Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
every one who has the means of estimating. This is a state of things
both of past time and of the present. We live in a wonderful age; the
enlargement of the circle of secular knowledge just now is simply a
bewilderment, and the more so, because it has the promise of continuing,
and that with greater rapidity, and more signal results. Now these
discoveries, certain or probable, have in matter of fact an indirect
bearing upon religious opinions, and the question arises how are the
respective claims of revelation and of natural science to be adjusted.
Few minds in earnest can remain at ease without some sort of rational
grounds for their religious belief; to reconcile theory and fact is
almost an instinct of the mind. When then a flood of facts, ascertained
or suspected, comes pouring in upon us, with a multitude of others in
prospect, all believers in Revelation, be they Catholic or not, are
roused to consider their bearing upon themselves, both for the honour of
God, and from tenderness for those many souls who, in consequence of the
confident tone of the schools of secular knowledge, are in danger of
being led away into a bottomless liberalism of thought.
I am not going to criticize here that vast body of men, in the mass, who
at this time would profess to be liberals in religion; and who look
towards the discoveries of the age, certain or in progress, as their
informants, direct or indirect, as to what they shall think about the
unseen and the future. The Liberalism which gives a colour to society
now, is very different from that character of thought which bore the
name thirty or forty years ago. Now it is scarcely a party; it is the
educated lay world. When I was young, I knew the word first as giving
name to a periodical, set up by Lord Byron and others. Now, as then, I
have no sympathy with the philosophy of Byron. Afterwards, Liberalism
was the badge of a theological school, of a dry and repulsive character,
not very dangerous in itself, though dangerous as opening the door to
evils which it did not itself either anticipate or comprehend. At
present it is nothing else than that deep, plausible scepticism, of
which I spoke above, as being the development of human reason, as
practically exercised by the natural man.
The Liberal religionists of this day are a very mixed body, and
therefore I am not intending to speak against them. There may be, and
doubtless is, in the hearts of some or many of them a real antipathy or
anger against revealed truth, which it is distressing to think of.
Again, in many men of science or literature there may be an animosity
arising from almost a personal feeling; it being a matter of party, a
point of honour, the excitement of a game, or a satisfaction to the
soreness or annoyance occasioned by the acrimony or narrowness of
apologists for religion, to prove that Christianity or that Scripture is
untrustworthy. Many scientific and literary men, on the other hand, go
on, I am confident, in a straightforward impartial way, in their own
province and on their own line of thought, without any disturbance from
religious difficulties in themselves, or any wish at all to give pain to
others by the result of their investigations. It would ill become me, as
if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular
facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical
conclusions: or to be angry with science, because religion is bound in
duty to take cognizance of its teaching. But putting these particular
classes of men aside, as having no special call on the sympathy of the
Catholic, of course he does most deeply enter into the feelings of a
fourth and large class of men, in the educated portions of society, of
religious and sincere minds, who are simply perplexed,--frightened or
rendered desperate, as the case may be,--by the utter confusion into
which late discoveries or speculations have thrown their most elementary
ideas of religion. Who does not feel for such men? who can have one
unkind thought of them? I take up in their behalf St. Augustine's
beautiful words, "Illi in vos sæviant," &c. Let them be fierce with you
who have no experience of the difficulty with which error is
discriminated from truth, and the way of life is found amid the
illusions of the world. How many a Catholic has in his thoughts followed
such men, many of them so good, so true, so noble! how often has the
wish risen in his heart that some one from among his own people should
come forward as the champion of revealed truth against its opponents!
Various persons, Catholic and Protestant, have asked me to do so myself;
but I had several strong difficulties in the way. One of the greatest is
this, that at the moment it is so difficult to say precisely what it is
that is to be encountered and overthrown. I am far from denying that
scientific knowledge is really growing, but it is by fits and starts;
hypotheses rise and fall; it is difficult to anticipate which of them
will keep their ground, and what the state of knowledge in relation to
them will be from year to year. In this condition of things, it has
seemed to me to be very undignified for a Catholic to commit himself to
the work of chasing what might turn out to be phantoms, and, in behalf
of some special objections, to be ingenious in devising a theory, which,
before it was completed, might have to give place to some theory newer
still, from the fact that those former objections had already come to
nought under the uprising of others. It seemed to be specially a time,
in which Christians had a call to be patient, in which they had no other
way of helping those who were alarmed, than that of exhorting them to
have a little faith and fortitude, and to "beware," as the poet says,
"of dangerous steps." This seemed so clear to me, the more I thought of
the matter, as to make me surmise, that, if I attempted what had so
little promise in it, I should find that the highest Catholic Authority
was against the attempt, and that I should have spent my time and my
thought, in doing what either it would be imprudent to bring before the
public at all, or what, did I do so, would only complicate matters
further which were already complicated, without my interference, more
than enough. And I interpret recent acts of that authority as fulfilling
my expectation; I interpret them as tying the hands of a
controversialist, such as I should be, and teaching us that true wisdom,
which Moses inculcated on his people, when the Egyptians were pursuing
them, "Fear ye not, stand still; the Lord shall fight for you, and ye
shall hold your peace." And so far from finding a difficulty in obeying
in this case, I have cause to be thankful and to rejoice to have so
clear a direction in a matter of difficulty.
