If the doctrine contained in the creeds is regarded in itself, prescinding from its verbal expression, the case is much worse for Dr. Ewer’s theory. The Arian heretics were numerous and powerful, and they were able to persecute the Catholics and lay waste the church in a fearful manner. They were nevertheless Catholics, according to Dr. Ewer’s definition. They professed to have the genuine, apostolical, and primitive faith, and accused the Catholics of having altered and corrupted it. They recognized the visible church, the apostolic succession, the hierarchical order, the sacrifice and sacraments instituted by Christ, and continued the outward show and appearance of conformity to established Catholic usage, and even to the language of the Fathers respecting the mysteries of faith. They were intruded into the possession of the titles, churches, and other temporalities of many of the most important episcopal sees, and sustained in their usurpation by the civil power.
After the extermination of the Arian heresy came the Nestorians. They also professed to be orthodox and Catholic, anathematized the Arians and all the previous heretics, confessed the Nicene Creed, and, when they were condemned and cut off from the church, so far from ceasing to exist, they increased and flourished in a remarkable way for centuries, and still remain as a separate organization with their bishops, who have succeeded in an unbroken line from those of the fifth century.
The Eutychians or Monophysites received the decrees of the councils of Nice and Ephesus, anathematized the Nestorians, and denounced the Catholics as Nestorian heretics. After the Council of Chalcedon, which condemned them, they persisted in maintaining their position as being the genuine Catholics, and formed a new sect, which still subsists in Egypt and the East. A century after the Council of Chalcedon, out of six millions of Christians in the patriarchate of Alexandria, there were only three hundred thousand Catholics, and in Asia Minor the divisions and dissensions caused by the Monophysite and Nestorian heresies were so great that the peace and stability of the Eastern empire were seriously compromised. This was the occasion of an effort at reconciliation made by the Emperor Heraclius, in concert with Sergius of Constantinople and Cyrus of Alexandria, which brought in a new heresy, the Monothelite, with new disorders, new persecutions, and another violent struggle for life on the part of the Catholic faith, that resulted after fifty years in a sixth œcumenical council, where the Monothelite heresy was condemned. What reason has Dr. Ewer for excluding these heretical Eastern sects from his comprehensive Catholic Church? They have always received the creeds of Nice and Constantinople. They hold fewer heresies than those which are admitted by the Church of England, and, apart from their special heretical tenets, are in close conformity of doctrine and order with the Greek Church. They always protested that they held the primitive, Catholic faith, and that they were unjustly condemned because they resisted the effort to impose new dogmas and additions to the creed as terms of Catholic communion. The history of the whole period of the first six councils completely falsifies and nullifies Dr. Ewer’s theory, and shows his fanciful chant in unison to be as mythical a song as was ever sung in the brain of a woman with a bee in her bonnet. It has a very nice sound to appeal to the first six councils. Even the Presbyterian General Assembly could vindicate their orthodoxy before Pius IX. by loudly proclaiming their assent to all the dogmatic definitions of the first six councils. But what do the majority of men know about these councils? The same objections which Anglicans make against the seventh, and Greeks and Anglicans alike make against the councils of Lyons, Florence, Trent, and the Vatican, are of equal force against those of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. The number of bishops present in each of them varied from one hundred and fifty to six hundred and thirty, out of a whole number of prelates certainly much larger even in the beginning of the fourth century, and estimated by the emperors themselves, who must have had better means of information than any others at the time, as having increased in the fifth century to a total of five or six thousand. The church went on very well for three centuries without any œcumenical councils. When the necessity arose, each council was sufficient for the present emergency, but not sufficient for the new ones which arose and demanded new councils and new decisions, of equal authority with the preceding. Each one has met the violent opposition of the rebellious, the schismatical, and