Why I am, and why I am not a Catholic

Front matter

Rats PLAT it

Ae ate ba

Bis

Part II Why I Am Not A Catholic

By THE REVEREND W. OrcHaARD, D.D.

By PrincipaL J. W. OMAN, D.D.

By Proressor A. E. Taytor, D.Lrrr.

By ProFessor H. L. Goupce, D.D.

By THE LorpD BisHoP OF GLOUCESTER .

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PART I WHY I AM A CATHOLIC

I WHY I AM A CATHOLIC HILAIRE BELLOC

THE question which I am set to answer is, “Why am I a Catholic?” These are my terms of reference. To these terms of reference I will write: giving as best as I can the statement of why the individual who writes these lines accepts, maintains, and will to the best of his ability, God willing, defend the Faith. And I mean herein by the term “The Faith,” both that which teaches and that which is taught: the religious organization in communion with the Bishop of Rome as its supreme and infallible Head on earth, and the doctrine and discipline emanating from this organization.

Now writing as I do to the Terms of Reference, and therefore necessarily in a fashion wholly personal (“Why I accept the Faith’’), certain provisos are necessary.

First, the thing being personal, there will be a great deal that is personal. That is unpleasant but under the conditions, inevitable. Secondly, I may, or rather, certainly shall, fall into certain repetitions of matter I have written elsewhere. I will avoid these as much as possible but to avoid them altogether is impossible, because I have been writing upon this very subject (under many aspects, it is true) for perhaps thirty years.

Thirdly, I humbly provise (if that be English, which I doubt) that my personal statement here is not to the prejudice of a thousand others. My own reasons are of less value than those of better men, than those of men who never express themselves (many millions of them), of men enjoying or suffering spiritual knowledge far more profound.

Fourthly, the Church being what it is, nothing I say must be taken as representative. The largest and truest lines of affirmation or evidence probably escape me. I may be drawn, by what our forefathers well called ‘‘the imbelicity of private nature,” into statements of little or no value, or of worse than no value. Let no one think I pretend to a full, the best, or even a sufficient statement. It is no more than my individual confession.

Lastly (I need hardly say it, save that so many modern readers do not know what the Church is, nor the nature of adherence to Her doctrine), any chance words in this poor essay are wholly subject to authority. If I misstate a point in theological argument I accept its correction at once at the hands of authority.

I, then, who must here present my argument, have these personal advantages and limitations.

In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and have known it all my life. Next, I have spent my life, for the most part, with people not of the Faith. Next, I have, though baptized into it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also discovered the Faith—but this line I will not pursue as it is somewhat intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have balanced.

But more important than the foregoing personal points is this personal point: I am by nature sceptical; that is, my inclination or appetite is for intellectual process, for analysis, for: discovering the nature of things by the reason rather than by vision. All men know (or should know) the advantages and disadvantages of this weakness or talent in a man. It imposes a certain dryness: it may lead him astray through deduction from insufficient premises. To use the common metaphor, it neglects the heart and lays too heavy a load upon the head. On the other hand, it leads to unshakable conclusions, it establishes perfect discoveries. Scepticism assured leads to confidence absolute. In general this temperament has the disadvantage of restriction, the advantage of certitude, for others as well as oneself.

I have before me two tasks, which I will call, for convenience, Positive and Negative. These words ‘Positive’ and “Negative” are often abused. They are obviously relative in any connection, for what is positive to one aspect of a question is negative to its opposite. To use them as though they had final meaning is silly (as it is silly to talk with final meaning of “destructive” criticism and “constructive” criticism) ; but if we define our terms, these words “Positive” and ‘Negative’ have their use.

I mean here by ‘Positive,’ all those arguments in favour of the Faith: the reasons I find for accepting it. I mean by “Negative, my reasons for not accepting such arguments as I am familiar with upon the other side. |

In either category I shall distinguish (I hope not arbitrarily) between major and minor considerations. For it seems to me that there are both in the attack upon the Faith, and in the defence of it, certain large determining propositions, few or single in number, which I will call ‘‘Major,” and a host of other converging lesser propositions supporting either side, which I will call “Minor.”

Thus in a discussion upon identity in a Court of Law, whether John Jones be John Jones or another, the main Positive point is the recognition of John Jones by a number of witnesses with an experience entitling them to affirm; while minor considerations would be questions of handwriting or tricks of habit, etc. On the other side, the main Negative point may be a mass of evidence to the death of the said John Jones, and minor considerations would be the disputing of his handwriting, the authenticity of photographs, etc.

