Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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Bishop Gore, we may be sure, will not willingly allow the High Church
party to be entangled in corrupt alliances. When he handles what may be
called applied Christianity, he does so in a manner which makes us
rejoice at the popularity of his books. The little commentaries on the
Sermon on the Mount, and on the Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians,
are admirable. They are simple, practical, and profound. We subjoin a
short analysis of the notes on the first part of the Sermon on the
Mount, as an illustration of the teaching which runs all through the
three commentaries.

The Sermon on the Mount is not the whole of Christianity. It
is the climax of law, of the letter that killeth. The Divine
requirement is pressed home with unequalled force upon the
conscience; yet not in the form of mere laws of conduct, but
as a type of character. It is promulgated not by an
inaccessible God, but by the Divine Love manifested in
manhood. The hard demand of the letter is closely connected
with the promise of the Spirit. We are told that many of the
precepts in the sermon were anticipated by Pagan and Jewish
writers. But this we might have expected, since all men are
rational and moral through fellowship with the Word, who is
also the Reason of God. Christ is the light which in
conscience and reason lightens every man throughout the
history of the race. But the Sermon is comprehensive where
other summaries are fragmentary, it is pure where they are
mixed. It is teaching for grown men, who require principles,
not rules. And it is authoritative, reinforced by the
mysterious Person of the speaker. The Beatitudes are a
description of character. Christ requires us, not to do such
and such things, but to be such and such people. ... True
blessedness consists in membership of the kingdom of heaven,
which is a life of perfect relationship with man and nature
based on perfect fellowship with God.... The Beatitudes
describe the Christian character in detail; in particular,
they describe it as contrasted with the character of the
world, which, in the religious sense, may be defined as
human society as it organises itself apart from God. The
first Beatitude enjoins detachment, such as His who emptied
Himself, as having nothing and yet possessing all things. We
are all to be detached; there are some whom our Lord
counsels to be literally poor. 'Blessed are they that
mourn' means that we are not to screen ourselves from the
common lot of pain. We must distinguish 'godly sorrow' from
the peevish discontent and slothfulness which St. Paul calls
the sorrow of the world, and which in medieval casuistry is
named acedia. 'Blessed are the meek' means that we are not
to assert ourselves unless it is our duty to do so. The true
Christian is a man who in his private capacity cannot be
provoked. On a general view of life, though not always in
particular cases, we must allow that we are not treated
worse than we deserve. The fourth Beatitude tells us that if
we want righteousness seriously, we can have it. The fifth
proclaims the reward of mercy, that is, compassion in
action. Pity which does nothing is only hypocrisy or
emotional self-indulgence. On the whole, we can determine
men's attitude to us by our attitude to them; the merciful
do obtain mercy. 'Purity of heart' means singleness of
purpose; but in the narrower sense of purity it is worth
while to say that those who profess to find it 'impossible'
to lead a pure life might overcome their fault if they would
try to be Christlike altogether, instead of struggling with
that one fault separately. 'Sincerum est nisi vas,
quodcunque infundis acescit.' On the seventh--there are many
kinds of false peace, which Christ came to break up; but
fierce, relentless competition is an offence in a Christian
nation. The last shows what our reward is likely to be in
this world, if we follow these counsels. Where the
Christ-character is not welcomed, it is hated.

From the later sections a few characteristic comments may be given in an
abridged form.

We are apt to have rather free and easy notions of the
Divine fatherhood. To call God our Father, we must ourselves
be sons; and it is only those who are led by the Spirit of
God who are the sons of God.... Ask for great things, and
small things will be given to you. This is exactly the
spirit of the Lord's Prayer.... Act for God. Direct your
thoughts and intentions Godward, and your intelligence and
affections will gradually follow along the line of your
action.... You must put God first, or nowhere.... It is a
perilous error to say that we have only to follow our
conscience; we have to enlighten our conscience and keep it
enlightened.... There is no greater plague of our generation
than the nervous anxiety which characterises all its
efforts. We ought to be reasonably careful, and then go
boldly forward in the peace of God.... Our Lord did not
mean to make of His disciples a new kind of Pharisee.
....'Judge not,' means, Do not be critical. The condemnation
of one who is always finding fault carries no moral weight.
It is those who have the lowest and vaguest standards of
what is right who are often the most critical in judgment of
other people.... We ought so to limit our desires that what
we want for ourselves we can reasonably expect also for
others.... A man who wants to do his duty must always be
prepared to stand alone.... Christianity is not so much a
statement of the true end or ideal of human life, as a great
spiritual instrument for realising the end.

