9. The Catholicity of the Church

[The Spirit of Catholicism] [Previous] [Next]

I became all things to all men, that I might save all (1 Cor. ix, 22).

The Church is the Kingdom of God thoroughly leavening all mankind in slow but irresistible process, the Body of Christ embracing the whole of fallen humanity in a supra-personal unity. Therefore of her nature she rests upon faith in the divine Redeemer, in Christ. As the supra-personal unity of mankind reunited to God she obtains in Peter's office the perfect expression of this unity and its guarantee, while her inward life, with the loving commerce which characterizes it, is realized in the Communion of Saints. Such is the sequence of thought developed in the previous Chapters.

The "notes," or characteristic marks of the Church, follow directly from her essential nature. Let us investigate first her most outstanding and most obvious attribute, that which is meant when one speaks of the "Catholic" Church: her catholicity. Ignatius of Antioch is the first witness for this title of "catholic" (Smyrn. viii, 2) and he indicates at the same time the reason why the Church must be catholic, that is to say, must have an essential aptitude for propagating itself over the whole earth (Kath holon) and embracing all humanity. "Where Christ is," he says, "there also is the Catholic Church." Since Christ came to redeem all mankind, therefore His Body is essentially related to all mankind. The whole of redemption-needing mankind is potentially present in it. And so the Church is not complete until she has in progressive process embraced all mankind. This trend towards the whole of mankind is native to her.

The Church's attractive power, her appeal to all men, has its source in the missionary injunction of the risen Christ: "Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost" (Matt. xxviii, 19). This command represents in the broadest outline the fundamental motives of our Lord's Gospel of the Kingdom. His Kingdom of God had in it "from the start the tendency to become a universal religion" (Holtzmann). For it is a great spiritual creation, that stands above all national interests or other worldly considerations, and that is of a purely moral and religious character. Its gifts are forgiveness of sin and grace, and its requirements are those moral imperatives which apply to all men and are set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. The citizens of this Kingdom are the children of God, and they pray in the Our Father to the common Father of all men. The preachers of this Kingdom have their mission not only to the Jews, but also to the whole world, for they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Jesus Himself, in His messianic consciousness, takes His stand above all merely national aspirations. He is not merely the Son of David, but the Son of Man. He belongs to all men and not to the Jews alone. Even if He had not after His Resurrection expressly given His apostles this great missionary injunction, yet in view of the supra-national and fundamentally universal aim of His Gospel of the Kingdom, we should have to say at the very least that He displayed a potential universalism. But if we turn from His Gospel to the living Jesus Himself, if we remind ourselves of the open repugnance and strong distaste with which He criticized and rejected all the caste prejudice, narrowness, pettiness and pride of the Pharisees, if we think of the boundless generosity with which He welcomed every trace of nobility, purity and goodness which He encountered, though it were in publicans and sinners, and if finally we observe that in His parables of the prodigal son, of the Pharisee and publican, and of the marriage feast to which beggars and the lame and blind are invited, the radiance of His redeeming love penetrates to the most wretched and forsaken corners of our humanity: then we realize that it is a psychological monstrosity to say with Hamack that "the Gentile mission cannot have lain within the horizon of Jesus.[1] It is an incontrovertible fact that the mission to the Gentiles not only lay within the horizon of contemporary Judaism, where it degenerated into a dreary proselytism (cf. Matt. xxiii, 15), but that it also gave a special color to the promises of the prophets. Jesus lived and moved in the world of the prophets. Therefore their hopes—even if we ignore His messianic consciousness—could not have been unknown to Him, and their spirit must have had its effect upon His large-hearted and liberal attitude. And in fact He never avoided pagans when they came to Him. He healed the sick daughter of the Syrophenician woman (Mk. vii, 24) and the sick servant of the pagan centurion (Matt. viii, 5 ff.; Luke vii, 1 ff.). On both occasions He does what He does with a hearty goodwill and undisguisedly expresses His appreciation of their dispositions: "O woman, great is thy faith." "Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel. And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. viii, 10-11). Our Lord here expressly confirms the promises of the prophets in their full scope. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which contains a severe rebuke to the Jews, teaches that practical charity was to be found rather among the heretical Samaritans than among the orthodox priests and levites. And we know also that Jesus frequently (Matt. viii, 28; XV, 21) entered heathen territory, and that therefore He did not shun the heathen, but rather sought contact with them. Yet if, despite this fundamental friendliness towards the Gentiles, He deliberately confined His own and His disciples' preaching to the people of Israel, there were sound practical reasons for that course. It was important that the forces at hand for the preaching of the Gospel should not be dissipated, and the preachers had to take account of natural and religious facts. Of natural facts, in so far as their own people, with their special history and with their ethico-religious monotheism, provided the strongest natural foundation on which to build the Kingdom of God. Of religious facts, in so far as Jesus, like the prophets before Him and like Paul after Him, regarded Israel as the chosen people who, because of their covenant with Jehovah, seemed to be especially called to deepen the faith which they had carried through the centuries into faith in the Triune God. No doubt we may here trace in our Lord's attitude a strain of nationalism. But it is far from being an exclusive nationalism. It did not exclude, but included, the conversion of the Gentiles. Israel—as the prophets conceived the matter—was to be the foundation and nucleus of the new Kingdom of God, a Kingdom which was to embrace all peoples and nations, and therefore also the Gentiles. So long as the Jewish people had not forfeited this claim, they had an historical and religious right that the Kingdom, germinally contained in the whole of their age-long development, should be fulfilled and completed in them.