The Major argument for an acceptation of the Faith may be stated thus:

The Faith solves the principal problem presented to mankind. It would be truer to say that it solves the problem which is not only principal, but, like the Faith itself, unique. The problem which the Faith solves is not one of many, which vary only in degree of importance. It is rather a Problem of a different category altogether from the rest: to wit, “What is the nature and the fate of man?” Since we are men, this alone really matters.

- Someone having lost his memory, and finding himself alone in a locked room, may interest himself in the wall paper, the pictures, and a slight itch upon his left arm. But the business of knowing who he is, how he got there, and what is likely to happen to him when he gets out, is in a different plane altogether. He will certainly begin with the large question before (perhaps in despair of answering it) he amuses himself with the wall paper and the pictures, or even bothers about his left arm. It would be a truer parallel, seeing what the development of a human life is, to say that, on coming to himself, he might first, in a silly sort of way, begin noticing the wall paper and the pictures, and only as he became fully conscious would pull himself together and consider the only real problem before him.

For that is what happens to us in human life. As children we only notice what is around us. Even as young men the chief affair may not occupy our minds. But when we come to maturity of thought, that chief problem must inevitably occupy our minds; and if we leave the great questions for a jaded interest in lesser things, it is only because we have despaired of an answer.

As we examine the great Problem (its best formula is, “What, whence, whither?’’) we have certain foundations upon which to build. We have certain directives towards a solution.

We have the sense of right and wrong, the sense of honour and dishonour, the sense of pleasure and pain, the strange paradox of mutability coexisting with a necessity for permanence—nay, an acute appetite for permanence.

What is the meaning of these things? It is one answet to say “They have no meaning’; but it is significant that man has never sincerely accepted that answet. He has always corporately and individually attempted a system; in societies through many generations, and moment by moment within his own soul, he gropes for something which should give him some answet. They who have replied that no answer is discoverable have themselves given an answer; but never was there a man yet, still less a society—that is man collective, and possessed of collective wisdom and an inheritance—who did not attempt an answer. Every

WHY I AM A CATHOLIC bie man propounds a philosophy. For the word “philosophy”’ signifies the love of wisdom; that is, the love of knowledge; and that is, the solution of questions in their order. Now, necessarily, the solution of questions in their order points, as a first step to be taken, to the solution of the Prime question, “What? Whence? Whither?” before we can attempt any other.

Every man, I say, propounds a philosophy. The Sophists indeed propound none openly, and what they call their “philosophies” or ‘‘systems’ are but games; yet they also are men, and therefore each of them has _ some philosophy in his heart, commonly of despair, sometimes more puerile than despair; though what each propounds to his school is but a system, an Opinion, or an arabesque drawn upon the window pane to correspond to the outlines of reality out of doors; at the best a half solution, a guess which may be modified, at the worst a mere negation; never, never an answer. And of this kind have been all the belauded names of the last hundred years, from that of Kant to that of the recently fashionable Bergson.

But what of philosophy? What of an answer to the main problem?

Were there a system which could flood with light the darkness of these torturing doubts, and make us know what we are and whence we come and whither we go, it would indeed be worthy of acceptance. It would immediately take precedence over all other affirmations, however well proved, upon such petty things as our bodily life and our passing environment in this world.

If Materialism could give a sufficient answer, we might rightly exalt it to the highest place, for it would at least establish a certitude: though that certitude were but nothingness and despair. It would be a determining Idea and final. But Materialism does not sufficiently reply. It does not assuage the thirst for real knowledge. It stops short at “How?” (and with not nearly enough even of ‘“How?’’). It is quite dumb upon “Why?”

Any system, I say, which could give the oracular teply would be blessed of all men, even though it were but a system. But wait a moment. Can any mete system give a reply?

Here we touch the very core of the affair. Man is an organism. All that is organic is complex. The full reply must meet the general nature of man. A merely mathematical reply will not suffice, nor will an emotional divorced from the intelligence. The full reply can only come from something consonant to the noble © complexity of man.

Man is a Person; by nothing less than a Person alone can he be guided. He has ears to hear—but nothing that he hears will satisfy him unless it proceed from a speaking soul, expressing will, intelligence, full being, in articulate words. There is that in man which, when he demands a full solution (I mean rather a sufficient solution, a harbour, a repose in conviction), requires something responding to himself; I say, again, a Personality, a Voice, an Organism, a Being. We look about, not for a theory but for a thing. In our search for that which can tell us in gradually convincing fashion “Things are thus and thus: such are you: such is the world,” we expect, we cannot be content without, a living authoritative and intelligible Voice and Person.

