Section VI. God in Theology and in the Church

Amongst the various sciences there is one which, be cause it speaks especially of God, is called theology. In spite of the usurpations of physics and politics, it is the queen of sciences. Its data are more sure; its methods more safe; its empire more magnificent; its results more permanently interesting; and its disclosures more vast, numerous, and heavenly, than those of any other science. It is in fact the rule and measure of all other sciences, and the only ultimate interpretation and harmony of them all. The value of all other sciences is in the proportion according to which they contribute to this mistress-science. Beautiful while in subordination to it, and contentedly shining with borrowed light, they become unsteady and misshapen, when they separate from it, and try to set up for themselves. Now if the view which we have been venturing to take of God be true, we should naturally expect to find vestiges of it in the science which especially discloses Him. It will not proceed in the manner we should beforehand have expected, and it will disappoint us by seeming imperfection, littleness, and unworthiness. It will conceal God at the very moment it is revealing Him, and in the same sort of way in which His grace and sacraments conceal Him. The Bible and apostolic tradi. tion are a collection of revealed premises, out of which theology draws a multitude of conclusions, which it afterwards classifies, and then makes them the premises of still further conclusions: and I have already shown how the genius and structure of the Bible illustrate the divine characteristics now under consideration, and the genius of tradition is even yet more strikingly of the same character. I pass on therefore to the formation of theological science, the historical formation of doctrine.

.Doubtless the apostles were in possession of the whole of Catholic theology in its fullest possible completion; and apostolic tradition contains in germ every theological conclusion which heresy may require at any time to be elicited. Yet it does not appear that each separate generation of the faithful has a complete consciousness of the breadth and depth of the deposit which it guards; and consequently theology cannot be left to the mere sense of the faithful, without the living Chair of Peter and the infallible gift of the Holy Ghost. Beforehand we should have thought it more consonant with the dignity of God, that Christian doctrine should have been put out in its fulness, or a fulness at least equal with that of the Mosaic law. How many heresies would have been prevented, how many schisms hindered, how many distressing con troversies spared, how many lost souls saved! But it was not God's way. His good pleasure was otherwise. Heresy was left to build up truth in spite of itself, like a convict at forced labour, and to erect it before the world's eye in all its glorious proportions as the intellectual temple of God. One by one truths were brought out and fitted into their places. Lights moved over the region of Christian doctrine. Now they fell upon the Eternal Generation of the Word and lighted up the depths of that fair but inaccessible mystery. Now they fell upon the truth and reality of His sacred Humanity. One while they illuminated the singleness of His Person, another while the Duality of His Natures. It was now His Soul and now Ilia Sacramental Flesh, now His Mother, now llis two Wills, now His Church and now His grace, that was irradiated before the eyes of men. It would seem a& if there was nothing succeeding generations were so beholden to as heresy.

But the processes by which these truths, or rather their relative bearings and proportions, were brought out, are sometimes almost a scandal to weak faith. What can be more trying than the quarrels of the different parties in many of the General Councils? What more miserable under some respects than Ephesus, what less winning than Chalcedon? Save that all these oriental confusions only brought out more and more continually the calm, placid firmness, the unquailing eye, the unflinching hand, the Bupcrbumanly. equable voice and judicial moderation of Rome, whose sole decision was after all the one thing needful, nothing can be less consoling to the Christian stu dent than the history of those very councils that are now dear to every true heart as the Divine gospels of the four evangelists. How unlike the Holy Ghost, the Eternal Spirit of truth, cooperating with the holy wisdom and grave reason and burning love of saintly men! Truly it was a chaos of human wills, ways, and minds, and He brooded over it and overshadowed it, and out of it came the infallible oracles of truth as sure as revelation.

