SURVIVALS AND NEW ARRIVALS Hilaire Belloc 3: Survivals
3: Survivals
I propose in this section to take the main Survivals of old forms of attack upon the Catholic Church. I mean by these, forms of attack which, though no longer in the first rank, are present amongst us, if not all of them in all parts of the modern world at any rate each in some contemporary part. I shall not include those which are fairly dead and buried (say, Voltaire's "Deism"), but only such as are still in some degree active, and these it would seem best to arrange, as I have said, in their order of vitality: beginning with those which show the faintest tremors of remaining life and ending with the most vigorous, though already showing signs of fatigue.
In such a sequence there would seem to be five principal bodies.
(1) There is the most antiquated and moribund of the series, the Biblical attack: that is, the comparison of Catholic doctrine, morals, and
practice, to their disadvantage, with the words of Holy Writ, regarded as a final authority in the Literal meaning of every word there found:[1] the words of the said document also to be treated as all sufficient, and anything not there plainly recorded or enjoined to be branded false. This, which is called in the United States the "Fundamentalist" attitude, may also be called, on our side of the Atlantic, "the attitude of the Bible Christian."
(2) Materialism: the old-fashioned and very downright philosophy which ascribed every phenomenon to a material cause. This was postulated as a Dogma, from which it was deduced that not only all transcendental and supernatural but even all spiritual causes were out of court. Those who accepted them suffered from illusion; and particularly so did Catholics who rely upon a full transcendental philosophy, approve supernatural explanations and refer all things,
ultimately, to a spiritual cause.
This kind of attack has, in its direct form, almost disappeared, but not quite: and as an influence on thought is still to be reckoned with.
(3) The "Wealth and Power" argument. This was the condemnation of the Catholic Church by the evidence of its economic and political results upon the societies it influenced: a judgment based upon the affirmed decline in comparative armed strength and in comparative wealth of Catholic nations, and the corresponding rise of Protestant. This was an attack of the strongest effect in the mid-nineteenth century, and its remains are still of considerable weight today, though manifestly weakening.
(4) The Historical attack. This was the comparison of Catholic affirmations to their disadvantage with what could be proved, or apparently proved, by historical evidence, e.g., the Catholic affirmation of Papal supremacy was attacked historically (a) by the evidence of early centuries in which that supremacy was less developed, (b) by the evidence against the authenticity of such documents as the Donation of Constantine (and the False Decretals in general). More generally the Historical Argument, being destructive of myth and legend, was, by an association of ideas, rendered destructive of truths connected with
such myths and legends.
This form of attack was for generations the main assault upon the Catholic position. It was the most powerful weapon of the early Reformation and it remained for more than three hundred years the standby of all criticism directed against the Church, and the peril in face of which Her defenders were most nervous. It began to break down badly and publicly only in our own lifetimes. It is now in full retreat. The reason it was so formidable for so long, the causes of its recent rather rapid breakdown, I will discuss in their place.
(5) Lastly, by far the most formidable opponent within the memory of all of us was that which I will call Scientific Negation. The term is clumsy and inaccurate, but a better one is hard to discover. It was that form of attack which denied Catholic affirmations on the strength of supposed evidence drawn from physical science in the first place, and then, by an extension of the methods of physical science, from a minute and calculated examination of documents, of savage custom and ritual, and of prehistoric remains.
Its powerful influence was adverse not only to Catholic claims but to the whole structure of the Philosophy inherited by our civilization, and there was a moment (say about fifty years ago) when it seemed to have conquered for good and all. Teleological views as old as civilization—that is, the conception that things are shaped to an end, and exist to fulfill that end—the idea of Creation (let alone of Revelation) were thought destroyed, not by a new mood but by positive proof available to all. It was in the hour of this folly's triumph that its weakness first appeared. Some forty years ago the criticism against it was just barely vocal; ten years later it had gathered strength. Then, with increasing rapidity, and for reasons which will later be considered, it began to break down on the intellectual side, fell to the defensive, and has now joined the ranks of the defeated. Some, especially in England, would regard it as still holding the first place among our enemies. That is an error. It has yielded such pre-eminence to a much baser bastard child of its own which we shall deal with as "the Modern Mind." The unquestioned Scientific Negation of the generation immediately preceding our own is now the angrily defended attitude of elderly men, who have many younger supporters it is true, but who are no longer dominant against the Faith. It is, though the most living of the Survivals, definitely a Survival; and we treat with Scientific Negation as with an opponent who has lost his positions.
(i) The Biblical Attack
The origin of the Biblical attack on the Church is familiar to all, simpler, and much easier to account for than are most extravagances in religion.
From its origins, the Catholic Church had adopted Holy Writ as the Inspired Word of God. It began by accepting the traditional Hebrew Books because Our Lord had appealed to their authority and had sanctioned it, because they led up to His Incarnation and Messianic Mission, because the first witnesses to His Miracles, His Resurrection and His own claim to the Godhead were steeped in, and appealed to, those Books; but above all because She, the Church, who knew herself to be the divinely appointed judge of Truth, recognized the sanctity of this scriptural inheritance and confirmed it.