Therefore while Jesus lived on the earth He belonged to His own people. From among them He called the twelve apostles, in order to fashion the new Israel. And when He had by His Resurrection proved Himself the "Son of God in power" (Rom. i, 4) and as such had bidden His disciples evangelize the whole world, it was from this Jewish sapling that the mighty tree grew, in whose branches dwell the birds of the air. The catholicity of the new society, which was to embrace all languages and all men, was manifested at the very beginning in the Pentecostal miracle of tongues. The life of the young plant, in its early days needed a protective sheath of Jewish custom; but this sheath was not able to hinder or restrict further development, and it was decisively set aside by St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Peter was the first to admit a pagan, the centurion Cornelius, into the Christian community; and St. Paul, by his vigorous reasoning as much as by his strong action, finally demolished the barriers of Jewish legalism and gave Christianity free course into the world. The universal character, which is implicit in our Lord's preaching, was made explicit by St. Peter and St. Paul. It has been maintained recently that by making Christianity co-terminous with the Church, St. Paul was unfaithful to our Lord's fundamental thought.[2] But that is to overlook the fact that St. Paul conceives the Church, not as one particular sect, but as a society embracing the whole of redeemed humanity. The Church is not an institution to be established within humanity, which for that reason introduces new lines of division and produces a sectional organization and a sort of new synagogue. On the contrary, it is so world-wide in its nature that it breaks down all barriers and all divisions. It is as big and as wide as humanity itself.

This world-wide spirit, rooted in the preaching of our Lord, has been taken over in its full breadth and depth by the Catholic Church, and by her alone. The Church is not one society or one church alongside many others, nor is she just a church among men; she is the church of men, the church of mankind. It is this claim that gives her action its persevering determination and its grandeur. The interests of the Church have never been subordinated to purely national interests, nor has the Church ever put herself for long in bondage to any state. Her members belong to this or that nation, and national interests are bound to exert some influence on the Church's action. There have even been times when the Church seemed to be no more than a handmaid of the German emperor or the French king. But those were only episodes, only brief and passing checks in her world-wide mission. She had to fight hard for it again and again, in bitter struggles, but she won for herself in virtue of her mission to all mankind, her spiritual freedom from princes and peoples, and so secured the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God and the independence of Christian faith and morals. As such a supra-national power which assembles all men and all peoples in one Kingdom of God, she is able, far more than any national organization, such as the Anglican, Swedish, or Russian churches, to evoke the best that lies dormant in the individual peoples and to make it serviceable for the propagation of the Kingdom of God. All peoples, each with their special aptitudes, are her children and all bring their gifts into the sanctuary. The elasticity, freshness of mind and sense of form of the Roman combine with the penetration, profundity and inwardness of the German, and with the sobriety, discretion and good sense of the Anglo-Saxon. The piety and modesty of the Chinaman unite with the subtlety and depth of the Indian, and with the practicality and initiative of the American. It is unity in fullness, fullness in unity.[3] The individual life of men and peoples—the most precious thing in the world and unique in character—flows with its rich and sparkling waters in all the innumerable courses and channels dug by missionaries in far lands; and those countless tributaries flow into the Church, and purified in the Holy Spirit by its infallible teaching, merge into a single mighty stream, into one great flood which flows through all humanity, fertilizing and purifying as it goes. That is the true conception of the Catholic Church. It is a great, supra-national tidal wave of faith in God and love of Christ, nourished and supported by the special powers of every individual nation and of every individual man, purified and inspired by the divine spirit of truth and love.

