CHAPTER II THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION

1. Three Prejudices

I here encounter three prejudices which are, I think, the most inveterate in the world. The first is that dogmas are immutable; the second, that they die fatally the moment they are touched by criticism; the third, that they form the essence of religion, which rises or falls with them. I wish to show that dogmas have neither this pretended immobility nor this delicate fragility; that they live by an inner life extraordinarily resistant and fecund, and that the criticism of dogmas, so far from injuring the Christian religion, frees it from the chains of the past and permits it to manifest its marvellous gift of rejuvenescence and adaptation to circumstances.

The proof that dogmas are not immutable lies in the fact that they have a history. That history is as full of conflicts, controversies, revolutions, as the history of philosophy.... One Church has said of its dogmas what a Jesuit General said of his Order: sint ut sunt aut non sint! It is an illusion. Momentarily arrested at one point, the movement begins again at another. In one half of Christendom, and certainly the most living half, criticism of dogma has never ceased since the sixteenth century. Even in the bosom of the Catholic Church, its most skilful advocates, the Moehlers and the Newmans, unable to deny that Catholicism is not to-day what it was in the first centuries, have made this strange concession to history; they have applied to dogmas the theory of development. At Paris in 1682 the dogma of the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome would have been condemned as an error. Since 1870 the orthodoxy of 1682 has become the gravest of heresies. There is no fiction more evident than that of the immutability of dogmas, whether in the Catholic or in the Protestant Churches. Like all other manifestations of life, they have an evolution as natural as it is inevitable. The proof that dogmas are not religion, and that criticism does not kill them but transforms them, will appear in what I now proceed to say.

2. The Two Elements in Dogma; and its Historical Evolution

Dogma is the language spoken by faith. In it there are two elements: a mystical and practical element, the properly religious element; this is the living and fruitful principle of dogma: then there is an intellectual or theoretical element, a judgment of mind, a philosophical proposition serving at once as an envelope and as an expression of religion.

Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it, trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now, thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into an intellectual judgment. Thus, wishing to express this relation, the believer will exclaim, e.g. "God is great!" marking the infinite disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him tremble.[1] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed in the mind into the notion of a relation, i.e. into an intellectual notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression which ideally represents a given quantity, but it is not the quantity itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious experience....

[1] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation and other experiences: the revelation of God and of a higher life, in the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "God is Love!" as the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "God is great!" And this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.

The intellectual will therefore be the variable element in dogma. It is the matter united to the germ, and it is ceaselessly transformed by the very effect of the movement of life. The reason of this is simple. We said just now that a religious emotion, like every other, translates itself into a notion which fixes the relation of the subject to the object, implied in the emotion itself. But what will this notion be? With what materials, with what concepts, will the religious man construct it? Clearly with those at his disposal. His religious formula will depend on his state of intellectual culture. A child, he will think and speak religiously as a child. Religious reason and language have followed the same steps as the general reason....

I am well aware that many Christians imagine that God has revealed to us dogmas in the Bible, and that they will accuse me of denying revelation. God forbid! We believe with all our soul in Divine Revelation and in its particular action in the souls of prophets and apostles, and especially in Jesus Christ. Only, the question is whether the revelation of God has consisted of doctrines and dogmatic formulas. No. God does nothing needless, and since these doctrines and formulas can be and have been conceived by human intelligence, He has left to it the care of elaborating them. God, entering into commerce and contact with a human soul, has produced in him a certain religious experience whence, afterwards, by reflection, the dogma has sprung. That therefore which constitutes revelation, that which ought to be the norm of our life, is the creative and fruitful religious experience which first arose in the souls of the prophets, of Christ, and of His apostles. We may be tranquil. So long as this experience shall be renewed in Christian souls, Christian dogmas may be modified, but they will never die. But why should we retain dogmas which, in the nature of things, must always be imperfect? Why not have religion pure and simple without dogmas? What would happen if we listened to this cry for pure unmixed religion? By suppressing Christian dogma you would suppress Christianity; by discarding all religious doctrine you would destroy religion. How many great and eternal things there are which never exist, for us, in a pure and isolated state! All the forces of Nature are in this case. Thought, in order to exist, must incarnate itself in language. Words cannot be identified with thought, but they are necessary to it. The hero in the romance, who was said to be unable to think without speaking was not so ridiculous as was once supposed, for that hero is everybody. The soul only reveals itself to us by the body to which it is united. Who has ever seen life apart from living matter? It is the same with the religious life and the doctrines and rites in which it manifests itself. A religious life which did not express itself would neither know itself nor communicate itself. It is therefore perfectly irrational to talk of a religion without dogma and without worship. Orthodoxy is a thousand times right as against rationalism or mysticism, when it proclaims the necessity for a Church of formulating its faith into a doctrine, without which religious consciousnesses remain confused and undiscernible.

