First, he is ignorant of the fact that he and they are working not on common sense accepted by all men, but on a highly particular philosophical theory (called once the Epicurean, but to-day the Materialist, Theory) which may be accepted or denied, but which can no more be taken for granted as universally admitted than can the Catholic Faith itself. He thinks he is only dealing with ascertained fact, whereas he is really acting on a religion; and as that religion is false, it compels him to force facts to fit it. This is the very mark of the provincial mind. It mistakes its local superstition for the very nature of things. It is from this inability to define their own first principles, from this conception that they are dealing with ascertained physical truth alone, that people of this kind are at once debarred from understanding their superiors and from reasoning clearly upon their own postulates.
Secondly, he is ignorant of the Catholic philosophy which he instinctively opposes. He does not know what it is that he is combating, nor what a crushing advantage of scope and examination it has over the insufficient and parochial experience lying behind his own work. He approaches the Catholic Church as a man who has only done a little suburban gardening might approach a fifty-acre field—with a spade.
All this comes out most clearly at the very opening of his discussion of human origins on pages 37 and 38. He there exposes in one paragraph all that ignorance to which I allude. He says with rather ponderous sarcasm that the Catholic Church is no more committed to a denial of the now widely accepted view of man’s origin “than it is to a doctrine of a flat earth, or of a stationary earth round which the sun revolves”; but adds that though the Church is apparently not committed to any particular view in such matters (he has grasped that much), yet “many believers dissent from the scientific opinion because they feel it is more seemly to suppose that man has fallen rather than risen” (my italics).
In that one sentence on Original Sin you have the whole of the writer’s ignorance upon the matter (and upon the very terms used in its discussion) exposed. It is as though some foreigner were to say of English constitutional practice: “The English legal system is not committed to the denial of historical evidence on the vices of James the First, but many individual lawyers believe that the King can do no wrong—because they think it more seemly.”
Why did he not look up the point in any book of reference? It is astonishing to me that, with his active mind and interest in his contemporaries, and his reliance upon books of reference, he has not done so.
The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin has nothing to do with the stages of man’s material culture. The fact that man now in Europe uses iron in places where he once used stone for his implements, has no possible connection with the doctrine of Original Sin. The traces of beings not men but, as are apes, man-like, exceptionally discovered, and belonging presumably to a remote past, can no more affect the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin than Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation being due to a micro-organism affects the truth that men can and do get drunk.
The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is this. That man, our known human nature as true men, was created by God to be supernatural, that is, enjoying beatitude; but fell, through the rebellion of his will, into a natural state. This, and this alone, says the Catholic Faith, explains man’s dual destiny, his sense of exile, the lack of correspondence between his ideal and his practice. It is not “many individuals” in the Catholic Church who affirm this great and luminous doctrine because it is “more seemly.” It is all Catholics who affirm it, and they do so because, whether pleasant or unpleasant, it is true.
We affirm the Fall: First on the authority of the Catholic Church itself, which we have discovered from experience to be the only teaching body whose voice and nature correspond with reality; answering justly the queries and fulfilling the needs and ends of man. Secondly, because this truth, like all other truths which we receive from that same Authority, we discover to be but one in a consistent scheme of many co-ordinated doctrines, which scheme alone explains the world, and is consonant with the nature of the individual and with the nature of society: with the nature of man himself as he discovers it to be when he examines the recesses of his own being and with the nature of man in corporate action. Nor has the firm hold which the high Catholic intelligence maintains upon this essential and reasonable dogma of the Fall any conceivable link with the denial or the acceptation of some piece of physical evidence. It does not depend upon the existence of the Garden of Eden somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, nor upon the date 4004 B.C.
The truth is that Mr. Wells, in some confused way, regards the Catholic Church as a sect; an extreme right wing of the various Protestant sects, with which he is fully acquainted, from which he himself derives, and whose ethics and general attitude towards life are part of his being. For he goes on to tell us “that no considerable Christian body now (my italics) insists upon the exact and literal acceptance of the Bible narrative.” He does not know—so ignorant is he of history—that this attitude towards the Bible came very late—in the seventeenth century—and was during its brief career highly local. He does not know that this conception of the Old Testament as an exact text book of history and science, not a word of which must be taken as allegory or generalization, was mainly confined to England and her colonies. The Catholic Church never held it or could of its nature hold it.
I wonder what effect it would have upon him to read a few passages from, say, Origen, on the allegorical interpretation of Genesis, or from St. Augustine? He need not do more than that. He need not waste energy in a long examination of the Christian past. It would be quite enough for him to consult a couple of passages, or, indeed, for any competent historian to inform him that the only body of people who ever dreamt of taking Genesis as a literal and sufficient guide to all the details of history and physical science were the members of a small and local Puritan sect (now rapidly disappearing) of which he is himself a product and which held this amazing view of the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew scripture into archaic English. These people loom so large in Mr. Wells’s personal experience as to obscure all else; but I can assure him that they count for next to nothing in the general culture of Europe.