Catholicism and independence : being studies in spiritual liberty

Front matter

1942.

Catholicism and independenc;

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Prologue

HESE essays and articles were written at

various times, and under the stress of various problems. If, as the writer hopes, they have one dominant note, one pervading and connecting thought, it is that of the right, the necessity, the duty of every mind to work out its own salvation by the courageous facing of its own difficulties, the resolute following of its own lights. Various reasons are given by the orthodox for the sad and frequent loss of faith which is to be witnessed in our days; there is one which they never give, but which might frequently be given. For how many minds are taught to flee when they should stand firm in front of the foe, or what they deem to be the foe? They are taught to distrust their own resources ; to doubt the power of their own mind to cope with the difficulties which itself has, at least in part, generated. They are told to close their eyes when they most need to open them ; to practise a passive obedience at the very moment y # it oe hd ‘a

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6% y | PROLOGUE when they should exercise the highest activity. They are given a ready-made and lifeless answer to a spontaneous and living difficulty.

In some cases the method may be successful, or, at least, not deadly. The pressure of life and the rhythm of custom do what the actual treatment could not have effected ; they distract the soul from the difficulties which have never been answered, and at last she forgets that she ever had them.

But is this a satisfactory ending even if it be an easy one? And then what of the soul that cannot forget? The cupboard is closed, but she knows that the skeleton 1s within, and that it may emerge at any time to clothe itself with her own life. The day of reckoning may be deferred, but not put off for ever.

What we would advocate, therefore, however imperfectly, in these essays, is the exercise of a stronger not a weaker faith, a faith not presumptuous, but courageous even to audacity. To trust oneself is, in certain cases, to trust God, for if the light within be not from Him, then are we indeed “ of all men most miserable.”

We cannot live alone in soul any more than in body, and where many are joined together there must be common laws and a common govern-

£ ae De 4 We, we a vi = PROLOGUE x1 ment. Hence there is a duty of obedience which must be loyally fulfilled in its own sphere, but there is another sphere into which that same duty cannot enter. To our own mental and moral conscience all doctrines and laws must make their last appeal, and we have a distinct as well as a corporate personality. If what we are told as truth be really true, it has nothing to fear from the lawful exercise of individual autonomy ; there may be dark moments, but the light must ultimately prevail.

Let us trust to the goodness of our own cause, and not put it to shame in the falsely-assumed name of reverence and loyalty. If our faith be what it should be, if the Church be what we believe her to be, neither can be injured by honesty and truth. Fear may be the beginning of wisdom, but it is not its end, “for the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

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FE, sometimes ask ourselves whether the many diseases which become gradually known to medical science are, for the most part, new as to their existence, or merely as to their recognition. We should probably find, after due examination, that the answer to such a question would be a qualified one, and that while much is now scientifically known which was formerly named from its effects rather than from its cause, there are also many developments of disease due to the peculiar circumstances and conditions of our present life. We might, perhaps, find individual cases, in the distant past, closely resembling those of our modern prevalent diseases, but investigation would probably show that certain symptoms are more widely spread and B

“= a va A “ey s . = ne ¥, ‘9h common in one age, and others in another, and that there are forms of physical suffering corresponding with the particular mode of life of each century.

It is obvious that, unless medical science be quite lifeless, the ordinary laws of supply and demand must obtain here as elsewhere, and that both diagnosis and treatment must be developed in accordance with the actual physical condition of mankind. New symptoms must be observed and collated, new experiments must be made and new remedies tried, if any advance is to be made towards meeting the existing difficulties. It is true that we shall suffer during this process of evolution from the over-driven theories which arise in every field of thought and action, and that the most universally accepted remedy at some particular moment may not be the only one, or the best. Still, taking things all in all, we would most of us prefer, in case of sickness, to be treated by the leading physician of London or Paris, rather than by the equally great or greater intellect of Galen or Hippocrates; for not only has science advanced, but the physical constitution has likewise altered, in its process of adaptation to a more complex form of life.

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Spiritual pathology is liable to at least as many variations and developments as its physical counterpart, and again we may ask, Are the symptoms new? or do we only know them better ? Once more the answer will be a qualified one. We look to the pages of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and we find in them the expression of much which we may have experienced in our own souls, or witnessed in those of others.