The decision of the Church to stand by the Jewish Scriptures was not maintained without difficulty. The documents were alien to that glorious civilization of the Mediterranean which the Church penetrated and transformed. Their diction was, in its ears, uncouth and irrational. The deeds they recounted (with approval) sounded barbaric and often absurd: taken as moral examples, some were found repulsive, others puerile: and the whole was of another and (to
Greek and Roman) lesser and more degraded world. We have remaining echoes of the reaction against them including the fury of those heretics who ascribed them to the Devil; and even after they had been flooding Christian study for nearly four hundred years you may find such an ardent follower of them as St. Augustine confessing that they had disgusted his cultivated taste and that their alien style had presented for him an abject contrast to the
noble tradition of classical letters.
But the Church firmly maintained their supernatural value and revered them as Divine Oracles bearing testimony to Her Founder. She did not indeed accept them of themselves. Of themselves they would not have concerned her. As law they were superseded. But they introduced and pointed to the Divine Event whence She sprang, and as such were sanctified.
The Church added to the Canon further books which were of greater moment, for these were not adumbrations and forerunners but records of
the essential doctrines whereon She was founded. The precepts of Our Lord Himself as collected by His companions and their immediate associates, the chief events of His Mission, His Passion, His Rising from the Dead, the inward meaning of all this as He revealed it to the Apostolic group whom He had
chosen (and in particular to St. John) these formed the Gospels of the Church: Her new and good tidings for men. These stood unique and on a different plane from aught else in the collection. To them were added the letters and exhortations written by the first propagators of the Faith and their successors, as also apocalyptic and symbolic treatises.
The process of deciding what among the books read in the Churches should be admitted as inspired was long. There was a sifting of the older Hebrew books, which left some of them outside the Canon; of the newer Christian books, which excluded some of these also (as the Epistles of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas). By the fourth and fifth centuries the thing was fixed. Its original Greek version in the East, its Latin translation in the West, had reached final form and Europe was henceforward in possession of the Holy Bible preserved and imposed by the Authority of the Catholic Church.
The living voice of the Church must obviously be the organ of doctrine, and tradition its main support. But the Church also persistently maintained the parallel authority of Scripture. Doctrine was confirmed by quotation from it and a ceaseless appeal was made throughout the centuries to the written text of the Canon. Though no Bible had existed, the Church would have sufficed to give her own witness to truth: but to the Bible, Her book, She perpetually referred. Thus the Primacy of Peter was amply founded in an unbroken acceptance of the doctrine: but She emphasized the Petrine texts and has engraved them on Her central shrine at Rome. The dogma of the Eucharist is Hers to affirm and define: but She also sends Her adherents, as well as Her opponents, to excerpts from the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper.
Therefore it was, on account of the Church's own practice in the matter and the Education she had given Europe therein, that when the great revolt broke out against Her four hundred years ago, Her own teaching was abused against Her. By a pretty irony, that Catholic thing which only the overwhelming authority of the Church over men's minds had compelled them to accept, was taken up as a weapon to destroy Her.
The men of the sixteenth century could only live by Authority, in religious matters as in civil. If the Primary Authority, the Catholic Hierarchy, was to be dispossessed, the secondary authority must be established as all sufficing: thus Bibliolatry appeared. The Bible, stark, uninterpreted, was set up as the one and only guide to truth. By the seventeenth century the Bible became an idol; and the intellectual effects of so base a perversion were not slow to appear. Men came to know so little of their own past that all the symbolic use of Scripture, all the allegorical spirit of the early Fathers, was forgotten. A dead document bound all.
The worst social effect of this was the ruining of the Renaissance. That mighty fountain of youth restored, that return to ancient order and beauty and to knowledge, was deflected, warped and fouled. Our opportunity for a full resurrection of culture was destroyed by the Reformers.
Of many examples one (which I have also quoted in another book)[2] will suffice. Just when the religious upheaval was at its height a Polish Canon, Copernicus, revived in a more precise form, the old Pythagorean doctrine of the earth's motion, and communicated to many his speculation that the sun was the center of our system and that the earth revolved. At last, as he died, he printed it, with a dedication to the Pope of the day.
This new hypothesis—so typical of the Renaissance advance in discovery—excited in the heart of civilization the interest it deserved. It was lectured on in the Papal Schools, and the lecturers splendidly rewarded. It was taught at Bologna. But the Bible worshippers were furious. On the authority of "the Bible only" they denounced the movement of the globe. Luther's own University of Wittenburg expelled its professor of mathematics for teaching the evil thing. Luther, Melanchthon and their followers roared against the blasphemy of a moving earth in scores of broadsides, and the evil example spread so far that it even infected Italy at last, and at Rome itself Galileo was condemned a lifetime later; though not indeed for advancing the hypothesis but for quarrelsomely
teaching it as proved fact, which, as yet, it was not.
Another dreadful consequence of Bibliolatry was the outbreak of vile cruelty in the persecution of witches. The hundreds of poor wretches—mostly women—who were tortured and burnt, or hanged (especially in East Anglia) during the worst of the mania owed their sufferings mainly to such inspiration. But indeed cruelty in general was fostered by the strange new fashion of accepting all the relations of the Old Testament as an infallible moral guide to the conduct of life. Another was the attitude towards the natives of new-discovered lands: your Bibliolater did not attempt their conversion but their extermination.
For he had read that those not "of the Law" were to be put to the sword, and as for those among whom he found himself he might massacre them cheerfully as so many Canaanites. Was he not of a Chosen Race, and was not everybody unlike himself an inferior in the eyes of the Creator?
For the dogma that this particular printed book was the sole and final authority upon all doctrine, morals, and the rest of it, meant that we are bound to imitate in every particular the deeds and the ethical code discoverable in that text.
It had another effect. What was not discoverable in the text must be abhorred. Thus the word "Mass" is not used for the Eucharist in the text—therefore it is an abomination. The war against the Mass had other origins, but this petty argument had strange force. Everything described by a word later than the words used in the latest book in the Canon must go.
It had another. Images were to be condemned; and art was suspect not only in worship but in all life—with consequences we can see around us.
The action was not consistent. Sunday took the place of Saturday (without Scriptural warrant) as a Taboo Day. Human sacrifice was not adopted, even as an exception. A priesthood—the center of the old books—was abhorrent. The elaborate ritual of the Jewish priesthood in its worship was not copied—rather was such a practice to be condemned, because the Church had adopted it. Black Puddings also were permitted, and one might eat a chicken though the gardener had wrung its neck.
But, take it in the large, the Biblical attack on the Church was the main one for three centuries; it supplemented the historical attack; it
remained vigorous in nations of Protestant culture to the last third of the nineteenth century—anyone over fifty in Britain or the United States can remember it in full activity.
Today it is but the weakest of the Survivals, and its rapid disappearance was due to the advancement of learning.
It had already sunk into Literalism: the idea that the English text of the Hebrew scriptures, as published under James I 300 years ago, gave an exact historical and scientific description of all therein contained.
The Literalist believed that Jonah was swallowed by a right Greenland whale, and that our first parents lived a precisely calculable number of years ago, and in Mesopotamia. He believed that Noah collected in the ark all the very numerous divisions of the beetle tribe. He believed, because the Hebrew word JOM was printed in his Koran, "day," that therefore the phases of creation were exactly six in number and each of exactly twenty-four hours. He believed that man began as a bit of mud, handled, fashioned with fingers and then blown upon.
These beliefs were not adventitious to his religion, they were his religion; and when they became untenable (principally through the advance of geology) his religion disappeared.
It has receded with startling rapidity. Nations of the Catholic culture could never understand how such a religion came to be held. It was a bewilderment to them. When the immensely ancient doctrine of growth (or evolution) and the connection of living organisms with past forms was newly emphasized by Buffon and Lamarck, opinion in France was not disturbed; and it was hopelessly puzzling to men of Catholic tradition to find a Catholic priest's original discovery of man's antiquity (at Torquay, in the cave called "Kent's Hole") severely censured by the Protestant world. Still more were they puzzled by the fierce battle which raged against the further development of Buffon and Lamarck s main thesis under the hands of careful and patient observers such as Darwin and Wallace.
So violent was the quarrel that the main point was missed. Evolution in general—mere growth—became the Accursed Thing. The only essential point, its causes, the underlying truth of Lamarck's theory, and the falsity of Darwin's and Wallace's, were not considered. What had to be defended blindly was the bald truth of certain printed English sentences dating from 1610.
All this I say was Greek to the man of Catholic culture. He could not understand it at all. But we, living in a Protestant society, know well enough what it was and the general collapse that has followed. For, with the defeat of Literalism, Bibliolatry went by the board; and the Biblical attack on the Faith, a standby for centuries, has dwindled to insignificance.
Its disappearance in one area after another has been extending rapidly. Men of my age can remember all Britain and America, you may say, based on Bibliolatry. The older members of its votaries survived in numbers till the other day. Some few linger yet: more in the United States than here.
It having thus failed why do I include it among the "Survivals" at all?
Bibliolatry would seem to be nowadays a quaint chapter which the generality of educated men regard as unworthy of mention, or, at any rate, of so little account that it might be neglected by anyone dealing with the major problems of religion in our moment.
Well, it is true that even in the Protestant culture no one who counts would tolerate the serious discussion of such rubbish on lines familiar only half a lifetime ago; yet it must be admitted as a Survival—though the most exhausted of them all—because its effect, in the English-speaking world at least, is still felt.
I will give three examples:
Dr. Gore, a man of the highest cultivation, was lately careful to distinguish between the story of Jonah and the whale, and the miracles of Our Lord. The first he reverently abandoned—the second he deferentially admitted. We must recognize that the mere existence of such an attitude is a serious proof that Literalism still has some vitality even in Europe, or, at any rate, in this country. It seems that in the eyes of men of the first rank in the Anglican Hierarchy the Literalist is still a figure to be reckoned with.
My second example is from a recent article by Mr. Arnold Bennett. That deservedly popular writer is perhaps in closer touch with his contemporary fellow-countrymen than any of his colleagues in the province of letters, wherein he has achieved such eminence. Well, in discussing the causes for the breakdown of religion he says that it was successfully attacked at its "only vulnerable point" the Bible. These words are not applicable to the Catholic, for whom the Bible depends on the Church, not the Church on the Bible. But they are full of meaning to those who, though no longer Bible- Christians, remember Bible Christianity as identical with religion.
Mr. Bennett makes no such confusion. He knows the world too well to err on the nature of Catholicism. But here he rightly takes it for granted that his vast English audience have a universal tradition of a Religion based on the Bible. And he is right.
My third example shall be from another writer of high standing in our time, thoroughly representative of modern English thought and also in close sympathy with his great audience; skeptical in profession, though as Protestant as Dr. Gore in morals and tradition—I mean Mr. H. G. Wells.
