The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
personal, creative God, the sustainer of the universe. Of the Catholic
discipline they accepted property as a moral right, and its twin
institution of indissoluble monogamous marriage as a necessary thing
in society, though they were perfectly ready to discuss these and any
other disciplines.
Undoubtedly the underlying conception common to the rationalists was
this, that there is a certain knowledge of reality to be obtained
through the reason dealing with the senses and experience common to all
men, and only what can be so obtained is to be affirmed as true. What
could not be so obtained is to be rejected as doubtful or false. But
while this was their underlying conception, they could not shake off a
considerable body of their Catholic past.
This rationalism rejected the miraculous in every form, and even the
unusual. It began to substitute the document for tradition in history,
it proceeded to a strict and most successful progressive examination of
the physical world, discovering more and more of its sequences. This
imprinted on all the rationalists did (not _thought_) a very special
stamp, the stamp of _proved certitude_. They carried the feeling of
scientific certitude which physical research had given them into the
field of ideas. They came to imagine their metaphysical dogmas to be
not transcendental but demonstrable by experiment, or, at least, by
the common sense of mankind. Here was a curious and, perhaps, unique
incident in human history: a faith which did not know it was a faith.
The rationalists had not any doubts at all, because everything exterior
to their faith seemed to them insignificant save in so far as it
combated their faith.
For instance, if you take Gibbon (who was the principal English writer
among them, and who was the chief English pupil of Voltaire) you will
see that most transcendental truths affirmed by Catholicism—such as
the divinity of Our Lord, the affirmation of miracle, the admission
of tradition in history, side by side with the document, etc.—were
to him ideas ridiculous in themselves, and in themselves therefore of
no value. But though direct Catholic statement inspired him with a
strong aversion, yet he revelled in, he took for granted, that very
civilisation, Europe, which the Catholic Church had made. He had no
conception whither rationalism was leading.
These people were certain; they stood upon a rock; and from the nature
of their certitude they took it for granted that all the world would
come to the same certitude by a mere process of evidence. They took
it for granted that there was in all men a certain line of reason
which only had to be turned upon any mass of affirmation in order to
distinguish at once what was false in it from what was true, reckoning
amongst the false whatever was affirmed without such proof behind it
(of document or experiment) as they required.
They made no doubt that all this was final, that they themselves had
reached finality, that the world was rapidly reaching it, and that
nothing could disturb such a progress save some hardly imaginable
reversion to Catholicism.
They were quite wrong. Before they had so much as convinced the bulk
of educated Europe, three further developments were upon them, one of
which has survived, and has become the modern opponent of the Catholic
Church. The first of these three developments was a sceptical attack
upon the postulates of the rationalists themselves: a questioning
whether humanity and its common experience had ever grasped reality.
That nonsense was German; it was Kant’s muddlement of the great and
clear Descartes.
Next they had to meet a development rather English than German, which
noted with great practical common sense the irrational flaw in the
rationalists’ position. This flaw was the statement that a thing
affirmed without the proof of common experience could not be true. It
does not at all follow that because a statement lacks material proof,
therefore it is untrue; it does not at all follow that because a thing
is most unusual therefore it has not been.
For instance, witnesses were brought forward to state that a man had
lifted himself off the ground without material force to aid him, and
had so remained suspended in an ecstasy. The thing was most unlikely;
it was opposed to the common experience of mankind. Therefore, said the
rationalists, it is false. They were attacked by those who replied:
‘Your “therefore” is ill-chosen; it is itself a mere affirmation
without proof. The thing _may_ have happened.’ Hence mere suspense of
judgment and what was called ‘agnosticism’ in England.
This second phase also was destined to a very brief life; but it
contained two permanent elements of truth. These were, first that it
denied the necessary truth of the rationalists’ postulates save only
the postulate of the evidence of the senses (it denied the necessity
of common experience being the only experience), and secondly that it
affirmed (what was obviously true) that a mass of things credited to be
real were not susceptible of proof through the evidence of the senses,
or the common sense of mankind.
This spirit advanced to the denial not of a personal God, but of the
rationalists’ belief in a personal God; and it attached to the Power or
Powers behind the universe the comic term ‘Great Unknowable.’
The third development attacking the rationalists now occupies all the
Western mind outside the Catholic Church. It came not from the head,
but from the heart. It is an affirmation that truths may be recognised
emotionally, and are not to be rejected because the intellect is
either incapable of analysing them or of discovering any foundation
for them. One might take as the germ of this movement a commonplace
sentence of Pascal’s which has become, because it is obvious and
superficial, far more famous than his deeper sayings: the saying that
‘the heart has its reasons of which the head knows nothing.’ This
emotional protest against rationalism appealed to the vivid response
awakened in the human heart by the life of nature. Such a trend could
only end in pantheism: and pantheist the modern world, outside the
Catholic body, has become.