These extracts will be sufficient to show what are the characteristics
of these little commentaries. They exhibit extreme honesty of purpose,
fearless acceptance of Christ's teaching honestly interpreted, scorn of
unreality and empty words, and a determination never to allow preaching
to be divorced from practice. No more stimulating Christian teaching has
been given in our generation.

The valuable treatise on the Holy Communion, called 'The Body of
Christ,' is too theological for detailed discussion in these pages. The
points in which the Roman Church has perverted and degraded the really
Catholic sacramental doctrine are forcibly exposed, and the true nature
of the sacrament is unfolded in a masterly and beautiful manner.

A study of the whole body of theological writings from the pen of this
remarkable man leaves us with the conviction that he is one of the most
powerful spiritual forces in our generation. It is the more to be
regretted that in certain points he seems to be hampered by false
presuppositions and misled by unattainable ideals. His loyalty to
'Catholic truth,' as understood by the party in the Church to which he
consents to belong, prevents him from understanding where the shoe
really pinches among those of the younger generation who are both
thoughtful and devout. He makes a fetish of the Creeds, documents which
only represent the opinions of a majority at a meeting; and what manner
of meetings Church Councils sometimes were, is known to history. He is
still impressed with the grandeur of the Catholic idea, as embodied in
the Roman Church, and will do nothing to preclude reunion, should a
more enlightened policy ever prevail at the Vatican. But this country
has done with the Roman Empire, in its spiritual as well as its temporal
form. The dimensions of that proud dominion have shrunk with the
expansion of knowledge; new worlds have been opened out, geographical
and mental, which never owned its sway; the _caput orbis_ has become
provincial, and her authority is spurned even within her own borders.
There is no likelihood of the English people ever again accepting
'Catholicism,' if Catholicism is the thing which history calls by that
name. The movement which the Bishop hopes to lead to victory will
remain, as it has been hitherto, a theory of the ministry rather than of
the Church, and its strength will be confined, as it is now, mainly to
clerical circles.

Catholicism and Protestantism (in so far as they are more than names for
institutionalism and mysticism, which are permanent types) are both
obsolescent phases in the evolution of the Christian religion. 'The time
cometh when neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men
worship the Father.'

A profound reconstruction is demanded, and for those who have eyes to
see has been already for some time in progress. The new type of
Christianity will be more Christian than the old, because it will be
more moral. A number of unworthy beliefs about God are being tacitly
dropped, and they are so treated because they are unworthy of Him. The
realm of nature is being claimed for Him once more; the distinction
between natural and supernatural is repudiated; we hear less frequent
complaints that God 'does nothing' because He does not assert Himself by
breaking one of His own laws. The divinity of Christ implies--one might
almost say it means--the eternal supremacy of those moral qualities
which He exhibited in their perfection. 'Conversio fit ad Dominum ut
Spiritum,' as Bengel said. The visible or Catholic Church is not the
name of an institution which has the privilege of being governed by
bishops. It is 'dispersed throughout the whole world,' under many
banners and many disguises. Its political reunion is (Plato would say)
an hen mhytho ehyche, and is at present neither to be expected nor
desired. Among those who are by right citizens of the spiritual kingdom,
those only are in danger of exclusion from it who entrench themselves in
a little fort of their own and erect barriers, which may make them their
own prisoners, but which will not hinder the great commonwealth of
seekers after truth from working out modern problems by modern lights,
until the whole of our new and rich inheritance, intellectual, moral,
and aesthetic, shall be brought again under the obedience of Christ.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] In 1908.

[25] Palmer's _Narrative_, p 20.

[26] _Contemporary Review_, April 1899.

[27] _The Church and the Ministry_, pp. 9, 10.

[28] _Ibid_., p. 74.

[29] _The Church and the Ministry_, p. 110.

[30] _Ibid_., p. 344.

[31] _Ibid_., p. 345.

