Third Meditation.
Christianity And Science.
It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration, and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are possessed. … They do not speak so by art, but by divine power." [Footnote 18]
[Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
[Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally, which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance. (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]
The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it positively. [Footnote 19]
[Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration," says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to the different texts of the New Testament which prove his assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]
This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an acceptation as in later times. In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets, strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of inspiration, and to explain one by the other—"It is not by any effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin, "that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them; pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras, "that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute the breath which makes it discourse its music."
Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired, great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God. Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. … When we meet with such diversity of expressions—although not in themselves contradictory—used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the words of each, only the intent with which the words are pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."
It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.