Still when we regard, not individual cases, but the face of the religious world as a whole, we see that here also different ages have had their prevailing characteristics, that their strength and their weakness have not been the same, and that, according to the prevailing need, there have arisen special methods of investigation and treatment. It is true that we may find our temptations, our trials, our hopes and fears, depicted in the spiritual struggles of men long passed away from the theatre of life; but the particular blend is special to the age, the general features are peculiar to the time. And as a new disease that suddenly appeared, and seized on whole populations, would at once draw to itself all the attention of medical science, until some means of succour was discovered, so any prevalent symptom of spiritual weakness surely deserves the same interest, and claims the same open-minded study and diagnosis. We do not want to force influenza into some ancient category unless the place really fits it, and neither should we so act with a disease of the soul. We desire, on the contrary, to study its special characteristics, and to make use, in its treatment, not only of the experience of the past, but of all the light we can obtain in the present.

Now it is undeniable that a new symptom has been, for some time, rapidly spreading throughout the Christian world, and assuming an extent and importance which surely demand particular and careful investigation. The epidemic of doubt seizes on populations now where it only affected individuals in former ages, and assumes continually proportions of such magnitude as to give a special character to the religious constitution of our century.

The subject is such a wide one that it will be well at once to narrow the field of action by specifying, as distinctly as the nature of the question allows, the kind of doubt which is here under discussion. The word is used, in one sense, to depict our mental attitude towards certain theories, principles, facts, or fictions which we have never held, but are approaching for the sake of inquiry, or are simply relegating to a half-way domain of opinion or uncertainty. Such doubt as this is rather that which precedes than that which follows on belief; it is not necessarily coupled with any sense of pain or loss ; and the mind may be as calm in its questions and denials as in any other process of acquiring knowledge. It is not, therefore, with doubt such as this that we are occupied, but with that which consists in a disposition to question what we have hitherto believed.

And here again we must distinguish a doubt which is fully approved and accepted, which is received into the mind and seated in the place which faith had occupied, from that which is merely suggested, however vividly and forcibly —which batters at the door and burrows at the foundations, but which nevertheless keeps its character of invader, and is not yet admitted as conqueror or friend.

It is with this latter kind of doubt that we are here concerned. It arises in the soul where untroubled faith had hitherto existed, and brings with it an inevitable sense of suffering or loss. It is the sudden disappearance beneath the horizon of something which had been fully visible ; it is the melting into shadow of something we had held as substance—we tighten our eo

2 a %. wet oa Mis Fae mn eh CATHOLICISM AND INDEPENDENCE eke brasp Mo find that our hands have closed on nothing; it is the violent withdrawal of the basis on which we thought ourselves securely settled, a withdrawal which seems to precipitate us into a chaos wherein all is shifting and uncertain ; it is a metamorphosis in which things seem to change their relative size and position—what was great becomes small, what was near grows far, and we stagger amidst the shifting confusion, asking ourselves, Do we dream? or were we dreaming and are we now awake? or is it that all we look upon is a dream?

This state is no more like that of mere questioning and investigation than the doubt which might seize us as to the sincerity of an old friend is like the dispassionate criticism of a new one; or than the visionary’s doubt as to the solidity of the earth on which he walks is like the questioning spirit in which we might receive the reported discovery of a new island. The doubt which precedes belief is not necessarily painful; the doubt which follows is like the freezing of a warm limb, the blinding of a sound eye.

But there is a class amongst those who pass through this ordeal of religious doubt who have to endure an added torture in a partly defined

THE TEMPERAMENT OF DOUBT ~~ sense of guilt, and fear of wilful wrongMeingp Among these are to be numbered all those who - look upon their religious beliefs as a deposit for whose preservation they are personally responsible, and which to abandon is not only a loss but a sin. Amongst these latter we may count many to whom, in various ways, faith has become a duty of conscience; but, in a very special manner, those who hold themselves subject to the teaching of an infallible authority. To such as these duty and truth appear to have parted company, and even duty seems to be imposed rather from without than by the inner moral sense. They suffer from a painful feeling of compulsion, as though they were called upon to profess what they do not believe, and to think what they do not mean. They have no wish to abandon the faith which they have hitherto cherished, and yet it seems to them that, were they true to themselves, they would have to do so, and that they are kept in it rather by outward compulsion than by inward conviction. Some will say that they are suffering from their own pride; but even had this been the case before they were landed in the difficulty, it certainly is not so now, for the struggle is too vital to leave room for sel‘-complacency.