The liberty of the schools, again, in theological ques tions is far greater than we should beforehand have ex pected. If so much is certain, why not more? If a thing is so true that it would be impiety to doubt it, why is not heresy also? Why should God have made clear up to this point, and not gone on to that? Why is nearly every doctrine half divine light and half human inference, with bars and streaks of blackness all over it, like those that Wollaston discovered in the solar spectrum? Many of the questions too which are left open seem to be just those which it would have been most desirable to close: and in some that which is of secondary importance is left open to disputation. Verily, there is no parallel to the liberty of the human mind in the theological world, except the freedom of the human will in the moral world, and the one seems very much to correspond to the other. It is an illustration of this that the very point where grace pieces on to nature is a matter of debate, the Scotists maintaining that a more perfect nature with an equal aid of grace, other things being equal, will produce a more perfect supernatural act, while the Thomists deny that it will do so. And the preservation of nature under the pressure and dominion of grace is simply defended by two anathemas, while the manner of it is an insoluble mystery.

Several of the most interesting departments of theology, the theatres of modern controversies, are based upon the negative censure of Condemned Propositions. There is something very peculiar, and to impatient minds vexatious, in this method of teaching.¹ In what sense is this or that proposition condemned? For what is it condemned, falsehood of doctrine, or petulance of expression? Is it false in its context, or false anyhow? And if it is false, does it follow that any one opposing theory is true, and what if there may be more than one? Yet there is a very great analogy between this method of teaching and that of Scripture. It is impossible for a student not to be struck by this resemblance. And how con pletely is it in keeping with God's whole way of disclosing Himself in the teaching of theology!

But what is the treatment which theology receives at the hands of the world? The science which proceeds on the premises of revealed truth and tells of the Creator is a byeword of contempt in the mouths of His creatures. It is not only utterly neglected, except by those to whom it is a professional duty, but it is thoroughly disliked. Any warmth of controversy in physical science is put down to zeal, and men discern in quarrels about formulas that much light was thrown on science by them and no little advance secured. But in theological questions, it is odious, bigoted, puerile, offensive. The method of the operation of a sacrament, necessary to salvation, is pronounced a question worthy only of a dark age. The minutest question about the polarization of light, or the anodes and cathodes of electricity, is on the contrary of deepest import to the human race, and worthy of the speculation of the most magnificent and intellectual age the world has ever seen. If theology stands aloof from and is awhile suspicious of some crude theory, which will ere long and on other grounds have to divest itself of what is untheological about it, then the fry is raised that religion is opposed to science. If on the other hand theology dares to lift its voice to help in the solution of a geological mystery, or to throw light on an astronomical hypothesis, or to add probability to a physiological theory, or to have its say about the doctrine of innate ideas, then it is churlishly told to keep to itself, and not to meddle with science. Yet if science comes upon its ground and invades theology, as Galileo did wheo he strove to make 32 Y his scientific theory au article of faith and the rejection of it to be an unscriptural heresy, and he is beaten off his ground and warned to keep to his physics, then for sooth it is persecution, and I know not what darkness and barbarity. Do what it will, theology cannot please the world. If it pipes to men, they will not dance. If it mourns to them, they will not weep. It fares on earth even as our Lord did. Men will not be content with it. They do with it what they do with nothing else except with Him. They hate it and scorn it too, they are at once furious and indifferent, they suspect it and yet they are ignorant of it. In truth it belongs to God, and it shares His destiny.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance of theology, even in many whose profession is an explicit avowal of its study. If we open a book of protestant controversy, and take any subject, say the doctrine of indulgences or the canonization of saints, we shall be quite startled to find clear evidence in nine cases out of ten, that the controversialist has never consulted a work of Catholic theology. Others again have opened books, not to read, or patiently to study contexts, but to verify references which they have found in other protestant writers. Protestant controversy has a tradition of its own. Objection and reply are handed 01 from one to another in the most meagre way, without a suspicion not only of the Catholic arguments but even of the true Catholic doctrine, and often with an exultation, quite ludicrous, of controversial discovery '} and as the perusal of these works is for the most part confined to protestants themselves, the ignorance remains unexposed. Thus in a work by one of the most noted of these con trove rsialista we find assumed as a major premise, a doctrine about the mass, which eren a perusal of the rubrics of the missal would have shown to be the most gratuitous imagination, and a protestant layman is congratulated on having put the question of the canonization of saints on an entirely new ground by a felicitous objection, so cogent the writer wonders it could be new j yet the very objection was put centuries ago by St. Thomas in his Quodlibet, and amply refuted by him, and modern works of controversy have often repeated it, even in our own language. But in truth the interval from the reformation up to some favorite early century is regarded by these men as if it were a simple blank. Though systems of philosophy and the ology arose in them which absolutely governed the human mind for centuries, and which men of the highest powers in modern times, such as Fenelon and Bossuet and the protestant Leibnitz, have looked upon as works of intellect of the most amazing depth and beauty, yet these men know nothing whatever of them, and have plainly never read them. Again, from the Council of Trent downwards, the Church has had a succession of the ologians of the most profound thought and the most brilliant genius, yet we hardly ever see in modern Anglican controversy the slightest vestige of the writers having read Vasquez, Suarez, De Lugo, Viva and the like, but on the contrary plain evidence that they have not. In the same way writers on physical science and political economy look vacantly and wearily into ages when the whole scientific structure of theology* was being raised by almost superhuman efforts of erudition and intelli-