Mr. H. G. Wells has been at great pains to discuss the fall of man, in which considerable catastrophe he puts no faith. But when he discusses the fall of man he always has in mind the eating of an apple in a particular place at a particular time. When he hears that there is no Catholic doctrine defining the exact place or the exact time—not even the name of the apple, he shrewdly suspects that we are shirking the main issue. He thinks in terms of the Bible Christian—with whom he disagrees.
The main issue for European civilization in general is whether man fell or no. Whether man was created for beatitude, enjoyed a supernatural state, fell by rebellion from that state into the natural but unhappy condition in which he now stands, subject to death, clouded in intellect and rotted with pride, yet with a memory of greater things, an aspiration to recover them, and a power of so doing by right living in this world of his exile; or whether man is on a perpetual ascent from viler to nobler things, a biped worthy of his own respect in this life and sufficient to his own destiny.
On that great quarrel the future of our race depends. But the inventors of Bible Christianity, even when they have lost their original creeds, do not see it thus. They take the main point to be, whether it were an apple—who munched it—exactly where—and exactly when. They triumphantly discover that no fruit or date can be established, and they conclude that the Christian scheme is ruined and the Fall a myth.
It is clear then that the most eminent writers in the Protestant culture can still be concerned with Literalism. It is almost equally clear that they have never grasped that full doctrine of the Fall—the sole doctrine explanatory of our state—upon which, coupled with that of the Incarnation, the Catholic Church bases all Her theology.
To put the thing in epigram (and therefore, of course, quite insufficiently), they are certain that we are animals which have risen. They have not met the idea that we may be a sort of angel who fell.
Now I submit that if men of this eminence take the Literalists thus seriously—one solemnly arguing with them, another not understanding that there has been any other kind of believer—there must be trace of life in Literalism still.
There are, of course, innumerable other instances. You can hardly find an article in any newspaper discussion on religion—save the very few by Catholics, which are occasionally admitted as a favor—but takes it for granted that advance in physical science has shaken something which the writer calls "religion." He can only mean the religion of the Bible Christian. For in what way could Physical Science affect the Catholic Church?
You can hardly get an allusion to the evolutionist writers (in this country it is always Darwin) without the same idea cropping up: "The Conflict of Science with Religion." But with what religion can Science conflict save Bibliolatry? On every side the recent presence of that strange worship—and even its present lingering—is taken for granted.
It is then a true "Survival," though I grant that it is on the point of death.
Before I leave it I would like to suggest a doubt to the reader concerning it. The Biblical attack on the Church has failed because Bibliolatry has been destroyed by extended geological and historical knowledge. It is dying and will soon be dead. But will it "stay dead"?
The good fortunes of stupidity are incalculable.
One can never tell what sudden resurrections ignorance and fatuity may not have. Most of us, asked to make a guess, would say that in fifty years no odd Literalist could still be found crawling upon the earth. Do not be too sure. Our children may live to see a revival of the type in some strange land. Or it may come later. These aberrations have great power. We might, if we came back to life 300 years hence, find whole societies in some distant place indulging in human sacrifice, massacring prisoners of war, prohibiting all communications on Saturdays, persecuting science, and performing I know not what other antics in
the name of James I's Old Testament—especially if James I's Old Testament should have become by that time (as it probably would have become by that time) a Hierarchic book preserved in a dead language, known only to the learned few.
(ii) Materialism *********************
As things now are, the survival of the Materialist cannot be long maintained.
Explicit Materialism—that is, the frankly stated philosophy that there are none save material causes, and that all phenomena called spiritual or moral are functions of matter—is now hardly heard.
But Implicit Materialism—that is, an underlying, unexpressed, conception that material causes explain all things—survives. Men do not commonly say, nowadays, as many did not so long ago, that man is to be explained as a machine or a set of chemical formulae. They no longer, in any great numbers, deny flatly the presence of immaterial factors in the universe. But when they speak of life or of death, or when they propose an explanation of anything, they imply, often without knowing it, that all of which they talk is material: that life is a material process, death but the cessation of that process, and that any human occasion—for instance any social development—can be completely understood when it is stated in terms of material things.
For instance, they will say that a community's character is the product of its physical environment; or again that the soul of a society changes with the introduction of a new machine.
That Materialism as an explicit, openly affirmed philosophy is—for the moment—vanishing, is due to two forces, each of them intellectually contemptible: the first is fashion, the second is the increasingly meaningless vocabulary of physical science. No reasoning man should allow himself to be affected by the mere intellectual fashion of his day without consideration of its value and of the proofs on which it relies. No reasoning man ought to ally himself with confused thought. The modern man is ashamed to call himself a Materialist "tout court" because those whose names are most quoted no longer call themselves so.
Even Haeckel a lifetime ago had to put spirit into his atoms and say that they had in them the beginnings of consciousness and will. Bergson, whose influence, now declining, was lately so great, went much further and put an immaterial force at the origin—or at least at the base—of all things. These, and a host of others created that fashion against explicit Materialism which modern men dread to challenge.
Meanwhile they became alarmed lest, if they ascribed all to matter, someone should ask them "What is matter?" and they should be unable to reply. A little while ago it was plain sailing. Matter and its laws were thought to be certainly known. Today its definition is lost in verbiage and one hears such meaningless phrases as "a substance on the confines of matter," "Matter as an expression of force," and the rest.
