History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic, dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside will ever find the slightest interest in having proved.

If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression. There need never have been any warfare between theology and science. Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a scrupulous ignoring of her.

In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand, to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels. Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic. On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma. Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence.

The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong. Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light.

Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others. The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political, sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true” or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his.

All this seemed to me implicit in the Apologia. But if the use Newman made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution. When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal.

Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved. If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious sect.

Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic. For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy. Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth” that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And dogma is poetry.

To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude, has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to “believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so. Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative, questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern, rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection. They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the growing end we wish to achieve.

Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it. As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion, whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart. Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future. He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in his own Apologia an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief.