CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF DOGMAS AND THEIR HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
1. Three Prejudices
I here encounter three prejudices which are, I think, the most inveterate in the world. The first is that dogmas are immutable; the second, that they die fatally the moment they are touched by criticism; the third, that they form the essence of religion, which rises or falls with them. I wish to show that dogmas have neither this pretended immobility nor this delicate fragility; that they live by an inner life extraordinarily resistant and fecund, and that the criticism of dogmas, so far from injuring the Christian religion, frees it from the chains of the past and permits it to manifest its marvellous gift of rejuvenescence and adaptation to circumstances.
The proof that dogmas are not immutable lies in the fact that they have a history. That history is as full of conflicts, controversies, revolutions, as the history of philosophy.... One Church has said of its dogmas what a Jesuit General said of his Order: sint ut sunt aut non sint! It is an illusion. Momentarily arrested at one point, the movement begins again at another. In one half of Christendom, and certainly the most living half, criticism of dogma has never ceased since the sixteenth century. Even in the bosom of the Catholic Church, its most skilful advocates, the Moehlers and the Newmans, unable to deny that Catholicism is not to-day what it was in the first centuries, have made this strange concession to history; they have applied to dogmas the theory of development. At Paris in 1682 the dogma of the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome would have been condemned as an error. Since 1870 the orthodoxy of 1682 has become the gravest of heresies. There is no fiction more evident than that of the immutability of dogmas, whether in the Catholic or in the Protestant Churches. Like all other manifestations of life, they have an evolution as natural as it is inevitable. The proof that dogmas are not religion, and that criticism does not kill them but transforms them, will appear in what I now proceed to say.
2. The Two Elements in Dogma; and its Historical Evolution
Dogma is the language spoken by faith. In it there are two elements: a mystical and practical element, the properly religious element; this is the living and fruitful principle of dogma: then there is an intellectual or theoretical element, a judgment of mind, a philosophical proposition serving at once as an envelope and as an expression of religion.
Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it, trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now, thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into an intellectual judgment. Thus, wishing to express this relation, the believer will exclaim, e.g. "God is great!" marking the infinite disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him tremble.[[1]] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed in the mind into the notion of a relation, i.e. into an intellectual notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression which ideally represents a given quantity, but it is not the quantity itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious experience....
[[1]] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation and other experiences: the revelation of God and of a higher life, in the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "God is Love!" as the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "God is great!" And this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.
The intellectual will therefore be the variable element in dogma. It is the matter united to the germ, and it is ceaselessly transformed by the very effect of the movement of life. The reason of this is simple. We said just now that a religious emotion, like every other, translates itself into a notion which fixes the relation of the subject to the object, implied in the emotion itself. But what will this notion be? With what materials, with what concepts, will the religious man construct it? Clearly with those at his disposal. His religious formula will depend on his state of intellectual culture. A child, he will think and speak religiously as a child. Religious reason and language have followed the same steps as the general reason....