the heretical appellants from the present, actual authority of the church to some ideal tribunal of their own imagination, in the past or in the future, which they can call what they choose, the Catholic Church or the Word of God. Their word of God is their own private interpretation of Scripture, or of Scripture and tradition together; their Catholic Church is themselves and their particular party, pretending to speak in the name of the church and to be her interpreters. The whole is worth as much as the œcumenical council forged by Photius, acts, decrees, signatures, and all, and promulgated at large among the Eastern bishops, in support of his usurpation of the see of Constantinople. The council of Photius was Photius himself, and the Catholic Church of Dr. Ewer is Dr. Ewer and the other members of his party. There is no really existing and speaking society which says: “I am the church, composed of three parts, Roman, Greek, and Anglican.” This is the language of certain individuals put into the mouth of an imaginary society. The principle of individualism, which is the first principle of schism and heresy, is just as really at the bottom of Dr. Ewer’s theory as it is at the bottom of Chillingworth’s. It breeds the same discord and disunion, and leaves men exposed to the same inroad of scepticism. Controversies concerning what the church is, what her authority and infallibility are, which are the true councils, which is the true Catholic communion, who are the lawful pastors to whom obedience is due, confuse and disturb the mind and conscience as much as controversies concerning the true sense of Scripture, the true doctrine of the Person of Christ, or the conditions of salvation in general. There must have been an external criterion, a rule of determination, by which the orthodox faith and Catholic communion could be discerned from Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, and Donatist counterfeits. That same rule must exist now; it must be an infallible test of every kind of spurious Christianity and spurious Catholicity. It is necessary that this rule, if it be really sufficient, should determine not only between Caiphas or Mohammed and Christ, between apocryphal and genuine Scriptures, between Arius and Athanasius, Macedonius and Basil, Nestorius and Cyril, Dioscorus and Leo, Pyrrhus and Maximus, but also between Calvin and Bellarmine, Elizabeth and Pius V., Nicholas and Pius IX., Döllinger and Cardinal Manning, Dr. Ewer and Dr. Brownson. It must determine not only between church and no-church, Bible alone and Bible with apostolic tradition, priest and preacher, but between bishop and bishop, the usurpation and the just right of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the pretence and the reality of infallible authority, the minimum and the maximum of doctrine which must be accepted as pertaining to Catholic faith. These are not non-essential matters or questions of debate between theological schools. They relate to obligations of conscience in which the salvation of the soul is involved, and are eminently practical. The Spanish prince Hermenegild had such a practical rule, and obeyed it by sacrificing his life rather than to receive communion from an Arian bishop. Marie Antoinette had the same, and died without the Viaticum rather than to receive it from a constitutional priest. An Anglican living in St. Petersburg, and in doubt whether he was bound to remain in his own sect, to join the Russian national church, or to become a Catholic, or was at liberty to choose between the three, would need the same rule. Who could decide the doubt for him? His own clergy? The Russian clergy? Catholic priests? The judgment of any of these, as private individuals, is not infallible. They can only help him to find some rule under which they are personally acting, and which proceeds from an authority superior to themselves. According to Dr. Ewer, neither of these authorities is supreme or infallible in itself; it is only in so far as they agree in transmitting the judgments of an authority in abeyance, that they can furnish an infallible rule. This is no rule which meets his case. They agree only in telling him that he must obey the rule recognized by the first six councils. Where is that voice of God which is audible to all men who will hear? Where is the embodied Christ who will take him by the hand? What has become of the chant in unison of the one, Catholic Church, musically uttering unalterable truth? Suppose that the Christians of the first seven centuries had been left without any better rule than this, what perplexity and unutterable confusion would have been the result—quite as bad if not worse than that which exists among our modern Protestant sects.