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It will be said again by others that they are the victims of passion, trying to free themselves from a creed that galls nature and checks self-indulgence. But such an accusation is utterly wide of the mark with those we are considering. They have no reason whatsoever for wishing not to believe, and they may even feel in themselves a strong desire to do so; but they have a haunting horror of not being loyal to their own lights, and they even distrust their very affection for the faith in which they have hitherto placed their confidence, as though it might lead them to disregard the call of truth. It is not pride then, nor is it immorality, nor is it even obstinacy which has brought about a state of soul in which they fear to lose their most precious possession.

It is at such a time that a strong helping hand is most urgently needed, but is, alas! often most grievously missing, for one of the features of the state is its apparent unapproachableness. Until we find some common basis intercourse between mind and mind is impossible. To say that such a state is wrong is rather to add extra suffering than to give help. That there may be, and sometimes is, guilt, we do not wish to deny; but it does not seem, all the same, particularly helpful to say so just at the moment. To recommend the patient to make — acts of faith is like advising him to dance on a broken leg by way of setting it; for even though the disease, like the seeming paralysis of hysterical patients, should be wholly inorganic, and rather of the nature of a fixed idea and constitutional weakness, still the powerlessness and anesthesia actually exist, and are as effective for practical results as a genuine lesion. Nor does such treatment seem in accordance with the spirit of the prayer which so naturally suggests itself at such a time: “I believe, Lord, help thou my unbelief” ; wherein the belief seems not to be in such full possession as to leave no margin uncovered.

Another mistake is in supposing that it is a question of answering certain difficulties. In the first place, what difficulties there are, are very subtle and elusive, and it may not be possible to answer them in any satisfactory manner. And, in the second place, as Cardinal Newman said that no number of difficulties made one doubt, so might we reverse the statement, and add that neither do many doubts constitute one difficulty, for it is a curious psychological fact that we cannot usually ascribe the condition we have

Io CATHOLICISM AND INDEPENDENCE depicted to any definite intellectual difficulty. It may be that many are acting confusedly together, or that one in particular, which suddenly gripped the mind, has been the point from which the trouble started ; but the state in which we find ourselves is not that of definite difficulty, but of general uncertainty ; so much so that we have no very keen inclination to seek answers to positive questions, since no one of them seems sufficiently to represent our need. |

It would be distinctly a mistake to deny, on the strength of this, that those liable to this trial are, for the most part, men whose minds turn naturally to intellectual problems ; whereas those who have not an analytical cast of mind remain often entirely free from them. Up to a certain point doubts and difficulties are closely connected, and, as we have said, some one especially intense difficulty, whether scientific, philosophical, or critical, may be the distinct origin in some minds of an acute crisis of doubt. But even here we should distinguish the thing itself from its causes, remote or immediate, and recognize their difference of character. :

There was a time when men rejoiced in subtle religious difficulties, but that was not a period in which doubt was very widespread or vigorous ;

THE TEMPERAMENT OF DOUBT II whereas just at present difficulties are not a pleasure but a pain, and this not from want of energy to cope with them, but because we dread the ghost that stalks behind, the doubt that lays its withering hand upon the soul at the very moment when it needs all its strength to grapple with a dangerous antagonist.

Modern thinkers, who are free from the sectarian spirit, and who have width of mind to enter into the thought of past schools in the manner in which they expect that others should enter into theirs, will grant that, in the Summa of St. Thomas for instance, many of the countless difficulties raised are closely akin to those of our own day. The answers may often appear to us unsatisfactory, though, with regard to a good number, it is hard even now to see what better could be said, if we interpret them in a liberal and sympathetic sense. But if we still feel, even after acknowledging this much, that our minds remain persistently dissatisfied, may it not be precisely that, in those pages, we have the expression of the difficulties of an age which had not many doubts, and that therefore both question and solution are somewhat lifeless to us?

A difficulty, pure and simple, is, in fact, a conundrum or problem which torments us as long as we look at it, which may haunt us if our minds grow tired and have not the power of shaking it off ; but which, nevertheless, remains partly external so long as it has no direct connexion with our life and its interests. But, once this more personal element enters, the difficulty has given way to doubt, and the outcome must effect in our lives a change of which difficulties in themselves could never be the direct cause, however much they might lead to it. A difficulty may be the same for you and me; a doubt is my own. Itisa personal individual matter, affecting my relations, moral and intellectual, to certain facts or doctrines. It is a narrowing of the field of assent, a limiting of the personal perception as regards some objects which were formerly within its range.

