In
the case of all but the Moslem and the modern confused but ubiquitous attack,
which is still in progress, I deal with their failure and the causes of their
failure.
I shall conclude by discussing the chances of the present struggle for
the survival; of the Church in that very civilization which she created and
which is now generally abandoning her.
There is, as everybody knows, an
institution proclaiming itself today the sole authoritative and divinely
appointed teacher of essential morals and essential doctrine.
This institution
calls itself the Catholic Church.
It is further an admitted historical truth,
which no one denies, that such an institution putting forth such a claim has
been present among mankind for many centuries.
Many through antagonism or lack
of knowledge deny the identity of the Catholic Church today with the original
Christian society. No one, however hostile or uninstructed, will deny its
presence during at least thirteen or fourteen hundred years.
It is further
historically true (though not universally admitted) that the claim of this body
to be a divinely appointed voice for the statement of true doctrine on the
matters essential to man (his nature, his ordeal in this world, his doom or
salvation, his immortality, etc.) is to be found affirmed through preceding
centuries, up to a little before the middle of the first century.
From the day
of Pentecost some time between A.D. 29 and A.D. 33) onwards there has been a
body of doctrine affirmed for instance, at the very outset, the Resurrection.
And the organism by which that body of doctrine has been affirmed has been from
the outset a body of men bound by a certain tradition through which they claimed
to have the authority in question.
Hence we must distinguish between two
conceptions totally different, which are nevertheless often confused.
One is the
historical fact that the claim to Divine authority and Infallible doctrine was
and is still made; the other the credibility of that claim.
Whether the claim be
true or false has nothing whatever to do with its historical origin and
continuity; it may have arisen as an illusion or an imposture; it may have been
continued in ignorance; but that does not affect its historical existence.
The
claim has been made and continues to be made, and those who make it are in
unbroken continuity with those who made it in the beginning.
They form,
collectively, the organism which called itself and still calls itself "The
Church."
Now against this authoritative organism, its claim, character and
doctrines, there have been throughout the whole period of its existence
continued assaults. There have been denials of its claim. There have been
denials of this or that section of its doctrines. There has been the attempted
replacing of these by other doctrines. Even attempted destruction of the
organism, the Church, has repeatedly taken place.
I propose to select five main
attacks of this kind from the whole of the very great the almost unlimited
number of efforts, major and minor, to bring down the edifice of unity and
authority.
My reason for choosing so small a number as five, and concentrating
upon each as a separate phenomenon, is not only the necessity for a framework
and for limits, but also the fact that in these five the main forms of attack
are exemplified.
These five are, in their historical order, 1. The Arian; 2. The
Mohammedan; 3. The Albigensian; 4. The Protestant; 5.
One to which no specific
name has as yet been attached, but we shall call for the sake of convenience
"the Modern.''
I say that each of these five main campaigns, the full success of
any one of which would have involved the destruction of the Catholic Church, its
authority and doctrine among men, presents a type.
The Arian attack proposed a
change of fundamental doctrine, such that, had the change prevailed, the whole
nature of the religion would have been transformed. It would not only have been
transformed, it would have failed; and with its failure would have followed the
break-down of that civilization which the Catholic Church was to build up.
The
Arian heresy (filling the fourth, and active throughout the fifth, century),
proposed to go to the very root of the Church's authority by attacking the full
Divinity of her Founder. But it did much more, because its underlying motive was
a rationalizing of the mystery upon which the church bases herself: the Mystery
of the Incarnation.
Arianism was essentially a revolt against the difficulties
attaching to mysteries as a whole though expressing itself as an attack on the
chief mystery only.
Arianism was a typical example on the largest scale of that
reaction against the supernatural which, when it is fully developed, withdraws
from religion all that by which religion lives.
The Mohammedan attack was of a
different kind. It came geographically from just outside the area of
Christendom; it appeared, almost from the outset, as a foreign enemy; yet it was
not, strictly speaking, a new religion attacking the old, it was essentially a
heresy; but from the circumstances of its birth it was a heresy alien rather
than intimate.
It threatened to kill the Christian Church by invasion rather
than to undermine it from within.
The Albigensian attack was but the chief of a
great number, all of which drew their source from the Manichean conception of a
duality in the Universe; the conception that that good and evil are ever
struggling as equals, and that Omnipotent Power is neither single nor
beneficient.
Closely intertwined with this idea and inseparable from it was the
conception that matter is evil and that all pleasure, especially of the body, is
evil.
This form of attack, of which I say the Albigensian was the most notorious
and came nearest to success, was rather an attack upon morals than upon
doctrine; it had the character of a cancer fastening upon the body of the Church
from within, producing a new life of its own, antagonistic to the life of the
Church and destructive of it just as a malignant growth in the human body lives
a life of its own, other than, and destructive of, the organism in which it has
parasitically arisen.
The Protestant attack differed from the rest especially in
this characteristic that its attack did not consist in the promulgation of a new
doctrine or of a new authority, that it made no concerted attempt at creating a
counter-Church, but had for its principle the denial of unity.