An extrinsic and infallible rule of faith must be one that in a self-evident manner manifests itself as really extrinsic to those who present it, and superior to their individual judgment, and it must be universal. The teacher and the judge must speak in the name of a really existing society which is actually one and universal, and in a manifest identity with itself in the past, by unbroken continuity of life and self-consciousness from the time of its origin in the divine institution of Christ. The instructor of the one who seeks the truth must teach him what the church thinks and commands, and give him a criterion of certainty that she does think and command what he ascribes to her, so that if he falsifies her teaching he will disclose and betray his own deception in the very act of deceiving, like one who hands over a package of money which had been entrusted to him with a letter containing a description of its contents. Such a rule of faith, with its criterion of certainty and of self-verification, without any doubt the Catholics of the first seven centuries possessed. Their living and immediate rule was a church really one and obviously one with itself in its present and in its past. It declared itself to have always held and meant just what it was now saying. The faithful believed and obeyed it, because its continuity and identity from St. Peter and the apostles were obvious by manifest signs and tokens which could not deceive them. Heretics and schismatics could not successfully mimic the voice of the true church. Their lack of continuity, i.e., apostolicity, of unity, of Catholicity, and of sanctity as well, was obvious. Their counterfeits were always put forth as the genuine coin of ancient stamp, but as coin which had been hidden or defaced until they had discovered it, or burnished it anew. The lawful issues of new coin from the old mint they denounced as counterfeit or adulterated. Their very pretence of returning to a kind of old Catholic doctrine more ancient and more Catholic than that of the present church, was a sure, detective test of their spuriousness. Continuity could not be in them, or universality, or unity; because their only claim to a hearing, and their only justification of their rebellion, implied that the church had not preserved these notes unimpaired. They were self-contradictory, and affirmed and denied the Catholic Church in the same breath. So likewise their successors. The so-called Greek Church is a contradiction to itself, in respect to its schismatical position, and a concrete absurdity. The Anglican sect is not on a par with the schismatical and heretical churches of the East in any way, and deserves no consideration in the treatment of the question of the actual extension of the Catholic Church. The theoretical church called Anglo-Catholic is an ens rationis. We give it only a hypothetical position in our discussion, as a possible society which might be organized in accordance with Dr. Ewer’s theory, if there were one real bishop to undertake the experiment. This hypothetical church is an hypothetical absurdity, as the Greek Church is a real one. The absurdity consists in the contradiction between the concrete and practical actuality of separate existence as a partial and incomplete church, and the confession of faith in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, having infallible authority in faith and morals. If the one church continues to exist as a complete, integral whole, there is no place for another partial and incomplete church, and any society which exists under that name is condemned by itself as an anomaly and a crime. If it does not exist, the church has failed. There being no whole, there can be no parts. There is no church at all of divine institution, no mystical body of Christ on earth. There are only human organizations, each of which is changeable and fallible. The profession of belief in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church is, therefore, a profession of belief in a falsehood. Mentita est iniquitas sibi.
In that part of his theory which is Catholic Dr. Ewer affirms as a necessary consequence from the nature of God as a God of love, together with the method which he has chosen for manifesting his love through the Incarnation, that the Catholic Church must be really existing: “that God has still remained, and will to the end of time remain, in a one, undying, ever-fresh, amazing, organic, visible, audible, tangible, and recognizable body of human matter, known as the mystical body of God on earth.” Once more he says: “As Jesus Christ was the only being who dared to call himself God, so Catholicity is the only Christian body that dares to call itself infallible; that dares to begin its discourses, to give its truth, to pronounce its judgments, and to pardon sin, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’” This is given as a token of the true church, the real possessor of infallible authority.