The mistake that orthodoxy sometimes makes is in denying or desiring to arrest the constant metamorphosis to which dogma, like all living things, is subject. So long as they are alive, dogmas have the faculty of changing and evolving. How is their evolution effected? The analogy between dogma and language will help us to the answer. A language is modified in three ways: (1) By disuse, i.e. by the disappearance of words whose contents have vanished; (2) by intussusception, i.e. by the faculty which words have, without changing their form, of acquiring new significations; (3) by the renaissance of old or the creation of new words, i.e. by neologisms.

Nothing is easier than to establish these three kinds of variations in the history of dogmas. Some religious formulas perish from disuse; others acquire a new content; while still others are themselves renewed. Many doctrines that were once alive and prevalent are seldom heard of now; they gradually passed out of use. There is hardly a dogma dating from the seventeenth or the sixteenth century that has now the same signification that it had at the beginning. The new wine that has been put into them has modified the old skins. There are limits, however, to the elasticity of words and formulas. There comes a moment when the new wine bursts the old skins, and when the Church has to construct other vessels to receive it. In this way neologisms spring up in languages, and new dogmas in theology. In the sixteenth century the dogmas of Justification by Faith and of the universal priesthood were resuscitated with a new energy. The verses of Horace, on which I might appear to have been commenting, are eternally true:

Ut silvæ foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
*****
Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere cadentque
Quæ nunc sunt in honore, vocabula...
*****

The evolution of dogma is possible; why is it necessary? Simply because the material of which it is composed is in a state of constant flux and evolution.... We do not mean to say that everything in the old formulas should be condemned. There are to be found in them many great and excellent ideas which still retain their truth and power. We simply say that there is nothing absolute in them, nothing that may be imposed by authority on Christian thought. It is always with notions borrowed from current science and philosophy that the Church constructs her dogmas. But science and philosophy are continually evolving and carrying dogma in their train. Everything changes, even our manner of thinking. Why do certain things appear absurd or grotesque in the imaginations of the past? Because we have lost the faculty for comprehending them. It is as impossible for us to think in Greek as to speak in Greek. Since the end of the Middle Ages two or three intellectual revolutions have occurred which have profoundly separated us from antiquity and changed the inner and the outer world in which we live. It will suffice to recall them in a few words in order to deepen our sense of the decadence of Græco-Roman dogmatic Christianity, and of the necessity incumbent upon us to reform and renovate it, if only we are strong enough to answer to the call of God.

3. The Crisis of Dogma

The first of these revolutions was a religious one. Our specific consciousness as Protestant Christians dates from the Reformation. Now, the Evangelical Reformation of the sixteenth century was the rupture of the tradition of the Church, of which the Dogmatics of the great Councils was the framework and the centre. In breaking the authority of the Church, the Reformers broke up the basis on which those ancient dogmas had been built. In appealing to the Word of God against traditional doctrines, they at least called in question the Dogmatics of the Councils. After protesting against all the infiltrations of pagan manners and superstitions into the morals of the Church, into its organisation and its hierarchy into its worship and its rites, why should they regard as sacrosanct the ancient philosophy which had entered into the construction of its dogmas?

