It follows that our discipline, in studying the tradition of the Church, is independent of philosophy. On the other hand, the fact that it borrows its methods and processes from philosophy, renders it independent with regard to the Church. Its freedom springs from its twofold subjection. Such a little principality, placed between two great rival Powers without whose help it could not live, maintains its independence of them both by virtue of their very rivalry, and may become an arbiter, an element of pacification and good understanding, between forces which are only hostile because they either do not know or do not understand each other. Thus the science of dogmas will be free, pacific, fruitful, on condition that it does not break its connection on either hand, but remains in close communication with the two sources of its life, without which it would be liable either to die of inanition for want of food, or of impotence for lack of liberty.

2. The Science of Dogmas and the Church

A religious society cannot dispense either with doctrines or doctrinal teaching. The more moral it is in its character, the more it needs a dogmatic symbol which defines it and explains its raison d'être. It will have its teachers as well as its pastors and missionaries. The apostle Paul compares the Church to an organism in which each member has its necessary function, according to the special gift it has received. "God," says he, "gave some, apostles; some, prophets; some, teachers" (1 Cor. xii. 28; Rom. xii. 6-8. "Teaching of the Apostles," 13 and 15). In passing through different lips the Gospel takes different forms. It creates divers types of doctrine, divers schools or parties (1 Cor. i. 10-14). It is necessary to instruct the ignorant, to refute heretics, to heal schisms, to administer reproofs, to correct the interpretation of texts. This could only be done by means of discussion, reasoning, exegesis, speculation. It was not an effort of pure science, but of practical science, in the interest of the Church itself, with a view to its inner edification and to the continuous reform of its worship and its faith. The labour of dogmatics thus sprang up spontaneously in the bosom of the Church itself, and it has continued its work, not from without, but from within, through an office which is an essential ministry, an organ of the Church. It could not be done well in any other way....

A religious society, by the very fact that it endures, creates a doctrinal tradition, and this tradition soon assumes a divine character and tends to become an absolute authority. This is the effect of a psychological illusion characteristic of the religious consciousness so long as reflection does not put it on its guard against itself. The object of our faith being divine, we ingenuously transport this quality into the formula by which it has been transmitted to us, and we hold this formula to be divine before we have learnt to distinguish between the essence of faith and its historical manifestations, between the religious substance of the doctrine and its traditional expression. Add to the prestige of the past the necessity of educating the new generations. Every Christian begins as a catechumen, and, in certain respects, he is and ought to be a learner all his life, for he cannot fail to see that the collective consciousness is always richer and more stable than his own. But, if the aim of Christian education is to produce adult Christians—that is, Christians who, having received the Holy Spirit, have entered into a direct and permanent relation to the common Father, and into personal and living piety, they possess an inward rule of conduct, and along with this a principle of free judgment. As St. Paul says, our tutelage ends when we have attained to our majority. The spiritual man judges all, but is judged of none. He becomes independent of the authority under which he has grown up, as the full-grown man becomes free from the mother who has borne and nourished him. He will, doubtless, always gratefully welcome the tradition of the past; but he feels within himself a higher principle which gives him the right to amend and the power to increase, in some degree, the inheritance he has received from his fathers. No one is either a man or a Christian on any other condition.

The solution of the problem named above is to be found in these considerations. A tradition which desires to be absolute, which misunderstands and stifles individual inspiration, is not only an usurper—it also fails in its mission, which is to make adult Christians, Christians who are inwardly inspired and autonomous. It is like those tyrannical mothers who, if they could, would keep their sons in a perpetual minority. On the other hand, the children, even when they have attained their majority, should not despise their parents and disdain the counsels of experience and of age. Individual inspiration is apt to lead to self-sufficiency and sectarianism; it loses sight of the link of solidarity which unites the generations, and the social continuity in which alone progress is made in the religious life, as in the life of civilisation. The first defect, the tyrannical usurpation of tradition, predominates in the Catholic Church; the opposite defect, that of the intransigeance of individual convictions and of Illuminism, is the plague of Protestant communities. The truth would be found in a middle course, and in the organisation of a traditional Church stable enough to receive and keep the heritage of the past, large and flexible enough to permit in it the legitimate expansion of the Christian consciousness and the acquisition of new treasure.

To this ideal, Catholicism cannot resign itself without succumbing to death. Protestantism aspires to it without reaching it; and yet nothing is more really in the logic of its principle. No Protestant Church professes to be infallible. Its most solemn Confessions of Faith have only a provisional value. The spirit of reform breathes in it without truce, continually. The principal task of the community, as of the individual, is to amend itself, to advance in knowledge and in virtue. A Church which should exclude this spirit of reform would cease to be a Protestant Church. And, of course, the duty of reform implies the legitimacy of criticism, of an appeal to the Gospel better understood, of a constant effort to bring the real up to the ideal. The only matter of importance is to decide aright on the principle or criterion according to which this criticism shall be made.

Shall it be another dogma? No; not even if it be called a fundamental one such as the authority of Scripture. For this very dogma, formulated by tradition, is therefore human and contingent, and is open to criticism like all the rest. With what then, or in the name of what, shall dogma be criticised? Shall we, with Rationalism, take a moral or philosophical axiom as the criterion? We should then violate the autonomy of the religious consciousness; we should denaturalise religion itself, by subjecting it to an external rule; and Dogmatics, basing its fabric on an alien principle, would produce a hybrid structure that would be rejected by believers and philosophers with equal disdain.

The principle of criticism of Christian dogmas can only be the principle of Christianity itself, which is anterior to all dogmas, and which it is the aim of dogmas to manifest and to apply. Now the principle of Christianity is not a theoretical doctrine: it is a religious experience—the experience of Christ and His disciples through the centuries. It is the Gospel of salvation by the faith of the heart, the revelation of a moral relation, of a new relation, of a filial relation, created and realised between the man who is sinful and lost, and the Father who calls and pardons him. Such is the initial germ from which the whole Christian development has sprung, and by which consequently that development should and can be judged.

This generative principle of the life and of all the dogmas of the Church being laid down, and the distinction established between the ideal principle and its successive realisations, all of them necessarily incomplete, the criticism of dogmas will be effected automatically, without violence, and with fruit. It will be enough to tell the story of the genesis and evolution of each of them. It will then be seen what contingent and perishing elements have entered into it in the course of history. Christianity is an organism whose soul is immortal, but whose body is renewed unceasingly by the fact that its materials are in constant movement, and that they are gathered from the various environments through which it has to pass. The philosophical notions which have served it as a temporary expression, and which are doubly dead to-day, either because civilisation has advanced, or because they were without vital connection with the initial Christian experience, fall from the tree like withered leaves or lifeless branches. As to the others, in which the sap still rises from the mother root, they will be seen to be transformed, to grow and flower from year to year under the same salubrious breath of criticism. Our discipline, religiously faithful to the principle of Christian piety, may often find itself in conflict with the administrative powers of the Church, but never really with the Church itself.

3. The Science of Dogmas and Philosophy