How is this catholicity of the Church realized? The internal catholicity of the Church, its essential aptitude for the whole of mankind, is of fundamental importance for its world- conquering power, its external catholicity. This internal catholicity of the Church is based upon two particular qualities, and first on a resolute affirmation of the whole of revelation in all its living fullness. Unlike all non-catholic communions, the Church affirms, completely and entirely, the whole of holy Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New. She affirms therefore not only the theology of St. Paul, but also the mysticism of St. John, not only St. Matthew's teaching concerning the Church and doctrinal authority, but also the faith and works of St. James and St. Peter. There is no thought in holy Scripture which is for her antiquated or unseasonable. Nor does she allow one truth to be obscured or garbled for the benefit of another. And by the side of holy Scripture stands extra-scriptural Tradition. The Gospel itself is based upon oral teaching, upon the preaching of Christ, of His disciples and of that apostolic succession of teachers which began with the first pupils of the apostles. Therefore the formation in the Christian communities of a living stream of tradition was natural and inevitable. The New Testament is certainly an important expression, but it is by no means an exhaustive expression, of this apostolic tradition which filled and permeated the whole consciousness of the Church. Oral tradition, the apostolic teaching alive and active in the Christian communities, that is prior to and more fundamental than the Bible. It attests the Bible, both in its inspiration and in its canon. It is more comprehensive than the Bible, for it attests a mass of ritual and religious usage, of customs and rules, which is only slightly indicated in the Bible. And it possesses a quality which the Bible as a written document has not and cannot have, and which constitutes its pre-eminent merit, namely, that living spirit of revelation, that vitality of revealed thought, that "instinct of the faith" which stands behind every written and unwritten word, and which we call the "mind of the Church" (phronema ekklesiastikon). This spirit of revelation lives in the living hearts of the faithful, and is quickened and promoted by the apostolic teaching authority under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. It is the most genuine, primary and precious heritage from the preaching of Jesus and His apostles. It is by means of this spirit that revelation acquires its inward unity, its inter-connection and its ultimate meaning. Now, because the Church accepts as revelation the whole of holy Scripture and the whole of that extra-scriptural Tradition which has come down from the teaching of Christ and His apostles, without restricting herself to particular revealed thoughts, such as the notion of the Fatherhood of God or of the certainty of forgiveness, and because the Church accepts and affirms that full Christian life and experience which originated in Christ and was by the apostles conveyed to mankind, therefore she is able out of her abundance to be something for all men and to give something to all men. She is become "all things to all men." Like St. Paul at Corinth, she gives the "little ones in Christ" milk and not meat, for they "are not yet able" for meat. To those who are not yet delicate enough of hearing and perception to appreciate the profound spirituality and delicate inward power of the Christian message, and to understand the "liberty of the children of God," those who are not ready for St. Augustine's rule, "Love and do what you will," the Church in her sermons and instructions indicates the stern commandments of the Decalogue, insists upon the obligations of Christian morality and holds up the awful majesty of that Judge who condemns to everlasting fire all those who fail in mercy and in love. If love of God cannot achieve it, at least fear of His justice will deliver them from their earthliness and self-seeking and give them a spiritual life based on a fear of God which for all its imperfection is yet supernatural And when souls are alive to her voice and can understand her doctrine of inwardness and love, then she allures them by the sweetest methods, by the Mystery of the Tabernacle, by devotion to the Sacred Heart, by the Stations of the Cross and by her Rosary. Thus she leads the simplest and rudest of souls to a height of spiritual life wherein the cry "Abba, Father!" is experienced in its full meaning, to the heights where St. Paul and St. John abide. And it may happen that a man is so penetrated with love of Christ and zeal for His Kingdom that his soul is stirred to its depths by those words of the Gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast and give to the poor; and come, follow me" (Matt. xix, 21). Then deserts and great cities alike are peopled with hermits and monks. There is no stage of religious development which the comprehensive influence of the Church cannot grip and mould. It is impossible to describe the infinite variety of forms in which the religious and moral life of Catholics is expressed. In this region variety is the rule and an unrestricted freedom the dominant law of Catholic piety.

