Where Was the Garden of Eden?
It is extremely difficult to find out what Mr. Belloc, as a representative Catholic, believes about human origins. I was extremely curious to get the Catholic view of these matters, and I heard of the advent of these articles with very great pleasure, because I thought I should at last be able to grasp what I had hitherto failed to understand in the Catholic position. But if Mr. Belloc has said all that there is to say for Catholicism upon these points, Catholicism is bankrupt. He assures me that to believe in the Biblical account of the Creation is a stupid Protestant tendency, and that Catholics do not do anything of the sort. His attitude towards the Bible throughout is one almost of contempt. It is not for me to decide between Christians upon this delicate issue. And Catholics, I gather, have always believed in Evolution and are far above the intellectual level of the American Fundamentalist. It is very important to Catholic self-respect to keep that last point in mind. Catholic evolution is a queer process into which “Design” makes occasional convulsive raids; between which raids species remain “fixed”; but still it is a sort of Evolution. My peasant neighbours in Provence, devout Catholics and very charming people, have not the slightest suspicion that they are Evolutionists, though Mr. Belloc assures me they are.
But, in spite of this smart Evolutionary town wear of the Church, it has somehow to be believed by Catholics that “man” is and always has been and will be the same creature, “fixed.” That much Mr. Belloc gives us reiteratively. A contemporary writer, the Rev. Morris Morris, has written an interesting book, Man Created During Descent, to show that man’s immortal soul was injected into the universe at the beginning of the Neolithic period, which makes those Azilians and Capsians, with their bows and carvings, mere animals. The new Belloc-Catholic teaching is similar, but it puts the human beginnings earlier. Somewhen after the Chellean and Moustierian periods, and before the Reindeer men, I gather that “man” appeared, according to Catholic doctrines, exactly what he is now. Or rather better. He was clad in skins and feathers, smeared with paint, a cave-hunting wanderer with not even a dog at his heels; but he was, because Mr. Belloc says so, a devout monotheist and had a lucid belief in personal immortality. His art was pure and exalted—there were little bone figures of steatopygous women in evidence. He had no connection with the Neanderthal predecessor—or else he had jumped miraculously out of the Neanderthaler’s bestial skin. Sometimes it seems to be one thing and sometimes the other. But all that stuff about Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Tree and the Serpent, so abundantly figured in Catholic painting and sculpture, seems to have dropped out of this new version of Catholic truth.
Yet those pictures are still shown to the faithful! And what the Fall becomes in these new revelations of Catholicism, or whether there was a Fall, historically speaking, Mr. Belloc leaves in the densest obscurity. I have read and re-read these articles of his, and I seek those lucid Latin precisions he has promised me in vain. Was and is that Eden story merely symbolical, and has the Church always taught that it is merely symbolical? And if so, what in terms of current knowledge do these symbols stand for? Is it symbolical of some series of events in time or is it not? If it is, when and what were the events in time? And if it is not, but if it is symbolical of some experience or adventure or change in the life of each one of us, what is the nature of that personal fall? What is the significance of the Garden, the Innocence, the Tree, the Serpent? To get anything clear and hard out of Mr. Belloc’s papers in reply to these questions is like searching for a diamond in a lake of skilly. I am left with the uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Belloc is as vague and unbelieving about this fundamental Catholic idea as the foggiest of foggy Protestants and Modernists, but that he has lacked the directness of mind to admit as much even to himself. Yet surely the whole system of salvation, the whole Christian scheme, rests upon the presumption of a fall. Without a fall, what is the value of salvation? Why redeem what has never been lost? Without a condemnation what is the struggle? What indeed, in that case, is the Catholic Church about?
What modern thought is about is a thing easier to explain. In the Outline of History, against which Mr. Belloc is rather carping than levelling criticism, there is set out, as the main form of that Outline, a progressive development of conscious will in life. It is not a form thrust upon the massed facts by any fanatical prepossession; it is a form they insisted upon assuming under my summarising hand. What is going on in this dispute is not that I am beating and putting over my ideas upon Mr. Belloc or that he is beating and putting over his ideas upon me, but that the immense increase of light and knowledge during the past century is imposing a new realisation of the quality and depth and import of life upon us both, and that I am acquiescent and he is recalcitrant. I judge his faith by the new history, and he judges the new history by his faith.
V
FIXITY OR PROGRESS
I am glad to say that we are emerging now from the worst of the controversial stuff, irritating and offensive, in which Mr. Belloc is so manifestly my master, and coming to matters of a more honest interest.
I have stuck to my argument through the cut and slash, sneer and innuendo of Mr. Belloc’s first twelve papers. I have done my best to be kind and generous with him. I have made the best excuses I can for him. I have shown how his oddities of bearing and style arise out of the difficulties of his position, and how his absurd reasonings about Natural Selection and his deliberate and tedious bemuddlement of the early Palæolithic sub-men with the late Reindeer men and the Capsian men are all conditioned by the necessity he is under to declare and believe that “man” is, as he puts it, a “Fixed Type,” the same in the past and now and always. He is under this necessity because he believes that otherwise the Christian faith cannot be made to stand up as a rational system, and because, as I have shown by a quotation of his own words, he makes their compatibility with his idea of Catholic teaching his criterion in the acceptance or rejection of facts.
I will confess I do not think that things are as bad as this with Christianity. I believe a far better case could be made for Catholicism by an insistence that its value and justification lie in the change and in the direction of the human will, in giving comfort and consolation and peace, in producing saints and beautiful living; and that the truth of the history it tells of space and time is entirely in relation to the development of these spiritual aspects, and has no necessary connection whatever with scientific truth. This line of thought is no novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that would need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect than Mr. Belloc’s a priori exploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own neglected philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s articles by the Universe, the Catholic Bulletin, and the Southern Cross shows that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to treat the fall of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact, even if they are rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities of modern biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man and thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain, is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in time or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the same. You will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like Mr. Belloc, on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to the spectacle. There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just a flow of individual lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth and damnation. That, I extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary writers, is the Catholic’s vision of life.