4.Protestant Christianity
It is strangely to mistake the nature of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century to see in it a sort of semi-rationalism, the inconsistent exercise of free examination, or the revolutionary introduction of a foreign philosophical principle into the warp and woof of Christianity. You have only to read the biography of the Reformers and to make a slight analysis of their soul to form an entirely different idea of their work. The first and almost the only question which preoccupies and troubles them is an exclusively religious and practical question: "What must we do in order to be justified before God? How may we attain to peace of soul and to the assurance of pardon and of life eternal?" To find this peace, this pardon and salvation, which the Church could not procure for them, they determined to turn back and quench their thirst at the primitive sources of the Gospel. They went back to the original documents because they were persuaded that Christianity had been corrupted in the course of centuries; they wished to have it in its purity. Their whole reformation was to consist in this restoration of primitive truth.
But history never recommences. This return to the past and this re-reading of the Bible were accompanied by a religious experience and an act of consciousness which made of their enterprise something essentially new and original, and which rendered it immeasurably fruitful. It is unnecessary to seek elsewhere than in psychological experience the germ of Protestantism. It was in the humble cell of a convent at Erfurt and in the soul of a poor monk that the drama was first enacted from which sprang the revolution that has changed the face of the world.
Luther entered the convent with a faith in the authority of the Church and in the efficacy of its rites as serious and entire as that of any monk. "If it was possible," he said afterwards, "to reach Heaven by monkery, I was resolved to reach it by that road." For years he shrank from nothing that might render God propitious; he multiplied his acts of devotion and his works of penance. There is a striking analogy between the experiences of Luther under the monachal régime and those of Saul of Tarsus under the discipline of the Pharisaic Law. Thedénoûmentwas the same. For the second time, the system of pious works was found powerless to appease a conscience which roused against itself the rigour of its own ideal. This struggle against an external law could only exasperate the sense of sin to the point of despair. Paul and Luther, in precisely the same manner, experienced the inward emptiness and radical worthlessness of the religious system in which they had been trained. The more they had tried to realise it in its perfection, the more had they found it wanting. Catholicism, considered as a means of salvation, was rejected by the religious and moral consciousness of Luther, before it was condemned by exegesis and by reasoning. To reach this sentence without appeal the Saxon monk had but to maintain inflexible the demands of the divine law and to measure, without illusion, the abyss that separated him from God, and that no human works could fill. It was in this way that he found himself shut up to the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he found the peace that fled from him in the pure and simple acceptance of the glad tidings of the paternal love of God, in the confidence that He gives gratuitously that which man can never conquer for himself, namely, the remission of sins and the certitude of eternal life. What then is faith? Is it still intellectual adhesion to dogmas or submission to an external authority? No. It is an act of confidence, the act of a childlike heart, which finds with joy the Father whom it knew not, and Whom, without presumption, it is happy henceforth to hold with both its hands. That is what Luther found in Paul's great words: "The just shall live by faith." In this radical transformation of the notion of faith restored to its evangelical meaning is to be found the principle of the greatest religious revolution effected in the world since the preaching of Jesus.
Let us therefore here set forth the radical opposition between the Catholic principle and the Protestant principle in order that we may thoroughly understand the internecine war that was henceforth to be waged between them. In vain will eminent men in both camps, with the most generous and conciliatory intentions, arise and endeavour to find some middle ground, and effect a pacific reunion of the two halves of Christendom. All compromises, all diplomatic negotiations, will fail, because each of the two principles can only subsist by the negation of the other. Having attained to salvation, to full communion with God, independently of and in collision with the authority and the discipline of the sacerdotal Church, how could Luther recognise them any longer as divine and submit to them with sincerity and confidence? The ancient edifice had been the more thoroughly ruined, inasmuch as it had become useless and had been replaced. The originality of Luther consisted in this: his religious enfranchisement sprang from his own piety, and he founded his freedom on his sense of sonship, on the sense he had of his quality and titles as a child and heir of God. How could such a consciousness submit itself to the yoke again without denying itself? Catholicism, on the other hand, cannot be less intransigeant. To recognise in any degree whatever that it is possible to a Christian to enjoy pardon and the sense of the divine fatherhood apart from its dogmas and its priesthood, would not this be to abdicate all its pretensions, and to transform itself to the point of destruction?