[32] _Ibid_., p. 348.

[33] _The Mission of the Church_, p. 32.

[34] _Church Congress Report_, 1896, p. 143.

[35] _Ibid_., p. 142.

[36] _Church Congress Report_, 1903, p. 15.

[37] _Ibid_., p. 17.

[38] _The New Theology and the Old Religion_, p. 162.

[39] _Church Congress Report_, 1903, p. 16.

[40] _Ibid_.

[41] _The New Theology and the Old Religion_, p. 163.

[42] _Dissertations_, pp. 41-49.

[43] _Church Congress Report_, 1899, p. 63.

[44] _Church Congress Report_, 1899, pp. 65-67.

[45] _Ibid_., 1896, pp. 342-346.

[46] _Epistle to the Ephesians_, pp. 113, 114.

[47] _Contemporary Review_, April 1899.

[48] _Ibid_.

[49] 'Go and sit thou by his side, and depart from the way
of the gods; neither let thy feet ever bear thee back to
Olympus; but still be vexed for his sake and guard him, till
he make thee his wife--or rather his slave.'

ROMAN CATHOLIC MODERNISM

(1909)

The Liberal movement in the Roman Church is viewed by most Protestants
with much the same mixture of sympathy and misgiving with which
Englishmen regard the ambition of Russian reformers to establish a
constitutional government in their country. Freedom of thought and
freedom of speech are almost always desirable; but how, without a
violent revolution, can they be established in a State which exists only
as a centralised autocracy, held together by authority and obedience?
This sympathy, and these fears, are likely to be strongest in those who
have studied the history of Western Catholicism with most intelligence.
From the Edict of Milan to the Encyclical of Pius X, the evolution which
ended in papal absolutism has proceeded in accordance with what looks
like an inner necessity of growth and decay. The task of predicting the
policy of the Vatican is surely not so difficult as M. Renan suggested,
when he remarked to a friend of the present writer, 'The Church is a
woman; it is impossible to say what she will do next.' For where is the
evidence of caprice in the history of the Roman Church? If any State has
been guided by a fixed policy, which has imposed itself inexorably on
its successive rulers, in spite of the utmost divergences in their
personal characters and aims, that State is the Papacy.

Beneath all the eddies which have broken the surface, the great stream
has flowed on, and has flowed in one direction. The same logic of events
which transformed the constitutional principate of Augustus into the
sultanate of Diocletian and Valentinian, has brought about a parallel
development in the Church which inherited the traditions, the policy,
and the territorial sphere of the dead Empire. The second World-State
which had its seat on the Seven Hills has followed closely in the
footsteps of the first. It is not too fanciful to trace, as Harnack has
done, the resemblance in detail--Peter and Paul in the place of Romulus
and Remus; the bishops and arch-bishops instead of the proconsuls; the
troops of priests and monks as the legionaries; while the Jesuits are
the Imperial bodyguard, the protectors and sometimes the masters of the
sovereign. One might carry the parallel further by comparing the schism
between the Eastern and Western Churches, and the later defection of
northern Europe, with the disruption of the Roman Empire in the fourth
century; and in the sphere of thought, by comparing the scholastic
philosophy and casuistry with the _Summa_ of Roman law in the
Digest.[50]

The fundamental principles of such a government are imposed upon it by
necessity. In the first place, progressive centralisation, and the
substitution of a graduated hierarchy for popular government, came about
as inevitably in the Catholic Church as in the Mediterranean Empire of
the Caesars. The primitive colleges of presbyters soon fell under the
rule of the bishops, the bishops under the patriarchs; and then Rome
suffered her first great defeat in losing the Eastern patriarchates,
which she could not subjugate. The truncated Church, no longer
'universal,' found itself obliged to continue the same policy of
centralisation, and with such success that, under Innocent III, the
triumph of the theocracy seemed complete. The Papacy dominated Europe
_de facto_, and claimed to rule the world _de jure_. Boniface VIII, when
the clouds were already gathering, issued the famous Bull 'Unam
sanctam,' in which he said: 'Subesse Romano pontifici omnes humanas
creaturas declaramus, definimus, et pronuntiamus omnino esse de
necessitate salutis.' The claim is logical. A theocracy (when religion
is truly monotheistic)[51] must claim to be universal _de jure_; and its
ruler must be the infallibly inspired and autocratic vicegerent of the
Almighty. He is the rightful lord of the world, whether he gives a
continent to the King of Spain by a stroke of the pen, or whether his
secular jurisdiction is limited by the walls of his palace. In the
fourteenth century the Pope is already called 'dominus deus
noster'--precisely the style in which Martial adulates Domitian. In the
Bull of Pius V (1570) the claim of universal dominion is reiterated; it
is asserted that the Almighty,