It was an effort
to promote that state of mind in which a Church in the old sense of the word
that is, an infallible, united, teaching body, a Person speaking with Divine
authority should be denied; not the doctrines it might happen to advance, but
it’s very claim to advance them with unique authority.
Thus, one Protestant may
affirm, as do the English Puseyites, the truth of all the doctrines underlying
the Mass, the Real Presence, the Sacrifice, the sacerdotal power of consecration,
etc. another Protestant may affirm that all such conceptions are false, yet both
these Protestants are Protestant because they communicate in the fundamental
conception that the Church is not a visible, definable and united personality,
that there is no central infallible authority, and that therefore each is free
to choose his own set of doctrines.
Such affirmations of disunion, such denial
of the claim to unity as being part of the Divine order, produced indeed a
common Protestant temperament through certain historical associations; but there
is no one doctrine nor set of doctrines which can be affirmed as being the
kernel of Protestantism.
Its essential remains the rejection of unity through
authority.
Lastly there is that contemporary attack on the Catholic Church which
is still in progress and to which no name has been finally attached, save the
vague term "modern.''
I should have preferred, perhaps, the old Greek word
"alogos''; but that would have seemed pedantic. And yet it is a pity to have to
reject it, for it admirably describes by implication the quarrel between the
present attackers of Catholic authority and doctrine, and the tone of mind of a
believer.
Antiquity began by giving the name "alogos'' to those who belittled or
denied, though calling themselves Christians, the Divinity of Christ.
They were
said to do so from lack of "wit,'' in the sense of "fullness of comprehension,''
"largeness of apprehension.''
Men felt about this kind of rationalism as normal
people feel about a colour-blind man.
One might also have chosen the term
"Positivism,'' seeing that the modern movement relies upon the distinction
between things positively proved by experiment and things accepted upon other
grounds; but the term "Positivism'' has already a special connotation and to use
it would have been confusing.
At any rate, though we have as yet perhaps no
specific name, we all know the spirit to which I refer: "That only is true which
can be appreciated by the senses and subjected to experiment. That can most
thoroughly be believed which can most thoroughly be measured and tested by
repeated trial. What are generally called `religious affirmations' are, always
presumably , sometimes demonstrably illusions.
The idea of God itself and all
that follows on it is man-made and a figment of the imagination.''
This is the
attack which has superseded all the older ones, which is now gaining ground so
rapidly and whose votaries feel (as did in their hey-day all the votaries of the
earlier attacks) an increasing confidence of success.
Such are the five great
movements antagonistic to the Faith.
To concentrate our attention upon each in
turn teaches us in separate examples the character of our religion and the
strange truth that men cannot escape sympathy with it or hatred of it.
To
concentrate on these five main attacks has this further value, that between them
they seem to sum up all the directions from which the assault can be delivered
against the Catholic Faith.
Doubtless in the future there will be further
conflict; indeed we can be sure that it is inevitable, for it is of the nature
of the Church to provoke the anger and attack of the world.
Perhaps we shall
have later to meet the heathen from the East, or perhaps, earlier or later, the
challenge of a new system altogether not a heresy but a new religion.
But the
main kinds of attack would seen to be exhausted by the list which history has
hitherto presented.
We have had examples of heresy, working from without and
forming a new world in that fashion, of which Islam is the great example.
We
have had examples of heresy at work attacking the root of the Faith, the
Incarnation, and specializing upon that of which Arianism was the great example.
We have had the growth of the foreign body from within, the Albigenses, and all
their Manichean kindred before and after them.
We have had the attack on the
personality that is the unity, of the Church which is Protestantism.
And we now
behold, even as Protestantism is dying, the rise and growth of yet another form
of conflict the proposal to treat all transcendental affirmation as illusion.
It
would seem as though the future could hold no more than the repetition of these
forms.
The Church might thus be regarded as a citadel presenting a certain
number of faces between the angles of its defences; each face attacked in turn,
and after the failure of one attack its neighbor suffering the brunt of the
battle.
The last assault, the modern one, is more like an attempt to dissolve
the garrison, the annihilation of its powers of resistance by suggestion, than
an armed conflict.
With this last form the list would seem exhausted.
If or when
that last danger is dissipated, the next can only appear after some fashion of
which we have already had experience. I may be asked by way of postscript to
this prelude why I have not included any mention of the schisms.
The schisms are
as much attacks upon the life of the Catholic Church as are the heresies; the
greatest schism of all, the Greek or Orthodox, which has produced the Greek or
Orthodox communion, is manifestly a disruption of our strength.
Yet I think that
the various forms of attack on the Church by way of heretical doctrine are in a
different category from the schisms.
No doubt a schism commonly includes a
heresy, and no doubt certain heresies have attempted to plead that we should be
reconciled with them, as we might be with a schism.
But though the two evils
commonly appear in company, yet each is of a separate sort from the other; and
as we are studying the one it is best to eliminate the other during the process
of that study.
I shall then in these pages examine in turn the five great
movements I have mentioned, and I will take them in historical order, beginning
with the Arian business which, as it was the first, was also, perhaps, the most
formidable.