No doubt, in actual life, this opposition is attenuated by the fact that in all Catholicism there is a latent Protestantism, and in all Protestantism a latent Catholicism. Between Port-Royal and Geneva, between Bossuet and Leibniz, between Leo XIII. and the Anglican Church, the distance seems but little. It is an illusion. Like two electricities of the same name, no sooner do they come into contact than they repel each other and separate more widely than before. In Catholicism Christianity tends to realise itself as a theocratic institution; it becomes an external law, a supernatural power, which, from without, imposes itself on individuals and on peoples. In Protestantism, on the contrary, Christianity is brought back from the exterior to the interior; it plants itself in the soul as a principle of subjective inspiration which, acting organically on individual and social life, transforms it and elevates it progressively without denaturalising and doing violence to it. Protestant subjectivity becomes spontaneity and liberty, just as necessarily as Catholic objectivity becomes supernaturalism and clerical tyranny. The religious element is no longer separated from the moral element; it no longer asserts itself as a truth or a morality superior to human truth and human morality. The intensity of the religious life is no longer measured by the number or the fervour of pious works or ritual practices, but by the sincerity and elevation of the life of the spirit. All asceticism is radically suppressed. Science is set free along with conscience; the political life of the peoples, as well as the inner life of the Christian. Man escapes from tutelage, and in all departments comes into possession of himself, into the full and free development of his being, into his majority.
This subjective character of a religion strictly moral stamps itself with energy on all the specific doctrines of Protestantism. It would be superfluous to dwell upon the doctrine of justification by faith; its subjective character is evident. No doubt the term justification has a legal colour and awakens the idea of a tribunal. But it must not be forgotten that this tribunal is nothing but the inner court where man and God meet each other face to face, where man is accused by his own conscience, and where the sentence which absolves him is the inward witness of the Holy Spirit, heard by him alone.
The doctrine of the sovereign authority of Scripture in matters of faith might seem at first sight to set up an external authority. And it is very true that certain Protestants have often understood it in the Catholic sense, and have employed it to exercise some violence on their own conscience or on the conscience of their brethren. But they never succeed for long; they soon fall into a too flagrant contradiction. The authority of the Bible is never separated in Protestantism from the right of the individual to interpret it freely, and from the personal duty of assimilating the truths he discovers in it. What therefore are those Protestants doing who attempt to set up a confession of faith as absolute and obligatory truth but imposing on their brethren their own subjective interpretation, and, consequently, denying to others the right which they exercise themselves? Nor let it be forgotten, on the other hand, that the obligation laid on each Christian to read the Bible and draw from it his faith is a perpetual and fruitful appeal to the energy of thought and to the autonomy of the inner life. The authority of Scripture, so far from being a menace to Christian liberty, is its invincible rampart. Not only has the Protestant Christian in the name of the Bible triumphed over eighteen centuries of tradition, but it is the Bible, an appeal to the Bible ever better understood, which has saved Protestant theology from scholasticism, which has prevented it from congealing in a confession of faith, and which, leaving the principle of the Gospel in an ideal transcendence in relation to all its historical expressions or realisations, has maintained, and still maintains, the spirit of reform in the Churches of the Reformation.