Now the Catholic is that man who has heard such a Voice, who has come across such a Personality, and who is (most rationally) satisfied with its credentials.

Man is not satisfied by an emotion alone; he is not content with a rational process alone; he must have both in unison and manifestly interdependent. He is illumined by the unexpected synthesis wherein all his ultimate demands are satisfied, and the great Question is answered.

It is no objection to this experience when men say, “That Voice I have not heard; that Personality I have not met; with that Organism I have no real acquaintance; that Society is outside my experience.” The only true countervailing objection would be, ‘‘All this I also knew, but it did not satisfy me.” Now that objection— and this must be carefully weighed—is not to be found. Men lose the Faith, indeed, as one may lose his sense of taste, or any other of the lesser approaches to reality; but when this calamity falls on them never do they cease to remember with anguish the sense of perfect adjustment whereof they have been deprived.

I have in other places used various metaphors to describe the event, the meeting, the realization of home.

One of these metaphors I happen to cherish patticularly. Perhaps it will be of less value to others: perhaps of more value to a few. I have compared the world to those pictures which were drawn in a distorted perspective by the artists of the later Renaissance and the XVIIth century, in which pictures all appears meaningless until you put your eye into a particular position, from which all suddenly falls into order, and you see a reasonable, well-proportioned, scheme. The Faith so solves the world.

Another of these metaphors is that of groping in a dark room. You take for granted, from all you know of rooms and from the nature of things, that there is a door, or a window: some entry, some exit. Were there not, you could not be there. No sense proclaims it. There is no sound. All is blackness. You experiment; you feel; you find. And having found, you have no doubts at all. “Here is the door.”

Parallels and metaphors are but aids to thought. They cannot of themselves convince, nor am I here occupied in convincing others, but only in making it clear how the Faith comes to, or, having been always accepted, is confirmed in, a man. It is a coming on reality. It is a grasp of things as they are. And if anyone then add, “But, why do I not perceive as you do?” I suggest this answer. “Have you, then, found reality?” I think not.

To this main proposition there come in a flood of minor considerations which will, I am afraid, have greater effect upon the modern mind than exposition of the major point. In another generation I would not have lingered upon them; for, in other and stronger generations men preferred wrestling upon main points. But for what they are worth let me tabulate them.

We who are of the Faith note that with the Faith there has arisen and continued what is manifestly the highest of human cultures. The expressions of the human spirit have in that air obtained and maintained the sublime. Ruins of the past proclaim that truth; relics of old efforts, tradition, and existing characters in the present.

The test of human happiness (the test of tests, if we are to descend to mere pragmatic proof) tells the same tale. So does the test of human dignity. So does (and this will seem strange, I think, in the ears of most English readers, though it is a commonplace abroad), the test of science and discovery. Truth confirms truth; and it is both singular and arresting to note how, for now nearly three hundred years of rapidly advancing achievement in the lesser forms of reality, physical science and the rest, the Catholic Church has found itself supported. The first achievements of research— hurried, insufficiently confirmed—have almost invariably risen at issue against the Faith. Without exception —I say, without one single exception—the definitely proved conclusions of physical research (even on that insignificant level) have been compelled to withdraw from the attack, or better still, have occasionally confirmed the immortal thesis. ,

Shall I advance lesser arguments still? What of the completeness of the Catholic affirmation? That completeness might be man-made. That vast and exactly consonant body of moral and transcendental theology might conceivably be of human manufacture. But in what other instance has man done such a thing?

Or shall I advance the unique Individuality of the Faith?

It is not true that the Church is but one of many warring creeds and varying religions. There is but one Authority on earth which claims to reveal to men their nature and their destiny. All else is opinion, habit of life, unreasoned affirmation or partial pickings and choosings from the entire Faith. All else either borrows from that central thing (remaining schismatic or heretical) or is separate from it, yet not conclusive.

And this leads me to another consideration which should be of profound effect with any man who undetrstands the nature of his fellow-men: I mean a consideration of the hatred and attack to which the Church is subject. Herein you discover that strong argument which runs from Tertullian to Newman through sixteen hundred years. ‘‘If there were on earth something which compelled men to the Divine, something which was the voice of the Divine, how should we men, being what we are and know ourselves to be, being what we are and knowing ourselves to be capable of what we are not, being what we are and angry with our own defects—how should we receive It? With obloquy, with persecution, with defiance, with contained reaction against it.” So it is with the Faith, and with the Faith alone, as a permanent historical phenomenon.

