We can know phenomena, but not noumena, is asserted by the reigning doctrine among physicists, which is as complete a denial of reason as can be found in any of the reformers. It reduces our intelligence to a level with that of the brutes that perish, for what distinguishes our intelligence from theirs is precisely reason, which is the faculty of attaining to principles or causes—first causes and final causes—both in the intellectual and the moral order, while brutes have intelligence only of phenomena. Hence, philosophers, who define things per genus et per differentiam, define man a rational animal, or animal plus reason. To our physicists, like the Lyells and the Huxleys, or to such philosophers as Mr. Stuart Mill, who knows not whether he is Mr. Stuart Mill or somebody else, whether he is something or nothing, this amounts to very little; for they, the physicists, we mean, are specially engaged in collecting facts to prove that man is only a developed chimpanzee or gorilla, and that the human intelligence differs only in degree from the brutish. But, then, what right have they to complain that belief in the supernatural tends to degrade human nature, to deprive reason of its dignity, and man of his glory? Moreover, this restriction of our power of knowing to simple phenomena, never satisfies reason, which would know not only phenomena, but noumena, and not only noumena, but principles, causes, the principle of principles and the cause of causes, the origin and end of all things, that is, God, and God as he is in himself. You cannot, except by brutalizing men to the last degree, suppress this interior craving of reason to penetrate all mysteries, to explore all secrets, and to know all things, nor can you by reason alone appease it. Do you propose to suppress nature, extinguish reason, and call it promoting science, vindicating the dignity of man?
Reason can never be made to believe that all reality is confined to what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls the knowable, and we the intelligible. There is nothing of which reason is better or more firmly persuaded than that there is more reality than she herself knows or can know. Reason asserts her own limitations, and will never allow that she can know no more because there is nothing more to be known. The intelligible does not satisfy her, because in the intelligible alone she cannot find the explication of the intelligible, or, in other words, she cannot understand the intelligible without the superintelligible; for, though she cannot without divine revelation grasp the superintelligible, she can know this much, that the superintelligible is, and that in it the intelligible has its root, its origin, cause, and explication. Here is a grave difficulty that every exclusive rationalist encounters, and which is and can be removed only by faith. Nature, reason; science alone never suffices for itself, as all our savans know, for where their knowledge ends they invent hypotheses. It is not that reason is a false or deceptive light, but that it is limited, and we have not the attribute of omniscience any more than we have that of omnipotence.
So is it with our craving for beatitude. Whether God could or could not have so constituted man, without changing his nature as man, that he could rest in a natural beatitude, that is, in a finite good, we shall not attempt to decide; but this much we may safely assert, as the united testimony of the sages and moralists of all ages and nations, and confirmed by every one's own experience, that nothing finite, and whatever is natural is finite, can satisfy man's innate desire for beatitude. "Man," says Dr. Channing, "thirsts for an unbounded good." The sum of all experience on the subject is given us by the wise king of Israel, "Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas—Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The eye is not satisfied with seeing, the ear with hearing, nor the heart with knowing. We turn away with loathing from the finite good as soon as possessed, and which the moment before possession we felt would, if we had it, make us happy. The soul spurns it, and cries out from the depths of her agony for something that can fill up the void within her, and complete her happiness by completing her being. We need not multiply words, for the fact is old, and all the world knows it. Nature cannot satisfy nature, and the soul looks, and must look beyond it, for her beatitude. So much is certain.
Hence it is that men in all ages and nations have never been able to satisfy either their reason or their craving for happiness with nature alone, and have, in some form, recognized a supernatural order, or a reality of some sort above and beyond nature, whence comes nature herself. Neither atheism, or the resolution of God into natural laws or forces, nor pantheism, or the absorption of natural laws or forces into the Divine Being itself, has ever been able to satisfy the man of a real philosophic or scientific genius, because either is sophistical and self-contradictory. Either is repugnant to the natural logic of the human understanding or the inherent laws of thought. Even such naturalists as Agassiz and our Dr. Draper find it necessary to recognize in some sense a Supreme Being or God, although, for the most part, like the old Epicureans, they leave him idle, with little or nothing to do. But God, if he exists at all, must be supernatural, and the author of nature. If God is supernatural and the creator of nature, he must have created nature for himself, and then nature must have its origin and end in him, and therefore in the supernatural. Man, then, has neither his origin nor end in the natural, and neither without the supernatural is explicable or knowable; without a knowledge of our origin and end, or an answer to the questions, whence came we? why are we, and how? and whither go we? we can have no rule of life, cannot determine the positive or the relative value of any line of conduct, and must commit ourselves to the mercy of the winds and waves of an unknown sea, without pilot, chart, rudder, or compass.
