To Blondel, Laberthonnière, and Le Roy can be added the names of Fonsegrive, Sertillanges, Loyson and Houtin, the last two of whom ultimately left the Church, for the Church made up its mind to crush Modernism. The Pope had intimated in 1879 that the thirteenth-century philosophy of Aquinas was to be recognised as the only official philosophy.[[36]] Finally, Modernism was condemned in a Vatican encyclical (Pascendi Dominici Gregis) in 1907, as was also the social and educational effort, Le Sillon.
[36] This led to revival of the study of the Summa Theologiæ and to the commencement of the review of Catholic philosophy, Revue Thomiste.
Such has been Rome’s last word, and it is not surprising, therefore, that France is the most ardent home of free thought upon religious matters, that the French people display a spirit which is unable to stop at Protestantism, but which heralds the religion or the non-religion of the future to which Guyau has so powerfully indicated the tendencies and has by so doing helped, in conjunction with Renan and Renouvier, to hasten its realisation.
A parallel to the “modernist” theology of the Catholic thinkers was indicated on the Protestant side by the theology of Auguste Sabatier, whose Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion d’après la Psychologie et l’Histoire appeared in 1897[[37]] and of Menegoz,[[38]] whose Publications diverges sur le Fidéisme et son Application a l’Enseignement chrétien traditionnel were issued in 1900. Sabatier assigns the beginning of religion to man’s trouble and distress of heart caused by his aspirations, his belief in ideals and higher values, being at variance with his actual condition. Religion arises from this conflict of real and ideal in the soul of man. This is the essence of religion which finds its expression in the life of faith rather than in the formation of beliefs which are themselves accidental and transitory, arising from environment and education, changing in form from aee to age both in the individual and the race. While LeRoy on the Catholic side, maintained that dogmas were valuable for their practical significance, Sabatier and Ménégoz claimed that all religious knowledge is symbolical. Dogmas are but symbols, which inadequately attempt to reveal their object. That object can only be grasped by “faith” as distinct from “belief”—that is to say, by an attitude in which passion, instinct and intuition blend and not by an attitude which is purely one of intellectual conviction. This doctrine of “salvation by faith independently of beliefs” has a marked relationship not only to pragmatism and the philosophy of action, but to the philosophy of intuition. A similar anti-intellectualism colours the “symbolo-fidéist” currents within Catholicism, which manifest a more extreme character. A plea voiced against all such tendencies is to be found in Bois’ book, De la Connaissance religieuse (1894), where an endeavour is made to retain a more intellectual attitude, and it again found expression in the volume by Boutroux, written as late as 1908, which deals with the religious problem in our period.
[37] It was followed after his death in 1901 by the volume Les Religions d’Authorité et la Religion de l’Esprit, 1904.
[38] This is the late Eugene Ménégoz, Professor of Theology in Paris, not Ferdinand Ménégoz, his nephew, who is also a Professor of Theology now at Strasbourg.
Quoting Boehme in the interesting conclusion to this book on Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (1908) Boutroux sums up in the words of the old German mystic his attitude to the diversity of religious opinions. “Consider the birds in our forests, they praise God each in his own way, in diverse tones and fashions. Think you God is vexed by this diversity and desires to silence discordant voices? All the forms of being are dear to the infinite Being himself!”[[39]]
[39] It is interesting to compare with the above the sentiments expressed in Matthew Arnold’s poem, entitled Progress:
“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
For ever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look’d on no religion scornfully
That men did ever find.
This survey of the general attitude adopted towards religion and the problems which it presents only serves to emphasise more clearly those tendencies which we have already denoted in previous chapters. As the discussion of progress was radically altered by the admission of the principle of freedom, and the discussion of ethics passes bevond rigid formulae to a freer conception of morality, so here in religion the insistence upon freedom and that recognition of personality which accompanies it, colours the whole religious outlook. Renan, Renouvier and Guyau, the three thinkers who have most fully discussed religion in our period, join in proclaiming the importance of the personal factor in religious belief, and in valiant opposition to that Church which is the declared enemy of freedom, they urge that in freedom of thought lies the course of all religious development in the future, for only thus can be expressed the noblest and highest aspirations of man’s spirit.