Such fashions and such confusions are contemptible.
It is a stronger point against Explicit Materialism that, though perpetually recurrent, it has never made a long stay in human thought: that there would seem to be something about it which the grandeur of man rejects as beneath his dignity.
Explicit Materialism, compared with the other philosophies meeting in man's Palace of Debate, is like a jolly little self-satisfied dwarf who should be perpetually trying to push his way into the stately ceremonies of a Senate, and as perpetually getting turned out by the officials at the door: but who, on occasions, when the officials slept or were drunk, managed to push his way in and get at least to the top of the stairs for a few minutes. Materialism made one such successful raid in the generation before our own and was gloried in by many, especially among the popular opponents of religion in the nineteenth century. It looked at one moment as though it might get a permanent foothold.
Let me digress to confess a personal weakness, at heart, for that old-fashioned Explicit Materialism. My leaning to it lies in this—that it was full of common sense and sincerity.
It was eminently right as far as it went; and when I say "eminently" I mean "eminently" it was at the top of its own tree. It was not an aberration, still less a perversion. It was a half truth, squat and solid, but human and, in its exceedingly limited way, rational.
The Materialist of my boyhood went his little way along that open road which we all must follow when we begin to philosophize. Day in and day out, from moment to moment, we are concerned with a patent chain of material cause and effect.
Of things not material we have knowledge in subtle ways. We also have knowledge in subtle ways of the truth that what we call an "experience of matter" is not an experience of matter at all, but of something very different, to wit, an experience of the mind—which, by some action of its own, presumes a thing called matter and predicates it as a cause. We have to be conscious of matter even before we can make matter supreme—and consciousness is not material.
But our jolly little dwarf cannot be bothered with all that. Subtlety is not in his line. He knows, as you and I know, and as the chimney-sweeper round the corner knows, that if you fall into water you drown: so water is the cause of your drowning. If you knock a man on the head, he stops thinking, and for the time apparently he stops being. If you knock him hard enough he apparently stops being altogether. Therefore, the brain when it is working is the cause of thinking and being—and the stopping of its working is the stopping of thinking and being.
All around us and all around the Materialist are manifest innumerable examples—visible, tangible, real—of material cause apparently preceding every effect. The Materialist is the man who stops there, at a half truth which is a truth after all, and goes no further. All that appeals to me. It reposes upon two great virtues: simplicity and sincerity.
I have no patience with those who approach with grandiloquence my sturdy little dwarf, who is so full of certitudes. I have no patience with those who use long words to him and try to overawe him with that jargon of so-called philosophy into the which the Germans befogged themselves from misreading the clarity of Descartes. I have no patience with people who muddle the poor little fellow up with such words as "subjective" and "objective." I would rather pass an evening with a Materialist at an inn than with any of these sophists in a common room. Moreover, the Materialist fills me with that pity which is akin to love.
I mark him, in the chaos of our day, with an emotion of protective affection. I want to shelter him from the shocks of his enemies and to tell him that, weak as they are, he is weaker even than they. I want also to tell him all the time what an honest little fellow he is. For he is at least in touch with reality, as are we also of the Faith in a grander fashion. He tells the truth so far as he can see it, whereas most of those who sneer at him care nothing for the truth at all but only for their systems or their notoriety.
I have noticed this about such Explicit Materialists as are left—that they are nearly always honest men, full of illogical indignation against evil,
and especially against injustice. They are a generous lot, and they have a side to them which is allied to innocence.
Among the Survivals they now take a very small place. They feel themselves to be out of the running. Their hearts have been broken with abuse and insult and with base desertion by their friends, who reject in chorus and with indignation the horrid title of Materialist. Therefore have most of them become apologetic. They commonly talk as an uneducated man among scholars; saying as it were:
"I know I am only a poor blunt fellow, and no doubt I'm old-fashioned, still, commonsense is commonsense after all. I can't talk Latin and Greek or German, but I can talk plain English, damn you, and that's good enough for me."
Now I like that.
But Explicit Materialism is not keeping up with the world. I rarely discover it today outside the columns of French provincial journals (for the clarity of Materialism appeals to the French temper), in a couple of obscure English weeklies, and in faded manuals a generation old treasured by elderly men. The Materialist has been left behind, and, for my part, I don't mind lingering in the rear of the column and making friends with the foot-sore straggler.
The Materialist will not recover strength in our own day. If I may be allowed to dogmatize enormously I will tell you why. He will not do so because the Devil has, for the moment, no further use for him.
The Devil used the Materialist (though the Materialist had no use for the Devil) for his own ends, between the middle of the eighteenth and the last third of the nineteenth centuries. Now the Devil has impatiently ordered the Materialist to get out of the way, and, like Youth, the Devil will be served.
He has made our generation too grand to deal with the Materialist. Spiritual forces have been awakened in us. We must talk about the "will to peace," "the will to power." "The will to" this and that and the other (a horrible piece of bad English). We want to live our "full life" and have discovered (oddly enough) that you cannot do that without a living principle—that is, without a soul.
So one may take it that the Materialist is today, after the Bible Christian, the last and weakest of the Survivals. And that is why I have put him second on the list.
He will not have wholly disappeared before my death I hope—though I fear he will—for when he has I shall feel very lonely.
There was a time—yes, up to the end of the '80's—when he was a constant companion, and one could be certain of meeting him pretty well anywhere. The world will be emptier without him, but he is on his last legs.