Yet, however various these expressions may be, they have all sprung in their fundamental forms from the living tradition, from that abundance and variety of life which is our inheritance in Scripture and Tradition. For here, in Scripture and Tradition, yes in Scripture alone and even in St. John and St. Paul alone, we have not merely the spiritual, but the sensible also, though it be the sensible transfigured into the spiritual. We have not only certainty of forgiveness, but also the severe imperative, the commandments and the doctrine of merit. We have not only personal spiritual experience, but also service of the community and official authority. And above all we have mysticism; for wherever there is genuine religion, there you must have mysticism. The fundamental forms of Catholicism may be determined without difficulty or dialectic from the Scriptures and even from St. Paul alone. For revelation does not consist merely in this or that inspiring idea. On the contrary, it is original, comprehensive, mighty life. It is something holy and but half-expressed, "a reality, which is fruitful in resources; a depth, which extends into mystery."[4]

So the fullness of Catholicism wells out of the fullness of the revelation of the Old and New Testaments, out of the fullness of Scripture and Tradition. But it is a fullness in unity, for it is animated by one spirit and by one soul. The life of Catholicism grows, but it does not outgrow itself. The Church has advanced, past all hesitations and reverses, "till the whole truth 'self-balanced on its center hung'."[5]

There are, indeed, apparent disturbances of this inward equipoise, especially when heresies have arisen and compelled the Church to withdraw a truth which has been abused or to emphasize another which has been denied. But a mere attitude of antagonism to heresy, whether it be to Gnosticism, Arianism, Lutheranism or Modernism, is not the proper attitude of Catholicism.

Such an attitude, on the contrary, is the creature of its time and represents a temporary shifting of the balance in order to meet and discomfit heresy. And Catholicism displays its vitality, its inner unity and truth, most clearly in the fact that it always ultimately regains its balance, after such temporary disturbances, though it may take it centuries to do so. The strong force which gives it back its inner equipoise is the vital spirit of revelation transmitted in its teaching authority, or, more profoundly, the Holy Spirit living in it. The Holy Spirit gives that secret energy which infuses new life into the weakened parts of the organism and repairs all unnatural dislocations in the Body of Christ. It could be shown in detail how Catholicism has sometimes repelled and rejected outright an heretical position with all its implications, reasons and consequences in order to prevent any contamination of revealed truth, and then, when the danger of such contamination was past, has taken over those elements of truth which heresy had grasped but wrongly emphasized, and molding them into harmony with the whole of revelation, has consciously built them into her teaching and maintained them. The Church alone, says Cardinal Newman, "has succeeded in thus rejecting evil without sacrificing the good, and in holding together in one things which in all other schools are incompatible."[6] It is the spirit of revelation living in the Church, the vitality and consistency of Catholic thought, that "active tradition," as the school men call it, which prevents any injury to the Catholic whole and ever restores its massive unity and inward harmony.[7] It is the same living spirit of revelation, manifested in the teaching authority, which gives the Church its flexibility and power of expansion, and enables it to adapt itself to every age, to every civilization, and to every mental outlook. It is indeed the propelling and progressive principle in Catholicism. All other Christian bodies, in so far as they have maintained a positive belief, have attached themselves to a fixed and rigid principle. In Lutheranism and Calvinism it is the letter of the Bible; in the schismatical churches of the East it is the Bible and "passive" tradition, that is to say, the tradition of the ancient Fathers and most ancient Councils. Therefore these churches are in danger of treating revelation as so much dead capital, as a store of gold which must be passed on to future generations in a merely external fashion, and of overlooking the vital energies that lie in the revelation and work for the further development of its germinal content. To this danger of petrifaction and ossification the Orthodox Church has succumbed. Or there is the opposite danger, that in an effort to accommodate religion to modern needs and requirements, its inner connection with revelation is sacrificed, and an entirely novel Christianity, the religion of German idealism, or what you will, is summoned into life. This is the danger that menaces Protestantism. But Catholicism is safe from both possibilities. The vitality of the spirit which inspires her teaching authority is manifested constantly in this, that acting as a living power it lays hold of the revelation enshrined in Scripture and passive Tradition, and discloses as it advances the fruitful energies that they contain. In the Catholic Church alone may we discern an organic growth in the consciousness of the faith. There is no petrifaction here; yet there is on the other hand nothing erratic or abrupt, but an organic development. Thus the Church has a message for the men of every age. For the dogmatic development is no fortuitous one, but corresponds to the needs and problems of the contemporary Church. Since they who bear the spirit of the revelation are themselves living men and living members of the body of the faithful, they are in constant sympathy with the questions and needs of the "learning Church," of the community of the faithful. They are able to bring revealed truth into connection with those needs and questions, and from its store to provide those answers for which the faithful look. So there is a constant movement in the exposition of the faith, and a continual dispensation of the store of revelation for the benefit of hungry souls. The revelation does not grow old, but remains ever new and full of life. It is timeless, it is immediate present, though century succeed century.