The reason, for instance, that the poet Wordsworth attained so
ill-proportioned a popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth
century in England was his pantheism. He is the exponent of that mood;
not the most vivid—for he is vivid only in a few flashes, and usually
dull and thoroughly bad; not the most intelligent, for he made no
pretence at an intelligent exposition of the mood; but because he was
so thoroughly steeped in pantheism: because every line of his betrays a
taken-for-granted and, as it were, necessary pantheism.
In France and Italy this same reaction took the form of accepting
the universe as blind but moral; the pantheist movement of the
anti-clerical factions deified what were taken to be the common moral
emotions of mankind speaking particularly of ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’ as
though there were real beings in a universe where the personal power
and virtues of a Creator were denied. Throughout the more cultivated
Europe a certain number of special marks of the thing increased,
notably the insistence upon landscape, upon our fellowship with the
rest of animated creation, and side by side with these a disdain
or negligence or despair upon the sharp points of Divine Will, of
personal immortality, of possible doom.
There was formed at last in our own time, as the crystallisation of all
this boiling, a philosophy, a set of judgments accepted vaguely, but
finally, by all that is not Catholic in the Occident, and this I will
call ‘sceptical pantheism.’ Over against it stands the defined, exact,
and traditional revelation maintained by the Catholics intact. This
revelation is as separate from that other mood as is the firm strand
from sea water, or waking from dreams.
Here many men reading me (if indeed many men shall read me, for
whatever number of men may read this hotchpotch of a book, most of
them, I think, will skip these musing passages—seeing that their
subjects are the only ones of real import) will reply:
‘In face of this great, new, general, modern spirit, which you call
sceptical pantheism, and which I admit to be the chief moral phenomenon
of our time, the Catholic Church is negligible. I accept your statement
that there is a great general modern spirit or mood full of this
feeling for nature and of brotherhood with all animated creatures and
a substitution of emotional materialism for dogma. I may or may not
accept your particular title “sceptical pantheism,” but I know what
you mean. We are all agreed that the spirit is there; and in face of
it the Catholic position no longer has weight: it no longer counts. It
is a mere surviving habit with most of its so-called adherents (who at
heart are themselves shaken in their adherence). It is ignorance on the
part of a few sincere ones; a bitter refusal to accept evidence on the
part of a larger number of less sincere ones: a deliberate shutting
of the eyes. Catholicism is in process of dissolution and has become
politically negligible.’
That is the reply which I think most educated men in England would
give to the proposition I have just advanced: the proposition that the
modern world is now divided into two sharply defined camps (of which
Catholicism is one) standing each over against the other.
Now these objectors are provincial, both the better informed and the
less. They should appreciate the modern world more exactly. They
could arrive at such an appreciation by a wise use of travel, and of
even their own contemporary society; by getting to know many kinds of
men intimately in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and by
reading the words written upon the Catholic side—a thing which, for
the most part, they wholly neglect to do.
Indeed, I have noticed that the finest and most conclusive pieces of
Catholic apologetics are, in England and America, hidden away in little
publications read by no one but Catholics; and by few, even of these.
If those who make the objection I have just recited would use travel
wisely, or even read contemporary Catholic writing in their own
country, they would appreciate that what I have said is true if one
regards Western Europe as a whole. Outside England every one is aware
of the Catholic Church; two great armies face each other, and the issue
is doubtful. All instructed Europe sees a great duel set between the
Catholic Church and its opponent. All instructed Europe sees that this
duel is taking the form of anti-Catholic laws and of proposals of laws
upon the one side, and upon the other of growing Catholic social power.
Those who, in England, once followed Calvin, who then at second hand
followed Diderot and Voltaire, who then at second or third hand
followed the French romantics, would to-day do well to follow this
great modern quarrel, as it is joined upon the old battleground of
European debate: the arena which lies between the Pyrenees and the
Channel, between the Rhine and the Atlantic: Gaul.
They will find that you can hardly take up a random French newspaper
in a French café without coming upon the great quarrel. They will find
that the statues in the towns express it; the names of the streets; the
titles as well as the tendencies of the novels.
In Italy, though in a different form, it is the same thing. In Spain it
is manifest; in Belgium it is the centre of interest. Throughout the
Occident the struggle is engaged.
The forces on either side use every weapon to hand. Those opposed
to the Catholic Church use, when they are in political power, the
bludgeon of a universal and enforced anti-Catholic popular education,
against which the Catholics use the force of personal intelligence and