The doctrines of grace and of predestination, which are at the centre of Calvinism, have no other meaning. Souls religiously inert see in these doctrines nothing but an abuse of blind power, a sort of divinefatum, breaking every spring in the human soul. Nothing appears to be more oppressive or more immoral. But this is only an appearance. There is really no predestination for irreligious souls. This doctrine is but the expression of the inner basis of all true piety, which is nothing if it is not the sense, the feeling, of the presence and the sovereign and continuous action of God in each soul and in all the universe. No other sentiment gives so much spring and vigour to the human will, nothing raises it to such a height or makes it so invincible to all assaults from within and without. "If God be for us, who can be against us?" etc. (Rom. viii. 31-39). How is it that the Calvinistic Puritans of New England were the founders of modern liberty, and the Jesuits, those admirable theorisers on freewill, the precursors of all the servitudes? It is with predestination as it is with religion itself. Conceived as exterior to the life of the soul, it gives birth, no doubt, to a crushing despotism; conceived as an inward inspiration, sustaining the initiative and even the liberty of the individual, it becomes, in the Christian soul, the source of a force which nothing can break or subdue.
But the point at which the antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism becomes most patent is the doctrine of the natural priesthood of all Christians as opposed to that of the supernatural priesthood of a privileged clergy. The free and perpetual communion of believing souls with the Father is the foundation of the independence of each and of the fraternal equality of all. The tap-root of clericalism is cut. The individual is a priest before the interior altar of his conscience; the father is a priest in his household; the citizen, if so he wills, in the city.
The Catholic notion of dogma vanishes with all the rest. To speak of an immutable and infallible dogma, in Protestantism, is nonsense; that is to say, if we accept the dictionary definition of dogma—the promulgation by the Church of an absolute formula. The decision of a Church cannot have more authority than that Church itself. Now, no Protestant Church holds itself, or can hold itself without denying itself, to be infallible. How then could it communicate to its definitions an infallibility that it did not itself possess? Protestant confessions of faith are always conditioned in time, and can never be definitive; they are always revisable, consequently they are always liable to criticism and to reform. Thus ceases the solidification of traditional dogma. The old ice melts beneath the breath of knowledge and of piety. The river takes again its natural course, and evolution, under the control of a perpetual criticism, becomes the law of religious thought, as of all other human activities.
From these observations and analyses (necessarily abridged) the true nature of Protestantism will have become sufficiently clear. It is not a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in competition with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method; more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious souls a new régime. It is equally evident that Protestantism cannot be imprisoned in any definitive form. It leads to variety of formulas, rites, and associations as necessarily as the Catholic principle leads to unity. No limit can be set to its development. Always interior, invisible, ideal, the religious principle that it represents accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that man may pursue and in all the progress he may make. Nothing human is alien to it; nor is it alien to anything that is human. It solves the problem of liberty and authority as it is solved by free and ordered governments; it does not suppress either of the terms, but conciliates them by reducing authority to its pedagogicrôle, and by making the Christian spirit the soul and inner rule of liberty.
By very reason of its superiority, and of the conditions of general culture that it presupposes, this form of Christianity could only appear after all the others. The spirit can only become self-conscious by distinguishing itself from the body in which at first it seems as if diffused, and by opposing to it an energetic moral protest. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual" (1 Cor. xv. 46. Cf. Gal. iv. 1-5). This divine plan, which the apostle discovered in the ancient history of humanity, is repeated in the history of Christianity. The Messianic form corresponds to infancy, to that brief, happy age in which the impatient imagination nourishes itself on dreams and illusions which the experience of life soon dissipates without killing or even enfeebling the immortal hope at the heart of it. The Catholic form, which succeeds it, endures longer and corresponds to the age of adolescence, in which education is painfully prosecuted, and it demands a strict external discipline and masters whose authority must not be questioned or discussed. It was in this way that Catholic discipline and authority conducted the slow, laborious education of the pagan and barbarian world up to the sixteenth century.
But a moment must arrive when the work of education had succeeded, when the leading strings essential to childhood began to be a bondage and a hindrance. The pedagogic mission of the Church, like that of the family itself, had its limit and its term in the very function it fulfilled. That function was to make adult Christians and free men, not men without rule, but Christians having in themselves, in their conscience and their inner life, the supreme rule of their thought and conduct. This new age of autonomy, of firm possession of self, and of internal self-government, is that which Protestantism represents, and it could only commence in modern times—that is to say, with that general movement which, since the end of the Middle Ages, is leading humanity to an ever completer enfranchisement, and rendering it more universally and more individually responsible for its destinies.