Not to lose the thread of the argument, let us summarize what has been said. We have laid it down that the external catholicity of the Church, her world-conquering power, rests upon her internal catholicity. And we have pointed out that the first element in this internal catholicity is a comprehensive affirmation of the whole of revelation, and a vitalizing of this revelation by that living spirit of revelation which resides in the teaching authority of the Church.

The second element in her internal catholicity is her comprehensive affirmation of the whole man, of human nature in its completeness, of the body as well as the soul, of the senses as well as the intellect. The mission of the Church is to the entire man. According to the teaching of the Church—as that was formulated at Trent against the Lutheran conception—original sin by no means destroyed the natural structure of man's being, nor is it synonymous with what St. Paul calls the law of our members, that is with concupiscence. It is true that the understanding is darkened by it and the will weakened; but these effects are not the direct and immediate consequences of original sin. They are the direct results of the loss of our original, supernatural union of life and love with God, whereby we were in our whole being diverted from our original, supernatural end. Consequently the natural structure of our being remains fundamentally unimpaired. Though original sin brought a weakening of nature, it did not bring as well a physical deterioration or corruption of our bodily and mental powers.

So the Church, starting from this basis, is able to enlist man's entire nature, his body and its sensitive life, his reason and his will, in the service of the Kingdom of God. Since man's nature is not essentially damaged in its natural powers, but only by diversion from its supernatural end, that is to say by a false orientation, therefore so soon as this false orientation is mended and man is replaced by baptism in his original, living union with God, that nature can be gripped in all its powers by the Church's preaching. The Church as the Body of Christ lays hold of all that is of God, and therefore of man's body, his senses and his passions, just as much as of his intellect and will. And in redeeming his body and senses and passions by sanctifying grace from their earthliness and selfishness and reclaiming them for God, she not only wins them back for His Kingdom, but also ennobles and deepens them. So the Church destroys man's old earthly structure to its foundations, but she takes over the old stones for the new building and gives them for the first time their true positions, their proper meaning, their full beauty and their glory. Therefore the conception of nature, so far from being destroyed by Catholicism, is enormously deepened. As man came from the hand of God, in the beauty of his body, in the ardor of his sense life, in the storm and stress of his passions, with keen intellect and mighty will, even so does the Church affirm him and even so would she have him be. She would mould this man of ardent, stormy passions and clear-sighted strength so that he may belong to God, and that he may by union with the original basis of his life bring all the greatness and the glory of his natural gifts into inward harmony and perfection.

Hence two further elements in that catholicity which gives the Church her comprehensive power of attraction. The first of these is that she loves and understands man's nature, his bodily and sensitive structure, as well as his mental powers. In acute and prolonged conflicts with Gnostics, Manicheans, Albigenses, Bogomili, and other similar sects, she has guarded the rights and the dignity of the human body, and in particular the rights and dignity of marriage. She does not regard the body as a "garment of shame," but as a holy and precious creation of God. And she teaches that this gift is so precious and so necessary for man, that the body that is dissolved in death will one day be raised again by God, to be the ministering organ of the immortal soul. Therefore the Church loves this body so related to God, and inspires her artists to represent, in its nobility and beauty, the unspeakable beauty of divinity and holiness. She adorns the humblest village churches with images of our Lord and our Lady and the saints, in order to raise her children by visible things to things invisible, from the beauty of this earth to the beauty of heaven. Art is native to Catholicism, since reverence for the body and for nature is native to it.

