The Catholic World, Vol. 05, April 1867 to September 1867

by Various

The writer in the Cincinnati Inquirer seems to agree with him. A certain Protestant minister, an Anglican, we presume, had said in a sermon, that "the church's greatest enemies are now Catholicism and rationalism." The writer, in commenting on this proposition, says: "Catholicism is the theology of authority; rationalism, the theology of reason;" and "Protestantism is Catholicism with a dash of rationalism, or rationalism with a dash of Catholicism." Both represent Catholicity and reason as standing opposed each to the other, as two opposite poles, and each makes as does the age no account of the via media church receiving the shots of both reason and authority, and discharging its double battery in return against each.

Now, is it not time that thinking men, and authors who claim intelligence and mean to be just, should stop this contrasting of Rome or authority and reason? The cant has become threadbare, and men of reputation and taste should lay it aside as no longer fit for use. It does not by any means state the fact as it is, for there is not the least discrepancy between the church and reason, nor is there, in accepting and believing the revealed word of God on the authority of the church proposing it, the least surrender of reason or nature. The Catholic has all of reason that belongs to human nature, and full opportunity to exercise it; and his soul is as free as the soul can be, and he is, in fact, the only man that has really a free soul. If God is in his masters, he is also in him. He has no less internal light because he has external light, and no less internal freedom because he has external authority. The Professor is quite mistaken in presenting the church and reason as two opposite poles. Nay, his illustration is not happy, for the two poles, if we speak geographically, belong to one and the same globe, and are equally essential to its form and completeness, and, if we speak magnetically, and mean positive and negative poles, they are only the two modes in which one and the same substance or force operates, and certainly in Catholic faith both authority and reason are alike active, and mutually concur in producing one and the same result.

It is only when we borrow our views of Catholicity from the theology of the Reformation, or suppose that it is substantially the same, that the authority of the church can be regarded as opposed to reason or repugnant to nature. He who has read the fathers has discovered in them no abdication of reason or want of intellectual freedom; and he who is familiar with the mediaeval doctors knows that no men can use reason more freely or push it further than they did. Melchior Cano, a theologian of the sixteenth century, in his Locis Theologicis, a work of great authority with Catholics, enumerates natural reason as one of the common-places of theology, whence arguments may be drawn to prove what is or is not of faith. A school of philosophers have latterly sprung up among Catholics, called traditionalists, who would seem to deny reason and to found science on faith; but they have fallen under censure of the Holy See, and been required to recognize that reason precedes faith, and that faith comes as the complement of science, not as preceding or superseding it. By far the larger part of the errors condemned in the syllabus of errors attached to the Encyclical of the Holy Father, dated at Rome, 8th of December, 1864, are errors that tend to destroy reason and society. The church has always been vigilant in vindicating natural reason and the natural law.

But the Reformation was a complete protest against reason and nature, and the assertion of extreme and exclusive supernaturalism. In Luther's estimation reason was a stupid ass. The reformers all agreed in asserting the total depravity of human nature, and in maintaining the complete moral inability of man. According to the reformed doctrines, man never actively concurs with grace, but in faith and justification is wholly impotent and passive. Man can think only evil, and the works he does prior to regeneration, however honest or benevolent, are not simply imperfect, but positively sins. This was the reformed theology which the writer of this article had in his boyhood and youth dinged into him till he well-nigh lost his reason. The church has never tolerated any such theology, and they who place her and reason in opposition are really, whether they know it or not, charging her with the errors of Protestantism, which she has never ceased, in the most public, formal, and solemn manner, to condemn. There are, no doubt, large numbers included under the general name of Protestants, who imagine that the Reformation was a great movement in behalf of intelligence against ignorance, of reason against authority, mental freedom against mental bondage, of rational religion against bigotry and superstition; but whoever has studied the history of that great movement knows that it was no such thing—the furthest from it possible. It was a retrograde movement, and designed in its very essence to arrest the intellectual and theological progress of the race. Its avowed purpose was the restoration of primitive Christianity, which, whatever plausible terms might be adopted, meant, and could mean only, to set the race back some fifteen hundred years in its march through the ages, and to eliminate from Christendom all that Christianity for fifteen centuries had effected for civilization. The Protestant party, was by its own avowal, the party of the past, and, if there are Protestants who are striving to be the party of the future, they succeed only by leaving their Protestantism behind, or by transforming it.

The church has always been on the side of freedom and progress, and the normal current of humanity has flowed and never ceased to flow from the foot of the cross down through her communion; and whatever life-giving water has flowed into Protestant cisterns, it has been from the overflowings of that current, always full. You who are outside of it, save in the application of the truths of science to the material arts, have effected no progress. You have worked hard, have been often on the point of some grand discovery, but only on the point of making it, and are as far from the goal as you were when Luther burnt the papal bull, or suffered the devil to convince him of the sin of saying private masses. You have always found your works after a little while needing to be recast, and that your systems are giving way. You have been constantly doing and undoing, and never succeeding. Save in the physical sciences and some achievements in the material world, you are far below what you were when you started. Of course, you do not believe it, because you confound change with progress, and you count getting rid of your patrimony increasing it. It is idle to tell you this, for you have already fallen so low that you place the material above the spiritual, and the knowledge of the uses of of steam above the knowledge and love God.