But if we would ascertain with correctness the real course of a
principle, we must look at it at a certain distance, and as history
represents it to us. Nothing carried on by human instruments, but has
its irregularities, and affords ground for criticism, when minutely
scrutinized in matters of detail. I have been speaking of that aspect of
the action of an infallible authority, which is most open to invidious
criticism from those who view it from without; I have tried to be fair,
in estimating what can be said to its disadvantage, as witnessed at a
particular time in the Catholic Church, and now I wish its adversaries
to be equally fair in their judgment upon its historical character. Can,
then, the infallible authority, with any show of reason, be said in fact
to have destroyed the energy of the Catholic intellect? Let it be
observed, I have not here to speak of any conflict which ecclesiastical
authority has had with science, for this simple reason, that conflict
there has been none; and that, because the secular sciences, as they now
exist, are a novelty in the world, and there has been no time yet for a
history of relations between theology and these new methods of
knowledge, and indeed the Church may be said to have kept clear of them,
as is proved by the constantly cited case of Galileo. Here "exceptio
probat regulam:" for it is the one stock argument. Again, I have not to
speak of any relations of the Church to the new sciences, because my
simple question all along has been whether the assumption of
infallibility by the proper authority is adapted to make me a hypocrite,
and till that authority passes decrees on pure physical subjects and
calls on me to subscribe them, (which it never will do, because it has
not the power,) it has no tendency to interfere by any of its acts with
my private judgment on those points. The simple question is, whether
authority has so acted upon the reason of individuals, that they can
have no opinion of their own, and have but an alternative of slavish
superstition or secret rebellion of heart; and I think the whole history
of theology puts an absolute negative upon such a supposition.
It is hardly necessary to argue out so plain a point. It is individuals,
and not the Holy See, that have taken the initiative, and given the lead
to the Catholic mind, in theological inquiry. Indeed, it is one of the
reproaches urged against the Roman Church, that it has originated
nothing, and has only served as a sort of _remora_ or break in the
development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I really embrace
as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its
extraordinary gift. It is said, and truly, that the Church of Rome
possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution. Afterwards
for a long while, it has not a single doctor to show; St. Leo, its
first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine; St. Gregory, who stands
at the very extremity of the first age of the Church, has no place in
dogma or philosophy. The great luminary of the western world is, as we
know, St. Augustine; he, no infallible teacher, has formed the intellect
of Christian Europe; indeed to the African Church generally we must look
for the best early exposition of Latin ideas. Moreover, of the African
divines, the first in order of time, and not the least influential, is
the strong-minded and heterodox Tertullian. Nor is the Eastern
intellect, as such, without its share in the formation of the Latin
teaching. The free thought of Origen is visible in the writings of the
Western Doctors, Hilary and Ambrose; and the independent mind of Jerome
has enriched his own vigorous commentaries on Scripture, from the stores
of the scarcely orthodox Eusebius. Heretical questionings have been
transmuted by the living power of the Church into salutary truths. The
case is the same as regards the Ecumenical Councils. Authority in its
most imposing exhibition, grave bishops, laden with the traditions and
rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their
decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and
of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect overruled the
super-human gift which was committed to the Council, which would be a
self-contradictory assertion, but that in that process of inquiry and
deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual
reason was paramount. Thus Malchion, a mere presbyter, was the
instrument of the great Council of Antioch in the third century in
meeting and refuting, for the assembled Fathers, the heretical Patriarch
of that see. Parallel to this instance is the influence, so well known,
of a young deacon, St. Athanasius, with the 318 Fathers at Nicæa. In
mediæval times we read of St. Anselm at Bari, as the champion of the
Council there held, against the Greeks. At Trent, the writings of St.
Bonaventura, and, what is more to the point, the address of a Priest and
theologian, Salmeron, had a critical effect on some of the definitions