I beg that no one will mix him up with his more powerful, but nastier, modern brethren who are so angry at having the relationship mentioned. The Pantheist especially abhors him. But he is better than them all.
Should he die in my own time, which is likely enough, I will follow piously at his funeral, which is more than I will do for any of the others.
But when he dies his works will live after him and in due time he will return. He is irrepressible. He lurks in the stuff of mankind.
(iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument *****************************
At this point we pass a dividing line between the Survivals that are patently exhausted and those which, though defeated, are still in activity and
still play a considerable part in the modern offensive against the Faith. The Bible Christian is nearly a fossil; the avowed Materialist is a rare specimen dating from long ago. But the Historical Argument against Catholicism, the spirit of Scientific Negation, and this "Wealth and Power" contention which we are about to examine, are of great remaining weight though declining. They form part, still, of active discussion and they still affect the issue.
The "Wealth and Power" argument is briefly as follows:
The Catholic Church is false because nations of Catholic culture have declined steadily in temporal wealth and power as compared with the nations of an anti-Catholic culture, which, in this particular instance, means the Protestant culture.
The first remark we make upon hearing such an argument is that, supposing it to be true, it suffers from two defects in application: (a) It is irrelevant; (b) It does not establish a chain of cause and effect.
The second remark we make is that it is not true.
We stand, when confronted by this "Wealth and Power" argument, much as a man might stand when confronted by the argument that the broad streets and the careful planning of such a town as Washington, D.C., was misuse of energy, because it has been found in practice that a town with narrow and confused streets like Cairo, allowed to grow haphazard, had the higher birth rate.
The argument would be irrelevant because the building of a town with foresight, and giving it broad streets, is not intended to affect the birth rate, but ease of traffic and other conveniences of living; and there is no attempt at producing a chain of cause and effect between a high birth rate and narrow streets. Moreover, it is not true. At one period or in one country the one sort of town has the higher birth rate, in another place or time, the other sort.
Nevertheless the argument made a very strong appeal and powerfully affected men's minds in all countries till quite recent years. Even today it has considerable strength. Below a certain level of instruction it is almost universal in countries of Protestant culture, and though, in nations of Catholic culture, modern evidence has become too strong for it there are pockets of isolated, old-fashioned thought where it has lost little of its original value. These belated people, it is true, are rather to be found among those who have neither traveled nor read much and who are thinking in terms of old tags about enlightenment and progress—particularly such tags as freedom of the Press, education of the masses, and all the rest of it.
In connection with its irrelevancy there is needed a paradox which not all those engaged on the Catholic side of the controversy have heeded. It is, that such example is effective. Where a clear case of superiority in political and economic power can be established, the idea that there is a corresponding superiority in the philosophy or religion of those enjoying such power will be inevitably entertained by men. It will be entertained for the wrong reasons, from confusion of thought and false ideals, but—and this is the important point—it will also be entertained for reasons which have real intellectual and moral value.
As to the wrong reasons: The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfill their being. If such happiness is to be found by an immortal race it must not be sought in a transitory and mortal but in a final and immortal happiness. It is an absurd philosophy which makes one do that which pleases for an hour but makes him miserable for the rest of his life; and those who accept the doctrine of immortality cannot appeal to temporal effects as the aim of a true religion. But there is irrelevancy in the argument even for that increasing number who reject the ancient doctrine of immortality, which irrelevancy is that wealth and political power do not of themselves produce even mortal happiness. Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously
where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased.
What then is the false reason which, in spite of such obvious truths, impels men to accept the argument? It is that all men have as individuals an appetite for wealth and for the power it brings, and the confusion between this and final good is the commonest of errors. Indeed, to our race, save when it is trained in the Catholic philosophy, wealth and power appear as being almost self-evidently the objects of life.
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St. Thomas has discussed that illusion in his famous question: "Whether money be the main good?" and all men not caring to pursue the reasoning to its conclusion, answer "Yes." Even where the Faith is preserved men pursue wealth and power inordinately. Where the Faith is lost they pursue nothing else.
Now the individual, being thus filled with the pursuit of wealth and the power it brings, projects himself into the community and sees in its increasing total riches a sort of greater individual doing what he himself would wish to do. In that pursuit he impoverishes himself and most others to the advantage of a small number, but the effect is lost upon him in the illusion of general prosperity.
Thus our industrial towns in the modern world boast their good fortune, though the bulk of their inhabitants are needy or half-enslaved.
Such are the false reasons which impel men to accept the argument when, in fact, greater total wealth and power are present in a Protestant than in a Catholic society.
But are there reasons for accepting it which have a real intellectual and moral value? There are—and that is the point I would particularly
emphasize, because it is commonly forgotten.
We all live by economic effort and we all rejoice in the strength of our country. Virtue and necessity combine to make us do so. We rightly blame habits of sloth or a mood of indifference to the greatness of the state. When we say, for instance, that drunkenness ruins the power of production in a man, or corruption among its politicians the political power in a nation, we are putting things on a high and good ground, though not on the highest. The highest ground on which to condemn drunkenness in the workers and corruption in public men is that each is morally evil.