• For example, Degerando's Histoire de la Philosophic gence and gifts of a strictly scientific kind, and pronounce that nothing was doing in those times. It is impossible to open any work of the accomplished literature of the present day without perceiving the marvellous ignorance of theology. The authors hardly ever speak of the doc trines or usages, for example, of the Catholic Church, without making such absurd blunders that we feel like men who are reading the pretended travels of a foreigner in our own land, with amusing and provoking evidence in every page that he has never seen what he describes nor has ever set foot upon our shores. And yet these very men are writing books which professedly treat of theological subjects, and when we ignore them or leave their precious lucubrations unanswered, they think it passing strange and peevish in us that we can find any thing more important or more interesting in life than to answer their objections, which have been answered completely a hundred years ago, or to defend doctrines, which are in good truth as much and as little a part of the Catholic religion as the tenets of Buddhism, the beliefs of the Esquimaux, or the latest revelations of Nauvoo! The importance of all this matter to us is that we naturally suffer from the contagion of our times and cir cumstances. To Catholics the intelligent study of the ology is always an affair of the greatest consequence, both as regards their social weight and influence, and also the depth of their devotion. But the present times render this study more important than ever. Intellectual activity is the order of the day. Reasons must be had for everything, and doctrine must show itself equal to the philosophical and scieitific developments of the age. Meanwhile, almost every nominally Christian sect has drifted away from its original principles, and has thus lost all distinct consciousness of what it believes and what it does not believe, and has so completely abandoned all theological habits that it has no suspicion of the con sequences to which it may be logically carried. Hence the importance to us of having a complete and intelligent appreciation of our faith. Outside the Church half the world is trying to do without a religion at all, and the other half of the world is on the look-out for a religion. Surely this is a time for the study of theology. Men of all ranks are deeply interested in the achieve ments of astronomy, the revolutions of geology, and the dawn of new worlds in chemistry, and a world-wide battle on the fields of physiology; so that popular manuals and histories of sciences are in the hands of every one. When the time comes to many of them to feel an equal interest in the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, in the wonders of the Incarnation, in the systems of grace, in the science of the Sacraments, they will come to the study with habits of mind which a true theological, by which I mean especially an uncontroversial, treatment of these things will alone satisfy. The amount of the harvest of souls, which we shall reap in this general breaking up of opinions, will depend in great measure, under God's blessing, upon the spread and appreciation among ourselves of an intelligent theology, and of theology as a science, independent of mere barren controversy. People will want to know what is actually said and thought, not what may be said or thought in the face of certain ob jections. The national formula of our countrymen is not merely "the truth, and the truth cnly/' but also * the whole truth." 32 •

But our own spiritual welfare also is not a little concerned in this. The more our understandings are laid hold of, impressed, and interested with sacred things, the inoro easy will it be to keep our hearts on God. Not but that the study of theology may easily be divorced from the life of grace; yet the one is a natural reinforcement of the other. Feasts will be kept with greater devotion When we understand and are delighted with the particular mysteries which they celebrate. Indeed, there is a close connection between devotion and theology. The devotions of one age become the dogmas of another, as in the case of the Immaculate Conception; and the dogmas of one age become devotions in others, as it was with the mys teries of the Sacred Humanity and the Maternity of Mary. And thus time goes on commuting dogma into devotion and devotion into dogma by a double process continually. There is no safety in devotion if it be sepa rated from dogma, though it may sometimes go before and sometimes follow after. So that even in a devotional point of view it is well to know what is of faith, what is not of faith but which it is rash to doubt, what are open questions, what are pious opinions, what popular devo tions have been indulgenced, what have lower sanctions, and what have apparently met with rebuff and indirect reproof, like the Servitude of Mary, devotion to Mary in the Eucharist, and a particular development of devotion to the Eternal Father.

The feverish and exclusive excitement of material in terests is passing away and a reaction is at hand. No one can watch the philosophical tendencies of the age in other countries as well as our own, without seeing that we shall shortly have the nineteenth century knocking at the doors of theology, and demanding to graduate in her schools. And just as we left physical science, with the still curtained sanctuary of life in the midst, and discovery growing bolder round it every day, so with theology we have the ark which hides the secret union of faith and reason, still enveloped in doubts and difficulties, and with an imperfect light round about it, and catholic science every year making new and interesting efforts to bring it into the full radiance of theological teaching. Theology will become the study of the age; and the harmony of faith and reason its critical and characteristic question.

But to return. We may look at theology in two ways. Either we may contemplate it in itself, its method of teaching us about God, the nature of its processes, the history of its structure, the vicissitudes which heresy im poses upon it, and all its peculiarities as a science, or we may regard men's treatment of it, their ignorance of it, their indifference to it, their refusal to recognize its rights, their contempt of it, their suspicion and their hatred; and from both points of view we behold in it an accurate representation of the way in which God vouchsafes to appear in His own world, and the treatment He receives from His creatures. It is as God in nature, as Jesus in Judea, as the Blessed Sacrament in the Church. The over-sight of God in nature, the dislike of Jesus in Judea, the neglect of the Blessed Sacrament in churches, the total want of interest in theology, a science which deals with the most interesting questions in the most interesting way, these are all kindred phenomena, expres sions of the same profound mystery.