On the other hand, the Reformation renewed the Christian consciousness by its fundamental doctrine of Justification by Faith. Until then salvation had come through adhesion to the Symbols of the Church and obedience to its commands. Justification by Faith (and faith here means the trust of the heart) freed the Christian from the tutelage of the priesthood and the bondage of Symbols. To maintain that you can only be saved by believing certain theological doctrines, is the same as to say that you can only be saved by doing certain works; it is to add to or to substitute for faith some other condition of salvation. The second principle of the Reformation therefore also shook the ancient edifice; in Dogmatics it substituted the internal principle of Christian experience for the external principle of authority; it made of Christianity a moral life and no longer a metaphysic. Is it not right and necessary to give the new principles of the Reformation a new theological expression? This process has been going on ever since the sixteenth century and can never cease.

The Reformation displaced the centre of the Christian consciousness. At the same time there began a scientific revolution which displaced the centre of the universe. I speak of that which is connected with the names of Copernicus and Kepler, and which was continued by such men as Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. Modern astronomy, geology, biology, etc., have completely changed the outlines and the horizon of our philosophy, and rendered for ever impossible the popular cosmogonies which, until then, had reigned supreme. And who does not see the bearing of this revolution on our views of Scripture, on its cosmography in particular, and on many of its minor teachings? The traditional doctrines of creation have been greatly modified, as also the doctrines as to the origin of evil, suffering, and death. These discoveries, it is said, have ruined religion, and are destroying Christian faith. Not so. What is being destroyed is the débris of an ancient philosophy. But they do compel us, absolutely, if we would remain in touch with the thought of our age, to modify the formulas by which the Church has hitherto believed that she might render an account of the origin and evolution of the universe.

A third intellectual evolution has been effected in our own time by the advent of the Historical Method. This has completely upset the traditional view of the history of mankind. Floods of new light have been poured upon the prehistoric and historic races of man. Modern criticism and exegesis have given us an entirely new view of the origin and contents of many parts of the Old and New Testaments. In every department of knowledge the historic method has made the point of view of evolution possible and victorious. It is in vain to oppose it, for it is the law of life. Those who cling to the doctrine of dogmatic immutability, whether in the Catholic or the Protestant Churches, are exactly in the position of the Romish cardinals who covered Galileo with anathemas and protested energetically against the rotation of the earth. Neither their protests nor their anathemas prevented the earth from turning round, and the cardinals along with it. In Protestantism, a resistance so blind would be the grossest of inconsistencies. Dogmatic revision is always alive, both in principle and in fact, in the Churches of the Reformation: in principle, because all Confessions of Faith are relative, and subordinate to the Word of God; in fact, because the spirit of research, of criticism, and free discussion has never ceased to breathe in Protestant Theology, and breathes to-day more ardently than ever. The work will therefore be completed; I am sure of it. We may lack the faith and courage to carry it on, but, failing us, God will not fail to raise up other fellow-workers with Himself in this great enterprise. Christianity cannot perish; it has never failed to adapt itself to the state of mind of ages past; in the future, it will find and make new forms in which to express and propagate itself, forms adapted to the coming times....

"One day, the monk Sarapion, a man of deep piety and ardent zeal, was told by the priest Paphnutius and the deacon Photinus that God, in whose image man had been created, was a purely spiritual being, without body, without external figure, without sensible organs. Serapion was convinced by the ascendancy of Catholic tradition and by the arguments that had been employed. The assistants rose to render thanks to God for having rescued so holy a man from the wicked heresy of the anthropomorphists. But, in the midst of their devotions, the unhappy old man, feeling the image of the God to whom he had been accustomed to pray vanishing from his heart, was deeply moved, and bursting into sobs and tears, he threw himself upon the ground, and cried out: 'Woe is me! Unhappy man! They have taken away my God. I have no one now to cling to and invoke.'"[2]

[2] J. Cassanius, abb. Massil.: Collatio, X. c. III.

Touching image of our own experience and of the experience of humanity! We are always making to ourselves some idol or other. It is very difficult for us to realise that God is spirit: we attach ourselves therefore to some fetish of human fabrication. And then, when science comes and takes it away from us, we are troubled and perplexed, as if they had taken from us God Himself. The study of dogmas and their evolution, were it wider spread, would relieve us of our illusions and calm our inquietude. It would teach us that our religious life depends on our faith alone, and that the God Who is its source and end is independent of all theory or representation, because He is infinitely above all human conceptions, and because, in order never to be separated from Him, it suffices that we worship Him in spirit and in truth.