But to say that their effects impoverish and weaken is to put their condemnation on sufficient grounds. If men hold a moral code which permits such things we rightly judge, by the outward effects of that code (poverty and national failure), that their code is false. If another code produces sobriety and hard word and a strict discipline over Politicians, forbidding their taking bribes or submitting to blackmail, then, other things being equal, we rightly conclude that this second code is the better. It is this commonsense consideration that is of such weight in the argument.
If, wherever Catholicism ruled the minds of men and in proportion to its influence we found want and misery due to sloth and other bad habits and a breakdown in the power of the state; if wherever Catholicism was expelled, and in proportion to its absence, we found cheerful, productive, willing industry and a high standard maintained in the public service—especially in its chiefs; if in the first we found external ugliness, vile and insufficient food and drink, dirt and misery, while in the second we found beauty in building, good cooking, cleanliness and merriment, then nothing could prevent men from deciding for the second against the first.
The practical argument would be too strong for the theoretical. No presentation of truth in the abstract could avail against the visible, tangible thing present to people's eyes and hands. Here things go well and better and better. There they go badly and worse and worse. The conclusion is obvious.
Now that is precisely the ground on which the "Wealth and Power" argument stood in its moment of chief effect, which was the mid-nineteenth century. There, though it had been badly battered, it stands for many even today.
That argument was particularly effective in England during the same mid-nineteenth century, and still remained very effective there to its close. This was a period when Protestant England was rapidly increasing in wealth, numbers, and extent of dominion, and when the nations of Catholic culture suffered either from decline in wealth in one case, or decline in population in another, or internal convulsions from which England was singularly free.
Further, the example immediately to hand (that of Ireland) powerfully affected the minds of Englishmen. They saw there a nation of Catholic culture rapidly declining in wealth and numbers, compared with their own. They did not consider their own contribution to this result. They thought it an example of cosmic process, of divine judgment.
It was customary at the same time to press the contrast with Spain in particular. In all our popular histories a continuous curve of advance was shown from the England of the sixteenth century challenging the might of Spain and defeating it in battle, to the present day.
We were shown Protestant England advancing unlimitedly and the all-powerful Catholic Champion of the sixteenth century falling from lower to lower level for three hundred years, losing its dominion and wealth, lagging further and further and further behind in the advance of material science, failing in population and sinking to what an English Prime Minister, the most capable man of his generation, called "a dying nation."
At the same time, in the more apparently prosperous nations of Catholic culture, it was the anti-Catholic forces which were allied to materialprosperity and political power. The revival of France after 1871 was slow until, in 1876, an anti-Catholic group captured the machine and maintained its power. It transformed public education, successfully copied alien institutions, increased the apparent wealth of the nation (or at any rate presided over its rising accumulation of wealth).
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The Universities achieved their new triumphs under direction vigorously opposed to Catholicism, and one law after another broke the power of the Church.
Italy, from a number of petty states, grew to be a kingdom united and claiming to some standing as a European power. It did so under influences which were at war with the Church. The Papacy was attacked, despoiled of its states and their capital, and thrust down a slope by which it seemingly must rapidly fall to insignificance. A movement parallel to that in France permeated the whole country. Its public education, its press, its literature took on the new tone, and with it a new Italy arose before men's eyes.
All this confirmed the English certitude that Catholicism was identical with decay, and there was added a domestic experience which strengthened the conviction. A vivid interlude of Catholic reaction on a small scale, but startling in intensity, illuminated and alarmed that generation. It secured a small but brilliant band of converts and roused in its votaries extravagant hopes for the future.
But it failed. Its chief result was to modify the established Protestant Church, and it was soon perceived that the individual convert to Catholicism in England suffered in its pocket and in his social chances of every kind. He was (and continues to be) an object lesson in the theory of Protestant supremacy. If the convert belonged to a great commercial or financial house he ceased to affect its fortunes. He was not seen at the head of any new enterprise. He failed to establish a Press. As a writer his history or fiction was neglected. As a thinker he might create—as did Newman—a strong effect for a moment: but a passing one. Nor did the numerical proportion of converts to the rest of the nation increase.
The argument, thus effective here in England, grew to be equally effective elsewhere. This was the period in which Protestant Prussia rose to the height of its power. She defeated Catholic France and Catholic Austria; she confirmed her grip over the Poles and dominated the Catholic minority of her new Reich. It was the period in which the United States, after passing successfully through a very grave crisis, proceeded to a rapid increase in material goods, population, and, at the end, international strength. In general also the whole Protestant culture was advancing continuously in Industrial development. A long lifetime and more was filled with this impression of contrast to the disadvantage of Catholicism, and on that account, even today, when it is failing, the survival of this "Wealth and Power" argument against Catholicism, demands our close attention.
Now let us consider what truth there lay in this attitude, and why, in spite of that element of truth, it was fundamentally false, and today is growing less and less tenable.
In the first place we must heavily discount the Protestant culture's own view of itself.
All human groups tend to this false perspective and so do all individuals. A man is the chief object in his own landscape, his troubles or successes are invariably less in the scheme of society than they appear to him to be.
But the Protestant culture greatly exaggerates this natural tendency, from a morbid self-sufficiency which is to be discovered in all its forms of expression. This proceeds in part from the "Chosen Race" tradition which was originally rooted in Bible worship, but more from a general ethical principle. It is thought a duty, and coincident with patriotism, to cherish a conception of superiority: superiority of one's own national unit over the rest, and superiority of one's
Culture in general over an opposing Culture.