Nor is even this enough. Not only is the natural inexplicable without the supernatural, but even the intelligible, too, is not intelligible without the superintelligible, as we have already said. We know things, indeed, not mere phenomena, but we do not know the essences of things, and yet we know that there is and can be nothing without its essence, and that the ground and root of what is intelligible in a thing is in its unknown and superintelligible essence. So in the universe throughout. God, as creator, as universal, eternal, necessary, immutable, and self-existent being, is intelligible to us, and the light by which all that is intelligible to us is intelligible; but we know that what is intelligible to us is not God in his essence, and that what in him is intelligible to us has its source, its reality, so to speak, in this very superintelligible essence. Hence it follows that to real science of anything we need to know the supernatural, and by faith, or analogical science, at least, the superintelligible. We cannot satisfy nature without the science and possession of the essences or substances of things, and therefore not without faith, "for faith is the substance of things to be hoped for," the evidence of things not seen. Fides est rerum substantia sperandarum, argumentum non apparentium, according to St. Paul, who, even they who deny his inspiration, must yet admit was the profoundest philosopher that ever wrote. We think he was so because divinely inspired, but the fact that he was so no competent judge can dispute. St. Augustine owes his immense superiority over Plato and Aristotle chiefly to his assiduous study of the epistles of St. Paul, which throw so strong a light not only on the whole volume of Scripture, but on the whole order of creation, and the divine purpose in the creation and the redemption, regeneration, justification, and glorification of man through the incarnation of the Word, and the cross and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But as we can know even by faith the superintelligible, the unknowable of Mr. Herbert Spencer, which even he dares not assert is unreal or non-existent, only by divine or supernatural revelation, it follows, that without such revelation, no science satisfactory to natural reason herself is possible. There is, then, and can be no antagonism between revelation and science, faith and reason, or supernatural and natural. The two are but parts of one whole, each the complement of the other. This dialectic relation of the two terms asserted by Catholic theology is denied by Protestant theology either to the exclusion of nature and reason, or to the exclusion of both the supernatural and the superintelligible, and hence the dualism which rends in twain the whole non-Catholic world, and presents revelation and science, reason and faith, authority and liberty, natural and supernatural, church and state, heaven and earth, time and eternity, God and man, as mutually hostile terms, forever irreconcilable. The non-Catholic world does not know or it forgets that the church presents the middle term that unites and reconciles them, and that the Catholic feels nothing of this interior struggle of two mutually destructive forces which rends the hearts and souls of the wisest of non-Catholics, not because he does not think or has abdicated reason, as the Professor imagines, but precisely because he does think, and thinks according to the truth and reality of things. He has unquestionably his struggles between the flesh and the spirit, between virtue and vice, between temptations to sin and inspirations to holiness, but presents in his life none of those fearful internal tragedies so frequently enacted among serious and earnest non-Catholics, and which make up so large and so distressing a portion of the higher and more truthful portion of non-Catholic literature. Non-Catholic poetry, when not a song to Venus or Bacchus, is either a fanciful description of external nature, scenes, and events, or a low wail or a loud lament over the internal tragedies caused by the struggle between faith and reason, belief and doubt, hope and despair, or vainly to penetrate the mysteries of life and death, God and the universe. Catholic poetry, Catholic literature throughout, knows nothing of those tragedies, is peaceful and serene, and is therefore less interesting to those who are not Catholics. We have (we speak personally) had some experience of those interior struggles, and many a tragedy has been enacted in our own soul, but it is with difficulty we can recall them; in the peace and serenity of Catholic faith and hope they have almost faded from the memory, and yet the period of our life since we became a Catholic has been with us the period of our freest and most active and energetic thought. If we have worn chains, we have not been conscious of them, and they certainly cannot have been very heavy, or have eaten very deeply into the flesh. The reason of it is that we find in Catholic faith and theology the two elements which in the non-Catholic world are in perpetual war with each other, perfectly reconciled, and mutually harmonized.
The peace the Catholic finds is not the sort of peace that was said to reign in Warsaw. The Professor is greatly mistaken if he supposes it is obtained by the suppression of reason, or that reason is forgotten in the engrossing nature or artistic perfection of the external services of the church. The offices of the church are beautiful, grand, and, if you will, imposing, but they are all provocative of thought, meditation, reflection, for they all symbolize the greatest of all mysteries—God dying for the creature's sin, God become man, that man may become God. Take away this great mystery, and the offices of the church become meaningless, purposeless, powerless. Without faith in that mystery to which they all refer, and which they at every instant recall, they would be no more imposing than the pomp and music of a military review or a concert in Central Park. From first to last they challenge our faith, and, if there were any discrepancy between our faith and reason, they would in a thoughtful mind bring it up in distinct consciousness, instead of suppressing or making us forget it. A Lord John Russell could call the sublime services of the church "mummery," and such do the mass of Protestants regard them. To the profane all things are profane, and the offices of the church are really edifying only to those who believe the mystery of the Incarnation. Unbelievers who are not scoffers may admire their poetry and the music which accompanies them, but would admire equal poetry and music in the theatre just as much, and perhaps even more.
No; the peace of the Catholic is a real peace. Neither faith nor reason, revelation nor science, authority nor liberty is suppressed; but all real antagonism between them is removed, and they are seen and felt to be but congruous parts of one dialectic whole. Peace reigns because the mutually hostile parties are really reconciled, and made one. The Professor, no doubt, will smile at our assertion, and set it down to our simplicity or enthusiasm, but we have this advantage of him, that we know both sides, and taught or might have taught him more than thirty years ago the philosophy he brings out so racily at the breakfast table.
Our nature was constructed by the supernatural for the supernatural, and it can no more live its normal life without a supernatural medium than it could have sprung into existence without a cause above and independent of itself. Regeneration is, therefore, as necessary to enable it to attain its destiny or beatitude as generation was to usher it into natural existence. Hence it is that, when men cast off in their belief and affections the supernatural, and live as natural men alone, they sink even below their normal nature, and lose even their natural light and strength, live only a life which the Scriptures call death, the death which Adam underwent in consequence of his disobedience to the divine order. When men undertake by their simple natural reason to construct a system of philosophy, they construct systems which natural reason herself rejects. Reason disdains her own work, and hence pure rationalists never construct anything that will stand, and they build up systems only to be demolished by themselves or successors. Of the systems in vogue in our youth not one is now standing, and we have seen them replaced by two or three new generations of systems that have each in turn gone the way of all the earth; and, unless we speedily follow them, we may be called to write the epitaphs of those now revelling in the heyday of their young life. The thing is inevitable, because our nature was made to act in synthesis with the supernatural, and is only partially itself when compelled to operate by itself alone.