Many other hatreds there have been, many alliances and counter alliances; but one note runs through the whole of history, wherever this Person has been felt, this Visage seen, this Voice heard; the note of violent antagonism, provoking sporadic, often belated, but sufficiently heroic defence.

And on that minor argument of the tests by which we might know what such a Divine Society would be if such a thing existed, what of its Claim? It would claim absolute right, It would claim to speak with the Voice of God, It would demand (in its own sphere, though only in its own sphere) obedience. It would, alone of things upon this earth, refuse to compromise. And by that test also the Faith is the Faith.

And here, to end up with, is another minor argument, which will appeal less perhaps to others than it does to me. It appeals to me strongly because I feel it in every line of good verse, in every excellent room or monument, in every phrase of good music, in every admirable character: I mean the argument from Proportion.

Nowhere else, in all the experience of mankind, will you discover universal Proportion as you discover it in the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Though it applies to the whole of human life, it does, in every relation, keep the normal—which some have translated ‘“‘the Mean.” It does so in the relations of parent and child, of husband and wife, of the propertied man and the destitute, of the citizen and the Christian (I mean of our duty to the Prince and our duty to God). It does so in that most difficult of all actual problems, the management of appetite.

The flesh is good. But the flesh can devour a man. If anyone can tell me where in the whole world there is another authority which decides rightly upon this awful crux, I shall listen with interest. Hitherto I have heard of none. I have met those who have told me that the crux may be neglected, and I have seen madness and terrible death ensue. I have heard those who have told me that it may be evaded; and I have met men contemptible thereby. But nowhere, save within the walls of the Holy City, have I seen the affair put in its just relations, leaving man, though fallen and always suffering, at least neither tortured, nor a sensual fool, nor a slave. ;

Perhaps if I were conducting this exposition of what is (I beg you to remember) a personal argument, and in no way a general one, upon general conversational, familiar lines, neglecting ultimate principles, I would lay more insistence upon this point of Proportion than upon any other. That which will give us Proportion even in temporal affairs has been discovered and is here to your hand. Men have achieved Proportion outside the Faith in one department at the expense of another. They have had the grace given them to satisfy the human spirit to the full in column and arch—and meanwhile to despise justice. They have had exactitude of law, and have meanwhile despised beauty. They have had a just arrangement of property, and meanwhile have lost culture. But in the Catholic scheme there inhabits a certain balancing compensating spirit, which though it can never constrain men to achieve perfect proportion, for men are fallen, does make them approach to such perfection sufficiently for the right conduct of life.

And here let me tell you another little point in con- _ nection with Proportion. The Catholic scheme (which those who desire to avoid the term Catholic call also by the uncertain title of Christian) will give you that final complement of Proportion which is called Humour.

Let me turn now to the negative affair.

There is one outstanding major argument against the Catholic Church, which, to all men of intelligence, comes first. It is this: Why should this particular affirmation be true?

‘There are a myriad trees in the wood. What is there special about this particular tree? There are a myriad guesses at an insoluble problem, why do you call this guess a solution? You have affirmed the thing to be unique. I recognize’ (says the instructed opponent—the uninstructed I neglect) “that it zs unique. You are right when you say it is something quite unlike any other thing and cannot be put into a category with others. It is not” (he admits) “one religion out of many, still less one creed out of many.’ (Indeed, being instructed, he knows that even the Catholic Creeds do not pretend to be a full exposition of the Faith, but only special definitions answering special denials). ““The Catholic Church 7s striking, individual, something apart. But to say that is not enough. That does not make it what you claim it to be, the actual Voice of God upon earth. Indeed, to men like myself and a host of others, it is no more than one, perhaps the most sympathetic, perhaps the most arresting, but not upon that account the most convincing, of I know not how many structures of the human imagination.”

Now to this major argument (which alone I respect among the innumerable propositions against the Divine origin of the Faith) there is no answer save that of the Faith itself. To the main agnostic argument, to Lucretius as to Huxley, there is no answer save the answer

_of appreciation, acceptation, discovery, and the experience of what Mr. Chesterton has recently and justly called “the king.”

That is why Faith is Faith. Were it other than Faith, the mass of men would accept or all men would reject. Being what it is, many, even of those who approach, reject; many accept; the rest remain ignoring.

That one Particular Man out of incalculable millions

should alone have been also the incarnate God; that one Organization out of I know not how many myriad organizations should alone be absolute in authority; that one connected and multiple set of statements—however closely interdependent, however widely ramifying —should be an ultimate philosophy; these are not affirmations which can be proved by the deductive reason, nor can they be put to such tests as will be immediately accepted by all rational beings.