Rome or reason, Rome or liberty, is not the true formula of the tendencies of the age; nor is it Catholicism or rationalism, but Catholicity or naturalism. The extremes opposed to Catholicity are, on the one hand, exclusive supernaturalism, or a supernaturalism that condemns and excludes the activity of nature, and, on the other, exclusive naturalism, or a naturalism that denies and excludes all communion between God and man, save through natural laws, or laws impressed on nature by its Creator, and held to bind both him and it. Your evangelicals are exclusive supernaturalists, as were the great body of the Protestant reformers; Auguste Comte, J. Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Mr. Parkman, and the Professor are exclusive naturalists, who deny the reality of all facts or phenomena not explicable by natural laws or natural causes. All the sciences, since Bacon, are constructed on naturalistic principles, and theology, philosophy, or metaphysics, which cannot be constructed without the recognition of the supernatural, are rejected by our savans as vain speculations or idle theories without any basis in reality. They belong to the age of ignorance and superstition, and will never be recognized in an age of light and science. As the church clings to them, insists upon them, she is behind the age, and they who adhere to her are to be tolerated and pitied as we tolerate and pity idiots and the insane, unless, indeed, they are clothed with more or less power; then, indeed, we must make war on them and exterminate them.

Few who have studied this age with any care will question the fidelity of this picture. The active living mind of this age unquestionably tends either to this exclusive naturalism or to the Catholic Church, which is the synthesis of the natural and the supernatural, of authority and freedom, reason and faith, science and revelation. Protestantism, which is exclusive supernaturalism, it is becoming pretty well understood, cannot be sustained. It cannot be sustained by reason, for it rejects reason; it cannot be sustained by authority, for in rejecting the church it has cast off all authority, but that of the state, which has no competency in spirituals. It has supported its dogmas, as far as it has supported them at all, on Catholic tradition, the validity of which it denies. This cannot last, for, where people are free to think and have the courage to reason without let or hinderance from the state, they will not long consent to affirm and deny tradition in one and the same breath. They will either fall into the naturalistic ranks or be absorbed by the Catholic Church, and it is useless to trouble ourselves with them as Protestants.

The naturalists or rationalists, by far the most numerous, and in most Protestant or non-Catholic states already the governing body, are repelled from the church by their supposition that all the substantial difference between her and Jansenists or Calvinists is, that in the one case super-naturalism is taught and explained by a living authority, claiming a divine commission, and in the other it is not taught at all, but collected by grammar and lexicon from a book said to have been written by divine inspiration. The Catholic theory is the more logical and more attractive of the two, but both alike discard reason, and insist on the submission of the understanding to an external authority, and it matters little whether the authority is that of the church or of a book written many ages ago. In either case the faith is proposed on authority, which assumes to command the reason and to deprive the soul of her natural freedom. I am forbidden to think and follow my own convictions, and must, on pain of everlasting perdition, believe what others bid me, whether it accords with my own reason or not. This, we take it, is the view entertained by the worthy Professor, and the writer of this many years ago preached it, and counted the Professor himself among his hearers, if not among his disciples. Now, we need not, after the explanation we have given, say that this view is altogether wrong. The Protestant asserts the supernatural in a sense that excludes or supersedes nature, and, therefore, natural reason; the Catholic adopts as his maxim, Gratia supponit naturam, and asserts the supernatural as the complement of the natural, or as healing, strengthening, and elevating it to the plane of the supernatural, or a destiny far superior to any possible natural beatitude. This is in the outset a very important difference, for, if grace supposes nature, the supernatural the natural, the authority on which we are required to believe the supernatural may aid, may strengthen, or illumine natural reason, but cannot supersede it or deprive it of any of its natural activity and freedom. The supernatural adds to the natural, according to Catholic faith, but takes nothing from it. The prejudice excited by Protestantism against the supernatural cannot bear against it as asserted by Catholicity.

But we would remind our naturalistic friends that nature does not suffice for itself. It is impossible by nature alone to explain the origin or existence of nature. The ancients tried to do it, but they failed. Some attempted to do it by the fortuitous combination of eternally existing atoms, others made the universe originate in fire, in water, in air or earth, as some moderns try to develop it from a primitive rock or gas, or suppose it originally existed in a liquid or a gaseous state, whence it has grown into its present form. But whence the primitive rock or the gas? whence the fire, water, air, or earth? whence the original germ? Naturalism has no answer. We have a natural tendency, strong in proportion to the strength and activity of our reason, to seek the origin, the principles, the causes of things, but this tendency nature can not satisfy, because nature has not her origin, principle, or cause in herself. For this reason Mr. Herbert Spencer relegates origin and end, principles and causes, and whatever pertains to them to the region of the unknowable, and maintains that we can know only phenomena, and therefore that science consists simply in observing, collecting, and classifying phenomena, not in the explication of phenomena by reducing them to their principle and referring them to their cause or causes.