The result of this drastic treatment of the sources may be realised by perusing chapter vii of Loisy's 'Les Évangiles Synoptiques,' The following is a brief analysis of this chapter, entitled 'La Carrière de Jésus.' Jesus was born at Nazareth about four years before the Christian era. His family were certainly pious, but none of His relatives seems to have accepted the Gospel during His lifetime. Like many others, the young Jesus was attracted by the terrifying preaching of John the Baptist, from whom He received Baptism. When John was imprisoned He at once attempted to take his place. He began to preach round the lake of Galilee, and was compelled by the persistent demands of the crowd to 'work miracles.' This mission only lasted a few months; but it was long enough for Jesus to enrol twelve auxiliaries, who prepared the villages of Galilee for His coming, travelling two and two through the north of Palestine. Jesus found His audience rather among the déclassés of Judaism than among the Puritans. The staple of His teaching was the advent of the 'kingdom of God'—the sudden and speedy coming of the promised Messiah. This teaching was acceptable neither to Herod Antipas nor to the Pharisees; and their hostility obliged Jesus to fly for a short time to the Phoenician territory north of Galilee. But a conference between the Master and His disciples at Cæsarea Philippi ended in a determination to visit the capital and there proclaim Jesus as the promised Messiah. As they approached Jerusalem, even the ignorant disciples were frightened at the risks they were running, but Jesus calmed their fears by promising that they should soon be set on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 'Jésus n'allait pas à Jérusalem pour y mourir.'[70]
The doomed prophet made his public entry into Jerusalem as Messiah, and, as a first act of authority, cleared the temple courts by an act of violence, in which He was doubtless assisted by His disciples. For some days after this He preached daily about the coming of the kingdom, and foiled with great dexterity the traps which His enemies laid for Him. 'But the situation could only end in a miracle or a catastrophe, and it was the catastrophe which happened.'[71] Jesus was arrested, after a brief scuffle between the satellites of the High Priest and the disciples; and the latter, without waiting to see the end, fled northwards towards their homes. When brought before Pilate, Jesus probably answered 'Yes' to the question whether He claimed to be a king; but 'la parole du Christ johannique, Mon royaume n'est pas de ce monde, n'aurait jamais pu être dite par le Christ d'histoire.' This confession led naturally to His immediate execution; after which
'on peut supposer que les soldats détachèrent le corps de la croix avant le soir et le mirent dans quelque fosse commune, où l'on jetait pêle-mêle les restes des suppliciés. Les conditions de sépulture furent telles qu'au bout de quelques jours il aurait été impossible de reconnaître la dépouille du Sauveur, quand même on l'aurait cherchée.'[72]
The disciples, however, had been too profoundly stirred by hope to accept defeat. None of them had seen Jesus die; and though they knew that He was dead, they hardly realised it. Besides, they were fellow-countrymen of those who had asked whether Jesus was not Elijah, or even John the Baptist, come to life again. What more natural than that Peter should see the Master one day while fishing on the lake? 'The impulse once given, this belief grew by the very need which it had to strengthen itself.' Christ 'appeared also to the eleven,' So it was that their faith brought them back to Jerusalem, and Christianity was born.
'The supernatural life of Christ in the faithful and in the Church has been clothed in an historical form, which has given birth to what we might somewhat loosely call the Christ of legend.' So the Italian manifesto sums up the result of this reconstruction or denudation of the Gospel history.[73] 'Such a criticism,' say the authors not less frankly than truly, 'does away with the possibility of finding in Christ's teaching even the embryonic form of the Church's later theological teaching.'[74]
Readers unfamiliar with Modernist literature will probably have read the foregoing extracts with utter amazement. It seems hardly credible that such views should be propounded by Catholic priests, who claim to remain in the Catholic Church, to repeat her creeds, minister at her altars, and share her faith. What more, it may well be asked, have rationalist opponents of Christianity ever said, in their efforts to tear up the Christian religion by the roots, than we find here admitted by Catholic apologists? What is left of the object of the Church's worship if the Christ of history was but an enthusiastic Jewish peasant whose pathetic ignorance of the forces opposed to Him led Him to the absurd enterprise of attempting a coup d'état at Jerusalem? Is not Jesus reduced by this criticism to the same level as Theudas or Judas of Galilee? and, if this is the true account, what sentiment can we feel, when we read His tragic story, but compassion tinged with contempt?