From theology let us pass to the Church. It is of the essence of the Church Militant to be visible. It is the pillar and ground of the truth, the Bride of the Lamb, a city set upon a hill which cannot be hid. The Church is a government and a kingdom, a society and an institution, a witness and a missionary. Her business is to teach, to command, to console, to edify, to punish, to praise, at all times and in all the ends of the earth. Thus light is her very life and office; and although we must now expect, to find the Church in analogy with God's other ways of manifesting Himself, yet obviously we shall look for fewer and fainter vestiges of His hiddenness here than elsewhere. How far do facts bear out this expectation? We may look at the Church as a government, as an institution, and as a missionary; and in every one of these functions we shall find just the same divine method, revealing by concealing. As a government the Church does not immediately recommend herself to men as a manifestation of heaven, as the Vicariate of God. The civil power in all ages, and even when saintly men were at the head of it, has exhibited a most inordinate jealousy of the Church, and an instinctive desire to intrude into her domain; and indeed protestantism, as a political movement, was mainly a transfer of the spiritual government of men to their temporal rulers; while the rulers themselves preferred, in their inexperience, to be con trolled by revolutions rather than by popes.² To the multitude of the modern world the narrow spirit of nationality is a more acceptable and attractive thing than the wide and comprehensive theory of Catholicism.³ It seems to them more plainly an ordinance of God. The whole of the beautiful machinery which the Church possesses to guide, to elevate, to console, to convert, to beautify the souls of men is explained by the world on the single coarse principle of priestcraft. The jurisdiction of the pope, with freedom of communication with Rome, instead of the palladium of liberty, which it has over and over again proved itself to be, looks to a jaun diced eye as a thraldom than which no human tyrant can be greater. As a matter of fact and history, the Church as a government has been immensely powerful; and yet men despise her. As a matter of fact and his tory, she has been of all governments the most patient, forgiving, and benign; and yet men hate her. As with God so with her. They despise His power, and they are irritated by His mercy. The secret both of men's indifference and of their dislike to the Church as a government lies in this single truth, that she is a theocracy. If we contemplate the Church as an institution she looks still less like God. It does not seem as if her object was so much to produce fine characters, like the he roes of the heathen world, as simply to multiply the fruits of our Lord's Passion and to spread the sacraments. Indeed the fear of hell, the physical character of its prominent punishment, the reverence for minute ceremonies, and the observance of such positive precepts as that of Friday's abstinence, under pain of mortal sin, seem in the world's judgment more fitted to render men little than great, trifling than serious, selfish than charitable, pusillanimous than brave. Writing to Catholics I am not concerned to defend the Church; I am only stating the natural view which an unenlightened world takes of the Church as an institution. Her doing more than she undertook to do is even turned into an eclipse of her divine character. Founded by God for a spiritual end, it is urged that she cannot be from God, because she does not accomplish a temporal one. Because all the heavy work, in fact the solid foundations, of European civilization, such as the sanctity of marriage, the mitigation of slavery, the cour tesies of warfare, the glories of law, the limitations of despotism, the preservation of literature, the founding of universities, and the patronage of fine arts, were all her creation, that she does not do by herself exclusively the easier work of completing this civilization, but lets diplomacy and physical science share the toil and carry on what it was at the outset a mere bye-play on her part to begin, men conclude that as an institution she knows of nothing but timidity and retrogression, and that she who is the light of the world is never happy except when she has become its darkness. Neither do men suspect, that when she seems to fail as an institution, it is because the civil power is cramping her as a government: nor again that an institution, which seems at certain epochs to be in the attitude of keeping other institutions in check, may be in truth discharging an office of the largest wi&dom and the most far sighted philanthropy. Anyhow to the eyes of men the Church as an institution looks old, feeble, antiquated, undignified, and losing ground. She seems to parody the divine ways more than exemplify them, and to be rather a disrepute than otherwise to Him whose sole ambassadress she claims to be.

She is hardly more attractive to the world's blood-shot eye as a missionary. The mere work of saving souls is not one in which the world can be expected to interest itself very warmly. Preparations for eternity are not complimentary to time; and to teach dislike of the world is hardly a title to its love. It is indelicate as well as unwelcome to examine symptoms and parade remedies for an undignified disease, when it is the patient's monomania that he is without disease at all. Hence casuistry, moral theology, and the maternal solicitudes of the confessional, which seem to us so kind, so gentle, so beautiful, and so inspired, exasperate the world and irritate its nervousness to a degree it positively cannot bear. In like manner her ceremonial, shreds of beauty caught from the heavenly worship of the Immaculate Lamb, and wrought with in spired craft into a system whose beauty ravishes souls and is too deep for tears, too fair for earth, is tawdry pomp, tinsel magnificence, heartless formality, lifeless puppetebow to those whose eyes are blinded and their hearts hardened. Like her Lord, the Church can do nothing right. Everything she says or does is taken in a wrong sense. It is only the poor penitent thief, not the rulers and nobles, that find out at last that she has done " nothing amiss." Thus with her, government is tyranny, conversion is proselytism, sanctity is unnatural asceticism, martyrdom is obstinacy, perfection is enthusiasm, gentleness is laxity, strictness is arrogance, and punishment is an as sault on the rights of man. Thus everything in the Church is a hiding-place of something divine; and the world is forever trying to break in to see what is behind, discontented it would seem with its own vulgar explanation of the whole, just as the indelicate tyranny of its baser sort would fain scale our convent walls and lay bare the privacies of bashful holiness, as if they could see any thing there which they could understand, anything moro than the ruffians who stared into the Face of God made Man and by instinct spat upon it. Successful as she has been, who will say that the venerable beauty of the Church is not hidden, as her Bridegroom's was? Who, with the world in his heart, hears only the mother's voice, sweetly warning, wisely warning, in the Index of Prohibited Books? Or who looks for the unvaried patience and gentle perseverance of a father's love, a love which so loves that it cannot despair, in the processes of the Inquisition? In the missionary years of our Blessed Lord, it was love that emptied the temple with a scourge and overthrew the seats of the money-changers. It was love which spoke in parables, and would do no miracles where men did no' believe. It was love that called the pagan womau i icg, and Herod a fox, and addressed Peter as S.-tau. And it wa»s love that -?ried out woe upon the rich, and cursed the 6g-tree, even though He knew that male diction would be the secular scandal of unbelieving philosophy.