Against that affirmation “Your Particular cannot take the place of the General,” there is, I take it, no answer but the Faith itself. There is no answer, in other words, save that convergence of experience in morals, in intelligence, in appetite, which brings us into, or maintains us in, the Household whereof the inhabiting spirit is a lively, a triumphant, a divine repose.

You are of that Household or not of it. But approach it, examine it closely, and, only after so doing, decide.

Of the minor negative points, perhaps the most important to-day are the arguments drawn against the

Faith from history and from what is called “pre-history’—though I would like to make the exception here, that pre-history is not history at all, but guesswork upon matters very little known.

The argument from real history is of two kinds.

The first is what I may call the Protestant argument. It is the argument that the Church was founded by Jesus Christ, who was God, who did intend to create a society among men after His own image, but that (though He so intended) everything went wrong. Some say it went wrong at Pentecost, others at the conversion of Constantine; others, again, with the Papacy of the monk whom they call Hildebrand, but we St. Gregory VII: others, again, with the excommunication of Elizabeth Tudor; others in the rejection of Mrs. Eddy.

To all this, if you will pardon me, I will pay no attention. Others can deal with it better than I, for I am afraid that I despise it with such a whole-hearted contempt that I am unfitted to deal with it. No one can doubt the existence of an historical visible Church. If it have not authority, a// doctrine fails: for from that body all doctrine has proceeded. No Christian doctrine has any other historical basis as dogma. 7

But the second argument from real history is of more weight: it is that history shows the whole affair of the Church to have been man-made. “The earliest documents,” it says, “the now lost original memorials underlying our existing text (which are corrupt) presented a young Jewish teacher who said vague things of a common morality, and was put to death either because he conflicted with government, or because his ideals were too high. These, later, were embroidered on by various hands. Then we get accretions upon accretions: the supposed Divinity of the said young man, and all the Christian theology, spun out henceforward from empty brains.”

I can’t agree. The first documents are not of the sort presupposed by this hypothesis. Any man who has ever written a book knows that they are homogeneous, save for trifling textual discrepancies, and every man who can read at all knows that they are direct, sincere, and overwhelming. Everyone who knows enough history to be worth arguing with knows that there proceeded from the very origin of the thing the Christian Church, and that the Christian Church had authority, claiming such from its founder. You are free to say that the origin was a myth, or an illusion, and only Faith can answer you; but you are not free to say as an historian that, at the very origin, the Church was not founded, or that all the great development does not start from that one seed. The gospels proceed from the Church: not the Church from the gospels.

As to pre-history (in which is included the observation of many savages) the whole argument against the Faith lies in this, that men follow certain lines in religion, and that because the Catholic Church follows those lines in an exalted way, therefore it is man-made. I don’t agree. I say that if God intended to reveal Himself to man, and to give man an institution whereby that revelation would continue and have body and form substance, continuity, life, that institution would incorporate those things which man either remembered or had groped after or in his intimate nature desired.

It is a very old quarrel, and there is no solution save the Faith. You either look at the thing one way, or you look at it the other. But there is this much quite certain, that zf there be a Divine Institution on earth then its consonance with human habits, traditions and adumbrations of the truth, are not against the claim of that Institution, but heavily in its favour. You may call Our Lady the Egyptian Isis or the Chinese Mother- Goddess. But #f the Incarnation is true she is the Mother of God, and worthy of our worship.

On the old minor argument from the supposed superior prosperity and happiness of the non-Catholic as against the Catholic culture I will not linger. To-day one can only laugh: though in reading the cocksure nonsense of forty years ago and the timid objections of Catholics living within the anti-Catholic culture, one might also weep.

To the argument that the Catholic Church destroys freedom in the intelligence or in the character I am afraid I can only answer with a similar contempt. I know that all contempt is acid, and that no man drinks it to his profit; but it is honest truth that I cannot brew any other liquor out of such materials. Within the Catholic culture alone is general freedom of discussion to be found, because within that culture alone are first principles, constantly demanded, and because in that culture alone is Reason the ultimate test. In practice it is within the Catholic culture that you hear matters debated fully, with such a contempt for rank and wealth, the power of the police or of the popular press or of the lawyers, of common labels and uninvestigated affirmation, as a non-Catholic culture can hardly conceive. If you doubt it read the press and the books of our contemporary world in various nations. Take specimens, and decide.