And on what principles are such liberties taken with our authorities? What is the criterion by which it is decided that Christ said, 'I am a king,' but not 'My kingdom is not of this world'? Why must the resurrection have been only a subjective hallucination in the minds of the disciples? To these questions there is a plain answer. The non-intervention of God in history is an axiom with the Modernists. 'L'historien,' says M. Loisy, 'n'a pas à s'inspirer de l'agnosticisme pour écarter Dieu de l'histoire; il ne l'y rencontre jamais.'[75] It would be more accurate to say that, whenever the meeting takes place, 'the historian' gives the Other the cut direct.
But now comes in the peculiar philosophy by which the Modernists claim to rehabilitate themselves as loyal and orthodox Catholics, and to turn the flank of the rationalist position, which they have seemed to occupy themselves. The reaction against Absolutism in philosophy has long since established itself in Germany and France. In England and Scotland the battle still rages; in America the rebound has been so violent that an extreme form of anti-intellectualism is now the dominant fashion in philosophy. It would have been easy to predict—and in fact the prediction was made—that the new world-construction in terms of will and action, which disparages speculative or theoretical truth and gives the primacy to what Kant called the practical reason, would be eagerly welcomed by Christian apologists, hard-pressed by the discoveries of science and biblical criticism. Protestants, in fact, had recourse to this method of apologetic before the Modernist movement arose. The Ritschlian theology in Germany (in spite of its 'static' view of revelation), and the Symbolo-fidéisme of Sabatier and Ménégoz, have many affinities with the position of Tyrrell, Laberthonnière, and Le Roy.
It is exceedingly difficult to compress into a few pages a fair and intelligible statement of a Weltansicht which affects the whole conception of reality, and which has many ramifications. There is an additional difficulty in the fact that few of the Modernists are more than amateurs in philosophy. They are quick to see the strategic possibilities of a theory which separates faith and knowledge, and declares that truths of faith can never come into collision with truths of fact, because they 'belong to different orders.' It suits them to follow the pragmatists in talking about 'freely chosen beliefs,' and 'voluntary certainty '; Mr. Tyrrell even maintains that 'the great mass of our beliefs are reversible, and depend for their stability on the action or permission of the will.' But philosophy is for them mainly a controversial weapon. It gives them the means of justifying their position as Catholics who wish to remain loyal to their Church and her formularies, but no longer believe in the miracles which the Church has always regarded as matters of fact. Nevertheless, an attempt must be made to explain a point of view which, to the plain man, is very strange and unfamiliar.
Two words are constantly in the mouth of Modernist controversialists in speaking of their opponents. The adherents of the traditional theology are 'intellectualists,' and their conception of reality is 'static.' The meaning of the latter charge may perhaps be best explained from Laberthonnière's brilliantly written essay, 'Le Réalisme Chrétien et l'Idéalisme Grec.' The Greeks, he says, were insatiable in their desire to see, like children. Blessedness, for them, consisted in a complete vision of reality; and, since thought is the highest kind of vision, salvation was conceived of by them as the unbroken contemplation of the perfectly true, good, and beautiful. Hence arose the philosophy of 'concepts'; they idealised nature by considering it sub specie æternitatis. Reality resided in the unchanging ideas; the mutable, the particular, the individual was for them an embarrassment, a 'scandal of thought.' The sage always tries to escape from the moving world of becoming into the static world of being. But an ideal world, so conceived, can only be an abstraction, an impoverishment of reality. Such an idealism gives us neither a science of origins nor a science of ends. Greek wisdom sought eternity and forgot time; it sought that which never dies, and found that which never lives.