This reverence for the body leads the Church further to a careful consideration for man's sensible needs. Since we are not pure spirits, but spirits enmeshed in body, we grasp spiritual things by means of things visible and sensible. Hence the whole sacramental system of Christianity and the Church. Our Lord Himself submitted to baptism. He has granted us communion in His Body and Blood by the visible signs of bread and wine, and in other ways conjoined spiritual blessing with sensible means. He bade His disciples anoint the sick with oil, He never ate bread without first blessing it, He never dismissed a child without laying His hand upon it. Even so, the Church joins her spiritual benefits to sensible signs. Besides the sacraments she employs the sacramentals. In distinction from the sacraments, they rest upon ecclesiastical ordinance and not upon the institution of Christ. Their efficacy is not derived therefore from a positive act of our Lord's will, but from the intercession of the whole Church and from their devout employment. They are supplications for blessing and grace made by the faithful and by the whole Church, and objectively manifested in visible signs. When the Catholic uses Holy Water, or makes the sign of the Cross on the forehead of one he loves, or fixes on his wall blessed palms and blessed flowers, his action signifies a devout communion with the intercessory prayer of the whole Church, that God may help him in all his needs. Each and every element of his mundane life, from marriage ring and bridal bed down to the blessed salt which he gives to a sick beast, is drawn by the blessing of the Church into a supernatural relation with God. By this means the whole activity of the Catholic in all its aspects is directed towards heaven—by visible things to things invisible. It is true that abuses are possible and that the sacramentals may be degraded into magical charms. But wherever there are men there will be abuses, nor should we judge a good thing by its abuse, but contrariwise. In elevating men by these sensible means to appreciate the supra-sensible, the Church obtains religious influence over those whose minds are as yet wholly immersed in the things of sense. She is able to bring a ray of divinity and holiness even into their small and poor lives. So she is not only the Church of the nations, she is the Church of the people.

As the Church affirms man's sensible nature, so does she also affirm and lay hold of his spiritual nature, and especially human reason. She aims deliberately at conquering the world of the mind. Her whole theology, from the apologists and the schools of Alexandria and Antioch through early and late Scholasticism down to our own day, is dominated by confidence in the illuminating power of reason. Her conception of faith presupposes that human reason can of itself recognize the so-called "praeambula fidei," i.e. the spirituality of the human soul and the existence of God—realities which transcend sensible experience—and that reason can establish the credibility of revelation on historical and philosophical grounds. The supernatural certitude of faith is the gift of God, but in so far as it is built upon these rational presuppositions, philosophy becomes the handmaid of faith (ancilla fidei). The Church does not in this propose to interfere in any way with the independence of the profane sciences in their own proper sphere. Indeed, the Vatican Council expressly renounces any such intention (Sess. III, cap. 4). What she wishes to establish is the fact that human reason, while remaining true to itself, can by its own principles advance to a point where God becomes visible as the fundamental basis and ultimate meaning of all reality, and where knowledge passes over into faith, philosophy into theology. Whenever men have doubted or denied the capacity of the human mind to transcend the limits of experience, whenever they have attempted to paralyze or kill man's profound yearning for absolute truth, then the Church has come forward in defense of reason, whether against Averroes and Luther or against Kant. And the more our own age becomes weary of subjective idealism and seeks to rediscover the objective world, the more grateful will it be to Pope Pius X that in his much abused anti-modernist Encyclical "Pascendi" he denounced all positivism, pragmatism and phenomenalism and defended the power of reason to transcend and surpass experience, thus exorcising those twin bugbears of solipsism and skepticism which menace all knowledge. The catholicity of the Church is manifested not least in this, that she does not allow knowledge and faith to be separated and set in an unhealthy antagonism, but conjoins them in intimate harmony, making knowledge accessible to faith and faith to knowledge. Her greatest minds, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and Newman, made it their life's task to establish this synthesis of faith and knowledge. Nor do the theologians of our own day know of any more important task than that of making modern knowledge fruitful for the faith. Catholicism lays its hand on every branch of knowledge, seeking everywhere the golden grains of truth, that it may adorn its sanctuary with them.