'cui data est omnis in caelo et in terra potestas, unam
sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, extra quam
nulla est salus, uni soli in terris, videlicet apostolorum
principi Petro Petrique successori Romano pontifici in
potestatis plenitudine tradidit gubernandam.'

But the final victory of infallibilism was the achievement of the
nineteenth-century Jesuits, who completed the dogmatic apotheosis of the
Pope at the moment when the last vestiges of his temporal power were
being snatched from him.

Now a government of this type is always in want of money. The spiritual
Roman Empire was as costly an institution as the court and the
bureaucracy of Diocletian and his successors. The same necessity which
suppressed democracy in the Church drove it to elaborate an oppressive
system of taxation, in which every weakness of human nature was
systematically exploited for gain, and every morsel of divine grace
placed on a tariff. But this method of raising revenue is only possible
while the priests can persuade the people that they really control a
treasury of grace, from which they can make or withhold grants at their
pleasure. It stands or falls with a non-ethical and magical view of the
divine economy which is hardly compatible with a high level of culture
or morality. The Catholic Church has thus been obliged, for purely
fiscal reasons, to discourage secular education, particularly of a
scientific kind, and to keep the people, so far as possible, in the
mental and moral condition most favourable to such transactions as the
purchase of indulgences and the payment of various insurances against
hell and purgatory.

Another necessity of absolute government is the repression of free
criticism directed against itself. Heresy and schism in an autocratic
Church take the place of treason against the sovereign. Cyprian, in the
third century, had already laid down the principles by which alone the
central authority could be maintained.

'Ab arbore frange ramum; fractus germinare non poterit. A
fonte praecide rivum; praecisus arescit.... Quisquis ab
ecclesia separatus adulterae iungitur, a promissis ecclesiae
separatur. Alienus est, hostis est. Habere non potest Deum
patrem, qui ecclesiam non habet matrem.'

Schismatics are therefore rebels, whose lives are forfeit under the laws
of treason. Heretics are in no better case; for the Church is the only
infallible interpreter both of Scripture and of tradition; and to differ
from her teaching is as disloyal as to secede from her jurisdiction.
Even Augustine could say, 'I should not believe the Gospel, if the
authority of the Church did not determine me to do so'; a statement
which a modern ultra-montane has capped by saying, 'Without the
authority of the Pope, I should not place the Bible higher than the
Koran.' Bellarmine claims an absolute monopoly of inspiration for the
Roman Church on the ground that Rome alone has preserved the apostolic
succession beyond dispute.[52] As for the treatment which heretics
deserve, the same authority is very explicit.

'In the first place, heretics do more mischief than any
pirate or brigand, because they slay souls; nay more, they
subvert the foundations of all good and fill the
commonwealth with the disturbances which necessarily follow
religious differences. In the second place, capital
punishment inflicted on them has a good effect on very many
persons. Many whom impunity was making indifferent are
roused by these executions to consider what is the nature of
the heresy which attracts them, and to take care not to end
their earthly lives in misery and lose their future
happiness. Thirdly, it is a kindness to obstinate heretics
to remove them from this life. For the longer they live, the
more errors they devise, the more men they pervert, and the
greater damnation they acquire for themselves.'[53]

In all matters which are not essential for the safety of the
autocracy, an absolutist Church will consult the average tastes of its
subjects. If the populace are at heart pagan, and hanker after
sensuous ritual, dramatic magic, and a rich mythology, these must be
provided. The 'intellectuals,' being few and weak, may be safely
rebuffed or disregarded until their discoveries are thoroughly
popularised. The pronouncements of the Roman Inquisition in the case
of Galileo are typical.

