'An abstract doctrine, like that of Greek philosophy or of Spinoza, consists always in substituting for reality, by simplification, ideas or concepts which they think statically in their logical relations, regarding them at the same time as adequate representations and as essences immovably defined.'[76]
Hellenised Christianity, proceeds our critic, regarded the incarnation statically, as a fact in past history. But the real Christ is an object of faith. 'He introduces into us the principles of that which we ought to be. That which He reveals, He makes in revealing it.' In other words, Christ, and the God whom He reveals, are a power or force rather than a fact. 'A God who has nothing to become has nothing to do.' God is not the idea of ideas, but the being of beings and the life of our life. He is not a supreme notion, but a supreme life and an immanent action. He is not the 'unmoved mover,' but He is in the movement itself as its principle and end. While the Greeks conceived the world sub specie æternitatis, God is conceived by modern thought sub specie temporis. God's eternity is not a sort of arrested time in which there is no more life; it is, on the contrary, the maximum of life.
It is plain that we have here a one-sided emphasis on the dynamic aspect of reality no less fatal to sound philosophy than the exclusively static view which has been falsely attributed to the Greeks. A little clear thinking ought to be enough to convince anyone that the two aspects of reality which the Greeks called στἁσιϛ and κἱνησιϛ are correlative and necessary to each other. A God who is merely the principle of movement and change is an absurdity. Time is always hurling its own products into nothingness. Unless there is a being who can say, 'I am the Lord, I change not,' the 'sons of Jacob' cannot flatter themselves that they are 'not consumed.'[77] But Laberthonnière and his friends are not much concerned with the ultimate problems of metaphysics; what they desire is to shake themselves free from 'brute facts' in the past, to be at liberty to deny them as facts, while retaining them as representative ideas of faith. If reality is defined to consist only in life and action, it is a meaningless abstraction to snip off a moment in the process, and ask, 'Did it ever really take place?' This awkward question may therefore be ignored as meaningless and irrelevant, except from the 'abstract' standpoint of physical science.
The crusade against 'intellectualism' serves the same end. M. Le Roy and the other Christian pragmatists have returned to the Nominalism of Duns Scotus. The following words of Frassen, one of Scotus' disciples, might serve as a motto for the whole school:
'Theologia nostra non est scientia. Nullatenus speculativa est, sed simpliciter practica. Theologiae obiectum non est speculabile, sed operabile. Quidquid in Deo est practicum est respectu nostri.'
M. Le Roy also seems to know only these two categories. Whatever is not 'practical'—having an immediate and obvious bearing on conduct—is stigmatised as 'theoretical' or 'speculative.' But the whole field of scientific study lies outside this classification, which pretends to be exhaustive. Science has no 'practical' aim, in the narrow sense of that which may serve as a guide to moral action; nor does it deal with 'theoretical' or 'speculative' ideas, except provisionally, until they can be verified. The aim of science is to determine the laws which prevail in the physical universe; and its motive is that purely disinterested curiosity which is such an embarrassing phenomenon to pragmatists. And since the faith which lies behind natural science is at least as strong as any other faith now active in the world, it is useless to frame categories in such a way as to exclude the question, 'Did this or that occurrence, which is presented as an event in the physical order, actually happen, or not?' The question has a very definite meaning for the man of science, as it has for the man in the street. To call it 'theoretical' is ridiculous.
What M. Le Roy means by 'interpreting dogmas in the language of practical action' may be gathered from his own illustrations. The dogma, 'God is our Father,' does not define a 'theoretical relation' between Him and us. It signifies that we are to behave to Him as sons behave to their father. 'God is personal' means that we are to behave to Him as if He were a human person. 'Jesus is risen' means that we are to think of Him as if He were our contemporary. The dogma of the Real Presence means that we ought to have, in the presence of the consecrated Host, the same feelings which we should have had in the presence of the visible Christ. 'Let the dogmas be interpreted in this way, and no one will dispute them.'[78]
The same treatment of dogma is advocated in Mr. Tyrrell's very able book 'Lex Orandi.' The test of truth for a dogma is not its correspondence with phenomenal fact, but its 'prayer-value.' This writer, at any rate before his suspension by the Society of Jesus, to which he belonged, is less subversive in his treatment of history than the French critics whom we have quoted. Although in apologetics the criterion for the acceptance of dogmas must, he thinks, be a moral and practical one, he sometimes speaks as if the 'prayer-value' of an ostensibly historical proposition carried with it the necessity of its truth as matter of fact.
'Between the inward and the outward, the world of reality and the world of appearances, the relation is not merely one of symbolic correspondence. The distinction that is demanded by the dualism of our mind implies and presupposes a causal and dynamic unity of the two. We should look upon the outward world as being an effectual symbol of the inward, in consequence of its natural and causal connection therewith.'[79]
But Mr. Tyrrell does not seem to mean all that these sentences might imply. He speaks repeatedly, in the 'Lex Orandi,' of the 'will-world' as the only real world.