In this order the most striking victories are never complete. Even after the most radical conversion, the old man survives, at least by its roots, in the new man. The Pharisee long survived in St. Paul after he became an Apostle of Christ. The same in human societies: political or moral revolutions never abolish the past. After those great battles in which passions and interests have often as much weight as noble ideas and generous sentiments, there is always established a sort of equilibrium by mutual concessions and spontaneous alliances between the vanquished and the victorious tendencies. Hence come what we have named the corruptions of the Christian principle in the course of historical Christianity, for which alone should be reserved the name of heresies.
It must not be imagined, however, that these corruptions or heresies, against which it is the duty of Christian criticism ceaselessly to protest, are arbitrary things, or that their number is unlimited. On the contrary, they fall, and must necessarily fall, into two categories. The cause of the corruptions of the Christian principle in social life can only be found in the previous tradition, in one of the moral and religious tendencies that Christianity aspires to conquer and replace. Now, these tendencies may be reduced to two: the tendencies of the religions of Nature, or Pagan; and the tendency of the legal, or Jewish, religion. Closely examine all that has disfigured or that still disfigures historical Christianity, and you will see that each of these corruptions is connected, by its character, with a Jewish or a Pagan root. The Gospel as the religion of free spirit and pure morality has never had, and could never have had, any other enemies than Judaism or Paganism, ever ready to spring up in its bosom and transform it either into the religion of Nature or into the religion of the Law.
Christianity, for example, in its pure essence, implies the absoluteness of God—that is to say, His perfect spirituality and His perfect independence. Hence, worship in spirit and in truth, the only worship that can be universal, the only one that corresponds to the Christian idea of God. Therefore every tendency, even in Christianity itself, to shut up God in a phenomenal form, to bind Him to something material, local, or temporary, to blend the Creator with the creature, or to fill up the gap between them by a hierarchy of divine beings which, under pretext of serving us as intermediaries, interrupt our free and immediate communion with the Father, is, properly speaking, a resurrection of Paganism, and a return to idolatry. Paganism and idolatry, of which we pretend to have so much horror, are simply the localisation and materialisation, more or less conscious, of the divine spirit and of divine grace, whatever may be the visible organ to which you bind them, or on which you make their action to depend,—Pope of Rome or Pythoness of Delphi, images of gods or images of virgin and of saints, sacramental liturgies, the deification of a church, a priesthood, or a book.
Take another example: Christianity is not only the liberty of God; it is also His holiness; it is pure morality placed above all the instincts of nature; it is, finally, the unity of morality and religion. Hence, all that tends to break this unity, every blow at the divine law, every attempt to cultivate religious emotion apart from conscience, all magic and mystagogy, æsthetic piety, religious romanticism, Christianity à la Chateaubriand, sensuous mysticism,—these essays, so numerous in our day, at philosophic or at literary gnosis, these new religions without repentance or conversion, all these cults without any element of moral sanctification—these are so many corruptions of the Christian principle, and consequences more or less immediate of the Paganism always latent in the human heart.
By the side of this Pagan is the Judaising heresy. Christianity is not only moral law and intransigeant holiness; it is also unconditional love, grace, mercy, the inward action of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man in order to produce in it that which He desires to find, and to realise that which His law commands; it is everything that scandalised Pharisaism in the teaching and conduct of Jesus in regard to the sinful and the lost: pardon without reproach, rehabilitation and salvation through repentance and affection, the sincere impulse of the heart that has been raised above external works; the very opposite of legal compacts, meritorious and atoning virtue, formalist religion and ritual piety. All that tends to separate the Father from the child; that places the liberty and virtue of man outside and apart from God as having some merit in His sight; all Pelagianism, every theory of salvation by works, every condition laid down to divine grace except faith to receive it: adhesion to a doctrinal formula, sacramental usages, priestly absolution, outward mortification, asceticism whether monkish or puritanical, which divides morality and, in the name of a fantastic sanctity, introduces dualism into the work of God,—all this should be called by its right name; it should be taken for what it really is—a relapse into the legal and formalist spirit of Jewish Pharisaism.
Finally, I see on what condition Christianity may remain faithful to itself while realising itself in history. It is only by an incessant struggle of the Christian principle against all the elements of the past which find, alas, in human propensities, and in the inertia of the multitude, a complicity so constant and effectual. So far from religious indifference being permissible, critical action and Christian prayer become, in every church and every life, permanent duties. I now understand the paradox of Christ: "I am not come to send peace on the earth, but a sword." For the Christian principle, in fact, war is life. To cease to fight is to succumb; it is to allow yourself to be submerged by the rising tide of human superstitions; it is to die. Who does not see the danger of allowing Christianity to become absorbed in one church form, Christian truth in one formula, the Christian principle in one of its particular realisations? All these contingent expressions, being imperfect, must be reformed sooner or later. How can they be unless the spirit of Christianity disengages itself without ceasing and floats above them as an ideal? For eighteen centuries a river of life has flowed through human history. Break down the barriers which fanaticism and superstition are always setting up athwart its course. If the waters cease to flow they stagnate, and corrupt and poison the very land it was their mission to fertilise.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT HISTORICAL FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY
1. The Evolution of the Christian Principle