You find that running through all current speech: in the North Hollanders' contempt for those "South of the Dyke"; in Berlin's contempt for Vienna; in the American word "Dago"; in those innumerable descriptions of our own institutions and productions which end up with a sort of doxology "best in the world ."
Next we must remark that this spirit not only neglects what is excellent in others but forgets elements of wealth and power in which its own people do not excel.
For instance, Urban Government in the Reich is, or was, the most orderly and economic in Europe; but the Urban architecture there was the least attractive.
The man of this culture will note the less cleanly streets of a rival people rather than their greater beauty. If his food is uneatable, that is an insignificant point, whereas if his postal service is good it becomes a test of civilization. If his trains are punctual and swift and the track better laid than elsewhere these are proofs of leadership: that the cost of transport is excessive becomes a minor part. If his country leads in the amount of a particular product, then mass is the test.
But if it leads in excellence, then excellence is the test and mass is a secondary consideration.
To all this we must add the effect of history.
History may be so written that every advance or success is a climax, every reverse an interlude—and history so written is worse than none. Yet Protestant history has been so written for generations. An incident petty in the future of Europe becomes capital because it is national.
Everything leading up to the existing state of affairs is a piece of good fortune. It was a piece of good fortune that the Monarchy broke down, that Cabinet Government arose, that the industrial towns increased. For long it was a piece of good fortune that the population was rising rapidly. Now it is a piece of good fortune that the birth rate is falling as rapidly.
The most striking example of this spirit is found in the neglect of the basis of all society: the land.
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The loss of a peasantry—an irreplaceable loss in the strength of a nation—is passed over as a minor detail. The immense agricultural wealth of the Catholic Culture is left aside: a nation's volume of foreign trade and the intensity of its industrialism are made the tests of economic success.
Another consideration of the first importance in judging the "Wealth and Power" Argument is the secular fluctuations in these. It is not true that there has been a steady rise in the Protestant culture, a steady fall in the Catholic. The very buildings of the past are there to teach the least instructed man that lesson of fluctuation. History leaves no doubt on it.
The seventeenth century—and a generation more—was a period of Material Catholic Ascendancy, led by the French Monarchy. The phase on which the "Wealth and Power" Argument was based was a later phase—doubtfully apparent in the later eighteenth century, and only really manifest after the Revolutionary wars.
We may recall in this connection (the rise and fall of material wealth and power over great spaces of time) the old Mahommedan thesis.
Mahommedanism at the height of its power claimed its superiority in the arts and in military strength to be the proof of its philosophic truth. Would it apply that test to the last two hundred years? There is no permanence in these things.
The Argument has, then, been advanced on a false basis. But it contains an element of truth which we must admit. In the nineteenth century the Protestant culture did, increasingly, dominate its rival. It followed a rising curve whose summit was reached and passed as the century ended.
The Causes were multiple—the French Revolution with its unexpected effect in creating Modern Prussia and its destruction of the French Fleet: the great "Anti-clerical" religious quarrel which long paralyzed Italy, still heavily handicaps the French and ran through all Catholic Europe with a violence only now diminishing: the successful exploitation of special natural resources—chiefly of coal—outside the Catholic Culture: the exhaustion due to civil disturbance and internal wars within it.
But whatever its causes (and there were many more) the phenomenon was there. On it all that was solid in the argument turned.
But, I repeat, these phases of material success are not permanent and that is why the argument has no final value. Today, before our eyes and beyond question the tide in Europe has turned.
Consider in support of that conclusion the more obvious things. There are the new nationalities—Poland and Ireland—the remarkable rise of Italy, which at last men begin to appreciate: the slow but regular advance of Spain. There is the rapid and manifest increase—for what it is worth—in mechanical science throughout the Catholic Culture. There is the profound change in strategic conditions. Most important of all there is the appearance of the Catholic tradition as the one safeguard against the dissolution of our society.
That society will pass through many strains before it is reconsolidated.
Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils.
The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor: a demand which threatens the very existence of profit (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes).
The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production. Against these two forms of menace it is the Catholic Culture to which men—confusedly—turn.
Against the first the Catholic Culture is a defense by its tradition of cooperative labor, the resurrection of the peasant, and the doctrine of
private property; against the second by its moral effect in a code which wars to the death against Communism. The presence of Poland as a bastion against the Revolution directed from Moscow is more than a symbol.
Underlying all the great change is a change in the mind: to one who watches Europe as a whole the chief spiritual phenomenon of these years is the return of Catholic Philosophy: directly, in the intellectual fashion of the schools, but, as yet, far more strongly in the indirect effects which you may see everywhere in literature and speech and action. It is witnessed to by the very contrast between itself and the extravagant Paganism around it. The first has the note of endurance, the second of a fever flaming to death.
(iv) The Historical Argument
Next among the more important Survivals is the Historical Argument. Like the others it has definitely crossed the borderline between active life and decay, but has more vigor left in it than remains to the "Wealth and Power" Argument with which I have just dealt.
First, let us define it.
I mean by the Historical attack upon the Catholic Church, not the common thesis that history shows Her to be but a man-made thing, with divinities that are illusions, like all divinities—that belongs rather to my next section on Scientific Negation; but rather the attempted proofs from history that the claims of the Catholic Church to certain historic positions are invalid.
e.g. The Faith affirms that in the sacrament of Her Altars is the full Humanity and Divinity of Jesus Christ really pre