From this it follows that the church whose supreme ruler is the Roman Pontiff is the one, Catholic Church, complete and integral in itself, and in no sense a compart with the Greek and Anglican churches as other parts making up with it, as a composite totality, the Catholic Church. The members of this church are on the same footing with the Catholics of the earlier ages, and have the same rule. They recognize one church, distinct and separate from all others, as perfect and infallible, with its continuous series of œcumenical councils. This church, and this church alone, dares to assume the exclusive name and prerogatives of Catholicity, to proclaim itself infallible, and to command obedience to its decrees as the necessary condition of salvation. The Sovereign Pontiff of Rome, and he alone, dares to call himself the Vicar of Christ and the Head of his entire mystical body, the church. But that most illogical and inconsistent of men, Dr. Ewer, confronted by Pius IX. and the Œcumenical Council of the Vatican, and feeling himself and his pseudo-Catholicism smitten by their anathemas, suddenly drops his Catholic disguise, and, showing himself in his true character as a Protestant and a sceptic, cries out: “Let us examine.” We have no objection to an examination. For a Catholic, to examine the dogmatic decrees of an œcumenical council or of the pope in respect to matters of faith, with an examination of doubt and hesitancy, is ipso facto a renunciation of his rule of faith and an act of apostasy. For one who is in inculpable ignorance or doubt concerning the criterion of truth and the proximate rule of faith, to examine with sincerity and honesty of purpose is a duty as well as a right. Dr. Ewer puts himself and his auditors into this position, as seekers, inquirers, who are invited to “go back and start all over again—without a Bible, without a church, without sacraments, without any religious notions—and see where we shall come out.” An interesting exploration, assuredly! Dr. Ewer, and those who follow his guidance, come out, by a tolerably short path, to a logical position, which is the next one to a final term of the process. Nothing remains to be determined, except the subject of the attribute of infallibility, in its specific and individual being as really existing, and representing the sovereign authority of Christ on earth. Even this is determined in respect to the past existence of the body which is recognized as the one, true church, and was assembled in the first six councils. The one point to be examined is whether the body assembled in the Council of the Vatican is identical with the one, true church assembled at Nice, Chalcedon, and Constantinople, in œcumenical council. If it is, the examination is terminated; the infallible church is found really existing in the present, with the same specific and individuating notes by which it is identified as existing in the past. If not, the examination is equally terminated, for there is no other body even ostensibly similar to this one which remains to be examined. Consequently, Dr. Ewer and his followers have come out into a cul de sac, or no thoroughfare.
Dr. Ewer, having examined the claim of the Vatican Council to be the Ecclesia Docens, defining the Catholic faith with infallible authority equal to that of the Council of Nice, does not merely dispute or deny it, but scouts and ridicules it with most contemptuous language, unsurpassed by any ever used by Arians or Eutychians against previous councils and definitions. Its great dogmatic decree defining the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff he vituperates as “this flagrant instance of the fallacy known as ‘begging the very question at issue’; an instance which is perhaps the sublimest in its presumption, and the most absurd in its simplicity, that the world ever stood amazed at.” This is a strong assertion and powerful rhetoric! But what we want is evidence and logic. Has Dr. Ewer furnished any? There is some pretence of an argument, and, such as it is, we will endeavor to sift its value. The argument is briefly this. The dogmatic decree is the product of two factors, the collective judgment of the bishops apart from that of the pope, and the judgment of the pope himself. The judgment of the bishops being confessedly not final and infallible in itself, it is the judgment of the pope which must make the decree defining his infallibility final and infallible. Therefore, he defines his own infallibility by the same infallibility. He declares himself to be infallible because he is; the reason why we are bound to believe is identical with the very object of belief, idem per idem.
We will first point out the consequences to Dr. Ewer’s own theory from the argument he has used against the infallibility of the pope, and show its thoroughly sceptical tendency, and afterwards refute it in a more direct manner. The infallibility of the church or of œcumenical councils has never been defined by any of the councils acknowledged by Dr. Ewer. It has always been taken for granted. Suppose that the Council of Nice had explicitly declared this doctrine as a dogma of Catholic faith. It would have affirmed the infallibility of a council as its own infallible judgment, and the infallibility of this judgment itself would rest on the infallibility of the church in council, the very thing defined, as much as the infallibility of the judgment of Pius IX. rested on his own declaration that he was infallible. It would be the same in the case of the imaginary future council gathered from the three parts of Dr. Ewer’s catholic church. The taking of infallibility for granted was just as much a begging of the question, on the part of the Ecclesia Docens, in her ordinary universal teaching and her solemn definitions, as if she had expressly defined it. According to the same logic, the affirmation of their infallibility and inspiration by the twelve apostles would have been a begging of the question. It would have been a demand for belief in their inspiration, because they declared that they were inspired. Even so with our Blessed Lord. He declared that he was the Son of God, and required absolute faith in his words because he was the Son of God, and the very reason for believing his declaration rested on his actually being the Son of God. It is exactly the same with the intellect and reason of man. The demonstrations of reason rest on first principles which are taken for granted. Why do you take them for granted, we may ask of the intellect. Because they are evident to me. What is the proof that what is evident to you is truth? I am intellect, and am made to see truth? By what authority do you affirm that? By my own, because I am intellect and reason. But I want an authority, extrinsic to you, as a warrant that you do not err when you say you are intellect and reason, and that what you call self-evident is really so, and not a mere hallucination. There is none.