We may wonder sometimes why it was that, in the Middle Ages, difficulties so seldom produced doubts; and the more so when we see how little there was often, in the moral demeanour of certain ages, to support faith, if intellectual conviction should waver. How did our ancestors contrive to

Believe—and yet lie, kill, rob, fornicate, Full in belief’s face?

Were we to try the experiment the basis of our faith would rot beneath us, and leave us as men are left nowadays who think to preserve belief without practice.

It is not possible now, but it was possible then, in the first place because of the surrounding atmosphere, which maintained a certain cast of thought even in those who did little to foster it ; in the second place because they were fronted by a great concrete reality, which won and retained their assent, little as they understood the grounds on which they gave it.

The Church of the Middle Ages was that concrete reality. In the midst of a wild, halfcivilized world she was—whatever corruption may have existed within her—the one sole guardian of justice and purity, the one sole teacher of religious truth. She was imposing and powerful from every point of view, and even her worldly dignity had no small influence in subduing the minds of those who were not occupied with philosophical problems, but needed a living object of allegiance. The deeper and more spiritual faith of men of pure and holy lives was such then as it must be in all times, based on invisible realities, and not on outward power and show ; but the mass of half-hearted worshippers and believers, who are to be found at all periods of the history of the Church, were propped and preserved in those days, not by the merits of their own faith, but by the unity which prevailed around them, and the external majesty of that Church whose spiritual grandeur they could never have understood.

Just the reasons, then, why doubt was so comparatively rare in the Middle Ages will furnish us with the explanation of its prevalence now. Those who do not care for their faith can no longer live, like parasites, on the belief of others ; neither can they find the same external support in a sovereign shorn of a great part of her outward magnificence. The Church cannot, in fact, look great to them through the eyes of others if their own sight is defective ; they must see for themselves or not at all.

It is easier to meet a danger if we know beforehand that it is one we have every reason to expect, and this seems the case as regards doubt in the present condition of the world. If faith has become, much more than it was before, a question of personal effort and perception, it is obvious that those who trust too much to habit and surroundings are liable to be lost. And, in fact, it will happen that just those whose instincts are too spiritual to be satisfied with the outside of religion will be the ones called upon to pass through the most severe crisis.

Doubt is of a nature so subtle and evasive that it may be despised, by the ignorant, for its shifting and uncertain character. But uniformity is not in itself a sign of life, and it should surely rouse us to careful consideration when we see that it attacks often, not those who think little on religious subjects, but those who think much, and, in its acute stages, inflicts an amount of mental pain which is a sure sign that the soul beneath is living and not dead.

It is true indeed that, with some, faith falls off like the skin of a serpent, that is worn out and dead—or it is lost, in the way we have indicated, from the want of support amongst those around. But these cases have in them as much of indifference as of doubt, which latter is, on the contrary, sometimes the straining and cracking of a rope on which a weight is suddenly thrown. Why should it cause us any misgivings while we just hold it loosely in the hand? But all our weight is suspended upon it, every fibre is drawn to its full tension ; it quivers and groans, and can we help asking ourselves, ‘‘ Will it bear ?”

Are we for this more reprehensible than those who have never trusted their whole welfare to the rope, and have consequently not had such overwhelming anxiety as to its security? It has been one of the many strands that bore up their lives, but they have not attempted to make it the only or the principal one. They have cared for their belief sufficiently not to lose it from sheer indifference like that other class to whom we have previously referred; but they have also kept it in too limited proportions to suffer the trials incidental to those to whom religion is all or nothing. They have not the unifying instinct which is at once the privilege and the penalty of those other souls.

Difficult as it may be of understanding to those cast in another mould, we must nevertheless recognize the fact that some minds are divided into separate compartments, with little communication between them. Some there must be, or identity would be lost, but the owner of the premises seems rather like a housekeeper who presides over a good many cupboards, filled with entirely different stores. One cupboard contains jam, and another soap; the only connexion between the two is that they are under the dominion of one person, who can dispose of either.

Thus we find a mind which is divided into separate compartments, one of which contains science, a second commerce, a third religion. It is, in fact, one intellect and one will that make use of all and each, but they are in no way blended ; and the same man will consequently astonish us by the calm facility with which he will pursue the call of business or science, and at the same time carry on the duties of religion, on lines apparently incompatible with one another.

Now such natures as these will not be easily troubled by doubts and difficulties. Since the wares are quite separate, there is not the trouble of co-ordinating them, and it is in this latter process that anxiety is likely to arise.

Hence we see that it is the religious mind that is more liable to suffering of the kind we have described ; and, by a religious mind, we mean not necessarily the mind of the man who is a priest or religious by profession, nor of one who consecrates more than the average time to religious exercises of any kind, but the mind that is cast in a religious mould, into which everything else enters or struggles to enter.

It would, of course, be an evident exaggeration to assume the converse of this opinion, and

C maintain that, since those who suffer from the attacks of doubt are often of deeply religious minds, that therefore the religious minded will always be subject to this trial. Many other causes intervene in the matter, the prevailing atmosphere may be contrary, the temperament may not be liable to that disease. But what we desire to indicate is that one of the classes of men who, as exempt from this trial, might be tempted to blame those subject to it, are not in fact exempt by reason of their more but of their less religious cast of mind.

The question of moral responsibility in doubt is one which will be differently viewed according to the theories tacitly or explicitly held as to the genesis of faith. While all religious and believing minds are agreed that doubt is an evil, and sometimes a sin, the part of the will still remains a very undefined one, and opposite schools will perplex one another by using the same word in a different sense, and with still more different emphasis. While all agree as to the duty of accepting a revelation which we believe to come from God, and the necessity of guarding a faith which we once possess, and not exposing it deliberately to injury and loss, the moral element, in both its first acceptance and subsequent preservation, is very differently represented according to the different line of thought which has been followed from the starting-point of discussion.

To some faith is like the light of day, visible to all those who, having eyes, do not deliberately shut them ; and doubt is like the blindness of Nelson, when he applied the telescope to his sightless eye and professed that he could not see. They look upon the will as a kind of scene-shifter, whose part it is to draw back the curtain from before the intellectual vision, and which sometimes perversely refuses to do so. They do not allow it any power or influence over the visual faculty itself, but only over its actual exercise. he spectacle, they think, would be the same for all, if all would open their eyes to it, only some do not.

They agree with a very opposite school, that doubt is a sickness; but they do not therefrom conclude that the whole constitution must require treatment. They are rather disposed to say that, since it is a state of soul, it can be got into and out of by an immediate act of the will. But the result of this attempt is so often a failure that it should surely teach us to look further back, and seek a more remote and general cause. In the words of a profound French thinker :—

“On se contente ordinairement de dire que le scepticisme est une maladie, et qu'il est absurde parce qu'il implique contradiction. Je n’en disconviens pas. Mais n’est-il pas eétrange tout d’abord qu’une contradiction puisse étre véecue en quelque sorte et se réaliser dans une 4me? Les impossibilités de la logique abstraite ne sontelles donc que des fictions? En tout cas 11 apparait bien que la vie reelle s’en joue et n’est point arrétée par elle. En logique une contradiction c’est l’impossible. A ce titre le scepticisme ne devait pas pouvoir se produire. Et cest toujours en effet ce qu’on s’efforce de démontrer, et bien inutilement, puisque le scepticisme se produit quand méme. II] faudrait comprendre enfin que c’est un état d’ame, et le considérer comme tel. Et si c’est une maladie il est nécessaire, pour l’€éviter, et pour essayer au moins de la guérir, d’en connaitre l’origine et la nature. Quand on est en présence d’un mal et qu’on veut le supprimer, ce n’est pas directement au mal lui-méme qu’on s’attaque, mais a sa cause” (Le Dogmatisme Moral, par L. Laberthonniere).

Our mental mechanism is complicated beyond all our psychological knowledge, and it is not surprising that, knowing as little as we do of the origin of our beliefs and opinions, we are bewildered to account for any change that may arise. And explanations are not growing easier now that attention is being turned to what are called subconscious phenomena, and that we are discovering a hitherto more or less unrecognized substratum of our intellectual existence. We see how what was thought to be forgotten is simply stored in some corner, which is inaccessible for the moment to the acting personality, though it may be reached by another ; and that actions, apparently irrational, are directed by some hidden motive of which the et itself cannot give an account.