We have described the first consequence which follows from the high value which the Church sets upon our human nature and indicated its relation to her world-wide influence. The second consequence shall be treated very briefly. It is her definitely affirmative attitude towards all that is natural, genuine and incorrupt in the pre-Christian and non-Christian world. So far as paganism is genuine paganism, that is to say, revolt from the living God, self-deification or the deification of nature, it has no more resolute foe than Catholicism. But there is more in paganism than revolt. There break forth even in paganism, from out of the uncorrupted sources of human nature, noble and pure impulses, thoughts and resolves, not only in philosophy and art, but also in religion and morality. The seeds of truth, as the Fathers constantly declare, are to be found everywhere, among Romans as among Greeks, among Indians as among Negroes. What we have to do is to free these seeds from the non-Christian growth that chokes them and to redeem them for the Kingdom of God. The Church is pursuing this task of purification and redemption when she takes the wisdom of the pagan philosophers, of Plato, or Aristotle, or Plotinus, or the Stoics, and makes it minister to the Incarnate Word. She does not hesitate even to take over pagan ritual and pagan symbols, whenever such things can be Christianized and reformed. This is not weakness, or unprincipled accommodation, but practical catholicism. It is a direct consequence of that fundamental Catholic conviction that every genuine value, everything that comes from pure and uncorrupted nature, belongs to God and has citizen rights in His Kingdom. Therefore the Church sets up no barrier against non-Christian culture, and no barrier against antiquity. She sets up her barrier only against sin. It was her loving hand that preserved for us many of the treasures of antiquity when the ancient world collapsed under the assault of the Germanic peoples. And were those same treasures and the whole spiritual achievement of antiquity to be in danger, in our own time, of being frittered away and squandered by modem vandals in their greed for gold, and were some frigid instinct for the practical and useful, for the idols of our time, to deprive men of sympathetic feeling for the spirit of antiquity and to destroy our humanist institutions, then the Church would stand forth once again, as she did in the Middle Ages, and taking the "gold of the Egyptians" hand it on to her sons and daughters.

Such is Catholicism: an affirmation of values along the whole line, a most comprehensive and noblest accessibility to all good,[8] a union of nature with grace, of art with religion, of knowledge with faith, "so that God may be all in all." Let others be "ever hunting for a fabulous primitive simplicity; we repose in Catholic fulness."[9] Catholicism knows no other watchword than the sentence of St. Paul: "I became all things to all men that I might save all. And I do all things for the gospel's sake" (1 Cor. ix, 22-23).

Endnotes

1. "Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten 3 Jahrh.," 1916; Vol. I, p. 39, Note 3. Eng. tr., Jas. Moffatt: "The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries," 2nd ed., London, 1908; Vol. I, page 38, note 1.

2. Kattenbusch, op. cit., p. 351.

3. St. Augustine emphasizes this unity in fullness: Corpus ipsius ubi jacet? . . . Extende caritatem per totum orbem, si vis Christum amare, quia membra Christi per orbem jacent (In. Ep. Joann. Tr. X, 8). The Catholic may proudly claim: Ego in omnibus linguis sum: mea est Graeca, mea est Syra, mea est Hebraea, mea est omnium gentium, quia in unitate sum omnium gentium (En. in Ps. CXLVII, 19).

4. Cardinal Newman, "University Sermons," XV (1872, p. 318.)

5. ibid., p. 317.

6. "Development of Christian Doctrine," VI, 2 (1846, p. 352)

7. St. Augustine repeatedly speaks of the importance of heresies in the development of the Church's teaching. Plurimum prosunt, non verum docendo, quod nesciunt, sed ad verum quaerendum carnales et ad verum aperiendum spiritales catholicos excitando. (De vera religione, VIII, 15.) Improbatio quippe haereticorum facit eminere, quid ecclesia tua sentiat et quid habeat sana doctrina. Oportuit enim et haereses esse, ut probati manifesti fierent inter infirmos (Confess. VII, 19, 28).

8. F. von Hugel (The Mystical Element in Religion, II; 118) speaks of the "all-welcoming" spirit of Catholicism.

9. Cardinal Newman, "Essays Critical and Historical," Vol. II, Essay XI (1873, p. 233).

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