Church, but the living God, who attests Himself to me in the Church. Nor is it I that believe, but the Holy Spirit that is in me. The Catholic grasps and affirms Jesus ultimately and decisively in the flowing life of His Church, in the Church as the mystical Body of Christ.
Here certainly lies the sharpest line of demarcation separating the faith of a Catholic from that of a Protestant, or rather, separating the Catholic's faith from that purely rationalistic apprehension of Christ which is establishing itself among the disciples of the so-called critical theology.
That critical theology, the child of the age of "enlightenment" and mistakenly committed to that scientific method which is prescribed for the profane sciences by their special subject matter, behaves as though Christianity is and must be a mere object of knowledge, a mere subject for scientific investigation, as though the living Christian faith could be resolved into a series of ideas and notions which might be examined, considered and classified according to their provenance and according to their relation to a supposed primitive Christianity or "Christianity of Christ." Christianity then becomes, not unitary, original and abounding life, but a juxtaposition of ideas and conceptions, which, deriving from the most various sources, have gradually by the power of collective faith gathered round the person of Jesus of Nazareth and transformed His originally simple gospel into the sacramental and dogmatic Christianity which we know. Such is the rationalistic foundation of the critical theology, and it rests on a bad misunderstanding of the nature of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. For the most important representatives of the latest religious psychology—I refer to James, Osterreich, Scheler, Scholz—have established it as a fact accepted even by the non-religious that religion is something spontaneous and not a derivative thing, that it is a fundamental fact of the human spirit and therefore original, unitary life, and not mere thinking, a life that has its own legitimacy, its own inner unity and purpose. It is quite wrong to estimate a religion solely according to its conceptual content, or even according to this or that dominant idea alone, and not rather to regard the totality of the vital forms that spring from it in past, present and future. If this be true of religion in general, it is far more true of the life of Christ and of Christianity. As the history of Christianity shows, it is a life, which manifesting its power first in the Person of Jesus delivered the souls of men from an earth-bound existence, created a new, supernatural community, and through it for all time by word and sacrament provides humanity with streams of truth and grace. It is a life which not merely laid hold of the restricted group of His disciples, but in an incredibly short space of time gripped the whole ancient world and brought into being new civilizations, new peoples, new men, and which still alive and effectual among us, attests itself to our own day as a perennial source of spiritual life. We know of no spiritual movement on the earth which has worked upon men with such elemental power—and that of its own nature and being, and not through any external, foreign factors—so unitarily, comprehensively, fruitfully and vitally as has Christianity.
And since such is the case with it, since Christianity is not mere cold thought, but a unitary religious life, a fullness of life, it is therefore an obvious error to do as the critical theology is ever seeking to do, and to conceive this life in terms of certain stale notions and catch-words, such as that of the Fatherhood of God, or of inwardness, or the near coming of the Kingdom, and to talk of a Christianity of Christ, of the primitive community, of the Hellenistic communities, and of a Johannine or Pauline Christianity, as though these were not expressions and manifestations of the one original life of Christ, but rather complexes of new ideas, of their nature alien to Christianity and derived from external sources. In reality Christianity is an intimate organic unity, a vital unity, which unfolds itself indeed to its fullness progressively, and yet in all the stages of its unfolding is a unity and a whole, the Christianity of Christ. Just as I first appreciate the totality of that potential life which is in the acorn when I see before me the mature oak, fully developed in all its grandeur, in a way that no mere study of the embryology of the acorn can enable me to realize it, so can I first discern the width and depth of Christ's Gospel, the whole vast richness of His mind and His message, His "fullness," when I have before me the fully-developed Christianity, and then only in the measure in which I appreciate its inner unity. The history of dogma has established these three facts. First, that Catholic Christianity has developed in a direct line, without interruption and without violent distortion. Secondly, that this development has not been effected by individual enthusiasm or individual inspiration, but by the one spirit of the whole Christian community, guided by the apostolic teaching. The conception of the community fashioning dogma as so much fable and myth is an absurd one and there can be no room for such a wild phantom within the line of the apostolic succession and within the one living community spirit. And in the third place, it is evident that Catholic Christianity has throughout the centuries anxiously resisted all that appeared to its consciousness as innovation, that it has held fast doggedly and rigidly to that which was handed down, and that it has observed as a sacred trust the injunction of the apostle to Timothy, "Guard that which has been committed to thee" (2 Tim. i, 14). History attests with exactitude, from Ignatius onwards, the principle of apostolicity, of most rigid conservatism, of utterly scrupulous continuity with the traditional revelation. So there is in Catholic Christianity a unitary life-stream, a life of unity in fullness, a single mighty life. And if I would determine the content of the original cell of this life, the content of the Christianity of Christ, I must not approach the tree of Christianity with the knife of the critic and mutilate it in order to discover this original cell. On the contrary I must accept the Christian life as a whole and appraise it as a whole. Unlimited criticism, faulty and sterile historical or philological research: these things do not conduct us to the mystery of Christ. But we attain to Him by steeping ourselves lovingly in the abundance of life which has gone forth from Him, which has attested its inner organic unity throughout the centuries, and which today as in the beginning is nothing else, desires to be nothing else, than a life lived in the strength of Christ, a Christian life.
It is thus only that the whole revelation in general acquires meaning for me. If it be really true that there is a personal God—and there is such a God, for our whole spirit is rooted in Him—and if it be really true that this living God—for the very reason that He is a personal God—willed to manifest Himself to me in Jesus Christ, then it cannot be that I should need, for the attainment of this infinitely important, saving reality, laborious historical and philological study, that I should have to appeal to the Higher and Lower Criticism in order to reach the divine mystery. For then the divine would not be simple and plain enough to penetrate into my heart and into the hearts of all men, even the least and simplest. But this simplicity and this plainness are found in the quiet, living faith, in the loyal and strong hope, in the devoted fellowship and love of the Church, which in her dogma, morals and worship breathes the Spirit of Jesus, and which in spite of persecution, sin and evil has for so many centuries with continually new strength borne testimony to Him. "Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." Not three only, but millions of loving and loyal hearts—though there be tares among them—are united in this one Church in the name of Jesus. Therefore is Jesus verily in the midst of them.
Endnotes
1. "Die Einheit in der Kirche," 1925, p. 42. The first edition of this remarkable book on the note of "unity" appeared in 1825
2. Futura ecclesia in omnibus linguis praenuntiabatur (S. Aug. Sermo CCLXVI, 2).
3. Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas (Contra ep. Manichaei, c. V).
4. He too teaches that Christ is to be grasped only through the Church, His body. cf . De fide rerum quae non videntur, III, 5: Proinde, qui putatis nulla esse indicia, cur de Christo credere debeatis quae non vidistis, attendite quae videtis: ipsa vos ecclesia ore maternae dilectionis alloquitur . . . me attendite, vobis dicit ecclesia, me attendite quam videtis, etiamsi videre nolitis. Similarly in Sermo CX VI, 6: Quomodo illi (sc. apostoli) illum (sc. Christum) videbant et de corpore credebant, sic nos corpus videmus, de capite credamus.
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