ROMAN CATHOLIC MODERNISM
(1909)
The Liberal movement in the Roman Church is viewed by most Protestants with much the same mixture of sympathy and misgiving with which Englishmen regard the ambition of Russian reformers to establish a constitutional government in their country. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are almost always desirable; but how, without a violent revolution, can they be established in a State which exists only as a centralised autocracy, held together by authority and obedience? This sympathy, and these fears, are likely to be strongest in those who have studied the history of Western Catholicism with most intelligence. From the Edict of Milan to the Encyclical of Pius X, the evolution which ended in papal absolutism has proceeded in accordance with what looks like an inner necessity of growth and decay. The task of predicting the policy of the Vatican is surely not so difficult as M. Renan suggested, when he remarked to a friend of the present writer, 'The Church is a woman; it is impossible to say what she will do next.' For where is the evidence of caprice in the history of the Roman Church? If any State has been guided by a fixed policy, which has imposed itself inexorably on its successive rulers, in spite of the utmost divergences in their personal characters and aims, that State is the Papacy.
Beneath all the eddies which have broken the surface, the great stream has flowed on, and has flowed in one direction. The same logic of events which transformed the constitutional principate of Augustus into the sultanate of Diocletian and Valentinian, has brought about a parallel development in the Church which inherited the traditions, the policy, and the territorial sphere of the dead Empire. The second World-State which had its seat on the Seven Hills has followed closely in the footsteps of the first. It is not too fanciful to trace, as Harnack has done, the resemblance in detail—Peter and Paul in the place of Romulus and Remus; the bishops and arch-bishops instead of the proconsuls; the troops of priests and monks as the legionaries; while the Jesuits are the Imperial bodyguard, the protectors and sometimes the masters of the sovereign. One might carry the parallel further by comparing the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, and the later defection of northern Europe, with the disruption of the Roman Empire in the fourth century; and in the sphere of thought, by comparing the scholastic philosophy and casuistry with the Summa of Roman law in the Digest.[50]
The fundamental principles of such a government are imposed upon it by necessity. In the first place, progressive centralisation, and the substitution of a graduated hierarchy for popular government, came about as inevitably in the Catholic Church as in the Mediterranean Empire of the Caesars. The primitive colleges of presbyters soon fell under the rule of the bishops, the bishops under the patriarchs; and then Rome suffered her first great defeat in losing the Eastern patriarchates, which she could not subjugate. The truncated Church, no longer 'universal,' found itself obliged to continue the same policy of centralisation, and with such success that, under Innocent III, the triumph of the theocracy seemed complete. The Papacy dominated Europe de facto, and claimed to rule the world de jure. Boniface VIII, when the clouds were already gathering, issued the famous Bull 'Unam sanctam,' in which he said: 'Subesse Romano pontifici omnes humanas creaturas declaramus, definimus, et pronuntiamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis.' The claim is logical. A theocracy (when religion is truly monotheistic)[51] must claim to be universal de jure; and its ruler must be the infallibly inspired and autocratic vicegerent of the Almighty. He is the rightful lord of the world, whether he gives a continent to the King of Spain by a stroke of the pen, or whether his secular jurisdiction is limited by the walls of his palace. In the fourteenth century the Pope is already called 'dominus deus noster'—precisely the style in which Martial adulates Domitian. In the Bull of Pius V (1570) the claim of universal dominion is reiterated; it is asserted that the Almighty,
'cui data est omnis in caelo et in terra potestas, unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, extra quam nulla est salus, uni soli in terris, videlicet apostolorum principi Petro Petrique successori Romano pontifici in potestatis plenitudine tradidit gubernandam.'
But the final victory of infallibilism was the achievement of the nineteenth-century Jesuits, who completed the dogmatic apotheosis of the Pope at the moment when the last vestiges of his temporal power were being snatched from him.
Now a government of this type is always in want of money. The spiritual Roman Empire was as costly an institution as the court and the bureaucracy of Diocletian and his successors. The same necessity which suppressed democracy in the Church drove it to elaborate an oppressive system of taxation, in which every weakness of human nature was systematically exploited for gain, and every morsel of divine grace placed on a tariff. But this method of raising revenue is only possible while the priests can persuade the people that they really control a treasury of grace, from which they can make or withhold grants at their pleasure. It stands or falls with a non-ethical and magical view of the divine economy which is hardly compatible with a high level of culture or morality. The Catholic Church has thus been obliged, for purely fiscal reasons, to discourage secular education, particularly of a scientific kind, and to keep the people, so far as possible, in the mental and moral condition most favourable to such transactions as the purchase of indulgences and the payment of various insurances against hell and purgatory.
Another necessity of absolute government is the repression of free criticism directed against itself. Heresy and schism in an autocratic Church take the place of treason against the sovereign. Cyprian, in the third century, had already laid down the principles by which alone the central authority could be maintained.
'Ab arbore frange ramum; fractus germinare non poterit. A fonte praecide rivum; praecisus arescit.... Quisquis ab ecclesia separatus adulterae iungitur, a promissis ecclesiae separatur. Alienus est, hostis est. Habere non potest Deum patrem, qui ecclesiam non habet matrem.'