'The theory that the sun is in the centre of the world, and
stationary, is absurd, false in philosophy, and formally
heretical, because it is contrary to the express language of
Holy Scripture. The theory that the earth is not the centre
of the world, nor stationary, but that it moves with a daily
motion, is also absurd and false in philosophy, and,
theologically considered, it is, to say the least, erroneous
in faith.'

The exigencies of despotic government thus supply the key to the whole
policy and history of the Papacy. 'The worst form of State' can only be
bolstered up by the worst form of government. There should therefore be
no difficulty in distinguishing between the official policy of the Roman
See--which has been almost uniformly odious--and the history of the
Christian religion in the Latin countries, which has added new lustre to
human nature. The Catholic saints did not fly through the air, nor were
their hearts pierced with supernatural darts, as the mendacious
hagiology of their Church would have us believe; but they have a better
title to be remembered by mankind, as the best examples of a beautiful
and precious kind of human excellence.

The papal autocracy has now reached its Byzantine period of decadence.
During the Middle Ages Catholicism suited the Latin races very well on
the whole. Their ancestral paganism was allowed to remain substantially
unchanged--the _nomina_, but not the _numina_ were altered; their awe
and reverence for the _caput orbis_, ingrained in the populations of
Europe by the history of a thousand years, made submission to Rome
natural and easy; a host of myths 'abounding in points of attachment to
human experience and in genial interpretations of life, yet lifted
beyond visible nature and filling a reported world believed in on
faith,'[54] adorned religion with an artistic and poetical embroidery
very congenial to the nations of the South. But a monarchy essentially
Oriental in its constitution is unsuited to modern Europe. Its whole
scheme is based on keeping the laity in contented ignorance and
subservience; and the laity have emancipated themselves The Teutonic
nations broke the yoke as soon as they attained a national
self-consciousness. They escaped from a system which had educated, but
never suited them. Nor has the shrinkage been merely territorial. The
Pyrrhic victories over Gallicanism, Jansenism, Catholic democracy
(Lamennais), historical theology (Doellinger and the Old Catholics), each
alienated a section of thinking men in the Catholic countries. The Roman
Church can no longer be called Catholic, except in the sense in which
the kingdom of Francis II remained the Holy Roman Empire. It is an
exclusive sect, which preserves much more political power than its
numbers entitle it to exert, by means of its excellent discipline, and
by the sinister policy of fomenting political disaffection. Examples of
this last are furnished by the contemporary history of Ireland, of
France, and of Poland.

These considerations are of primary importance when we try to answer the
questions: To what extent is the Roman Church fettered by her own past?
Is there any insuperable obstacle to a modification of policy which
might give her a new lease of life? We have seen how much importance is
attached to the Church's title-deeds. Is tradition a fatal obstacle to
reform? Theoretically, the tradition which she traces back to the
apostles gives her a fixed constitution. So the Catholic Church has
always maintained. 'Regula quidem fidei una omnino est, sola immobilis
et irreformabilis.'[55] The rule of faith may be better understood by a
later age than an earlier, but there can be no additions, only a sort of
unpacking of a treasure which was given whole and entire in the first
century. In reality, of course, there has been a steady evolution in
conformity to type, the type being not the 'little flock' of Christ or
the Church of the Apostles, but the absolute monarchy above described.
It has long been the _crux_ of Catholic apologetics to reconcile the
theoretical immobility of dogma with the actual facts.

The older method was to rewrite history. It was convenient, for example,
to forget that Pope Honorius I had been anathematised by three
ecumenical councils. The forged Decretals gave a more positive sanction
to absolutist claims; and interpolations in the Greek Fathers deceived
St. Thomas Aquinas into giving his powerful authority to infallibilism.
This method cannot be called obsolete, for the present Pope recently
informed the faithful that 'the Hebrew patriarchs were familiar with the
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and found consolation in the
thought of Mary in the solemn moments of their life.'[56] But such
simple devices are hardly practicable in an age when history is
scientifically studied. Moreover, other considerations, besides
controversial straits, have suggested a new theory of tradition. A Caesar
who, like the kings of the Medes and Persians, is bound by the laws of
his predecessors, is not absolute. Acceptance of the theory of
development in dogma would relieve the Pope from the weight of the dead
hand.

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