Let us go back to God himself. We believe God on his veracity, i.e., because he is truth in his essence, his knowledge, and his manifestation of the same to us. This veracity of God, which is the reason for believing whatever he makes known to us by revelation, is made known to us by God himself, and we depend on his truth for the certainty that it is truth, that he exists, and that he has manifested to us the truth. If, therefore, the declaration of the infallibility of the pope by the pope himself is a logical fallacy because the infallibility of the person and the act declaring it is implied and presupposed, there is a logical fallacy at the bottom of all faith and all science, of the first acts of reason and intellect, of the very idea of being and reality. This is Kantian and transcendental scepticism and nihilism pure and simple. Being and nothing are identical. We are swallowed by the abyss of the unknowable, and the only fate possible or desirable for us, phantoms of a nightmare, is to be swallowed by the lower abyss of dreamless unconsciousness.
There is a real affinity between the pseudo-Catholicism of Oxford and scepticism. The former breeds the latter, and has actually been succeeded by it in the English universities and in many individual minds. Its sophistical methods pervert the reasoning faculties and undermine the basis of certitude. There is, moreover, a reaction caused by the refusal to draw from premises which can only find their just conclusions, their logical consequences, in genuine and complete Catholicity, which drives men back upon a rejection of all Christianity and all rational theology. As for the great mass of the present doubting generation, they are disgusted and repelled, if they are not rather moved to laughter and contempt, by the exhibition of such an illusory and fantastic claim of authority, before which they are exhorted to bow down. If Protestantism is a failure, and the authority of the Roman Pontiff and the great councils which have been celebrated under his presidency is futile, and the doctrine of the Greek Church is only Catholic in so far as the Church of England agrees with it, and this final measure of truth is only ascertained by taking the opinion of one small party of individuals, most men will conclude that Catholic authority is the most baseless of pretensions, and that Christianity itself is a failure. It is very unwise for any man to attempt to play the prophet, and assume to speak to men with a solemn air in the name of God, in these days, unless he has very authentic credentials. The pope can speak to the world as the Vicar of Christ, and receive some respectful attention. Any Catholic priest preaching Catholic doctrine has the pope, and the whole hierarchy, and many past centuries behind him, to overshadow him with their majesty. But the world cares nothing for what is said officially by the Patriarch of Constantinople or the Archbishop of Canterbury, much less for Dr. Ewer, and others like him who attempt to play the priest and imitate the Doctors of the church. In the great controversies of the age they count as a cipher. Whatever else the men of the coming age may do, they will not become Greco-Russian or Ritualistic. The issue is between Rome and anti-Christianity. Our only reason for noticing such a theory as that of Dr. Ewer is that numbers of individual members of his communion who are personally worthy of all respect are hindered by its speciousness from perceiving clearly the truth over which it casts a haze, and that others are likely to be prejudiced against the truth which it misrepresents and denies. It is a pseudo-Catholicism. Those who imbibe its Catholic ingredient are hindered from embracing the genuine Catholicity, toward which they have a tendency. Those who assimilate its uncatholic and sceptical element are hardened in their unbelief. We have said enough to show that it is no substitute for pure Catholicity and no antidote against scepticism. We drop this theory now out of sight, and during the remainder of this article we shall present to the candid inquirer for truth whose mind may have become confused by following the exposition of sophistry, a brief counter exposition of the integral Catholic truth in respect to that extrinsic, infallible criterion and rule by which it is ascertained with certitude, and all Protestant errors, or errors in faith or morals of any kind, are rejected.