Historically as well as doctrinally it has been shown that the service of God is incompatible with the service of the world. "The friendship of the world is enmity with God." So has it been with the Church. In all her relations the world and she are incompatible terms. She has but one office to it, which is to weaken it, to break it up, to master it, and to subjugate it, and to save it in spito of its own wicked self. Thus as God is in the world, so is the Church in the world. Neither is she without par-alK 1 to Him as He vouchsafes to show Himself in the Bible. She claims, as He does, universal dominion; for her dominion is by virtue of His. She, as He is, is ever putting out her claims, and never having those claims al lowed, yet going on her way without compromise, without abating one hairsbreadth of what seem such extravagant pretensions. Surely this is not worldly-wise, and she so dangerously sagacious and insinuating as men will have it she is! Like Jesus in His Infancy, she is weak, helpless, and ungodlike in her outward seeming. Like Jesus in His Boyhood, she is shy, silent, inactive, contemplating. Like Jesus in His Ministry, she is careless of applause, seeks not the great, often repels advances as if she read the heart, takes to unlikely unpersuasive ways, and does not lay herself out to the greatest advantage. Like Jesus in His Passion, she is always having the worst of it with the world, seeming to be coming to an end, tired out, and on her death-bed. Every age and every year she is surviving some Calvary or other, which it was confidently prognosticated must at last be fatal. Like Jesus Risen.

and like God always, her glory is best recognised when it has passed onward. So God showed Himself to Jacob, 80 to Moses, so to Elias. So Jesus manifested Himself to Magdalene in the morning and at Emmaus in the evening. In primitive times the Church was the scorn of men, and now the world glories in the beauty of the work. In the Middle Ages the world was impatient of her, yet now heretics even rehabilitate her mediaeval his tory. Everything is allowed to her but the present, and the present is never allowed because it is never recognised. As God is, so is she; as Jesus in His Sacrament, so she also.

Footnotes

1. Some modern writers have expressed themselves disrespectfully •A this very subject. ↩

2. Speaking of the temporal jurisdiction of the popes, Nettement says, Les rois et lea peuples ont-ils beaucoup gagne" & ea disparition? II est permit d'en douter, car les papes ont eu, dans cette fonction, une formidable he"ritiere, la revolution. — Litte"rature de 1« Restauration. ii. 185. ↩

3. Thus even anti-Catholic writers on the philosophy of history notice how all the theories of humanity split up and become nar rowed as soon as the study of history was divorced from belief and from allegiance to Catholic unity. In Raymond, Lully, Arnold of Villeneure, Repescissa, Postal, and the Franciscan Campanella, the grand Catholic idea of humanity, as one family with a single destiny, predominates even over all the millenarian vagaries and wild here sies of the "Eternal Gospel." But later on Machiavel hns no idea beyond a nation; Vico isolates tribes and populations; Montesquieu makes climates and individual legislators do all his work; and hie school have been reproached for writing history as a series of chance episodes. Nor would it be hard to show how even the broadest views of the modern doctrine of progress, in Herder, Lessing, Kent, Condorcet, and others, fall far below the grandeur of the old Catholic idea. A Catholic would have to guard himself from being misunderstood, if he used Bacon's words, Hi/tory, like geograpby, has its deserts. ↩