It may be remarked that by this evolution, and under its Protestant form, the Christian principle was only returning to its pure essence and its primitive expression. It could only recognise itself, take cognisance of its true nature, separate itself from that which was not itself; it could only disencumber itself of every material, temporary, or local element, of all by which it had become surcharged in the course of ages, and which was neither religious nor moral, by remounting to its source, and by renewing its strength, through reflection and criticism, at its original springs. That is why Protestantism has taken the form of this return to the past, for in it Christianity does not surpass itself; it simply tries to know itself better and to become more faithful to its principle. In the consciousness of Christ, what did we find was the essence of the perfect and eternal piety? Nothing more than moral repentance, confidence in the love of the Father and the filial sense of His immediate, active presence in the heart: the indestructible foundation of our liberty, of our moral dignity, of our security, in face of the enigmas of the universe and the mysteries of death. Is it not to this eternal gospel that we must always return? To finish its course and complete its work, will humanity ever discover another viaticum that will better renew its courage and its hope?
5.Conclusion
Here I must stop. At the outset I spoke of a personal confession, and it seems to me as if it were nearly complete. In sketching the broad outlines of the religious history of humanity, I have had but one object; I have wished to show the men of my generation why I remain religious, Christian, and Protestant. I am religious because I am a man and do not desire to be less than human, and because humanity, in me and in my race, commences and completes itself in religion and by religion. I am Christian because I cannot be religious in any other way, and because Christianity is the perfect and supreme form of religion in this world. Lastly, I am Protestant, not from any confessional zeal, nor from racial attachment to the family of Huguenots, although I thank God daily that I was born in that family, but because in Protestantism alone can I enjoy the heritage of Christ—that is to say, because in it I can be a Christian without placing my conscience under any external yoke, and because I can fortify myself in communion with and in adoration of an immanent Deity by consecrating to Him the activity of my intellect, the natural affections of my heart, and find in this moral consecration the free expansion and development of my whole being.
Under this new form, divested of the swaddling-clothes by which at first it was bound, Christianity always seems to me to be best as it is, a spiritual and eternal principle, which brings peace to the soul, and which alone can give harmony and unity to the world. Nothing can contradict it except evil and error; everything serves and strengthens it. It is this principle which to my eyes manifests itself with ever-growing clearness in that heroic love of Science which, in our time, has created so many marvels and made so many martyrs; this it is which reveals itself to me in the works of all the great artists, in that ideal of beauty which enraptures them and brings such generous tears into our eyes; it is this which I honour and bless in the efforts of men who interest themselves in the future of humanity, and who in the political direction of their country or in the work of social education seek and find some means of raising and ameliorating the condition of the people: I salute it in the illustrious apostles of all great causes and in the obscure workers at all humble tasks, from the mother who teaches her children to join their hands and bend their knees before the Father in Heaven, to the preacher and the missionary who faithfully distribute to the hungry soul the bread of the Gospel, from the sister of charity who devotes her life to the solace of the sick and suffering, to the thinker who fathoms the mysteries of the heart and of the universe in order that he may shed on the paths of erring humanity some rays of light and joy.
Amid the twilight that envelopes us you predict the threatening night; I see the day that is about to dawn with a new century. Where you see nothing but discords, conflicts, and confusion, I see a concourse of forces which, coming from all points of the horizon, are still ignorant of each other, and, because ignorant, conflicting, but which, by these very conflicts and collisions, are labouring together in the common work of elevation and salvation: the mysterious work whose nature Christ defined in His Gospel, and whose motive-power he created by breathing into the human heart His own fraternal love. Since then there has been a secret inquietude at the heart of all egoisms, a sentence of condemnation on the brow of all abuses and all tyrannies. The modern world can never settle down again into repose, or fall asleep in evil and in slavery; it has had a vision it cannot forget; it has been touched with a flame that cannot be quenched. Many who are often the best collaborators in this work of redemption know not whence it comes and whither it tends; they even blaspheme the Christ who inspires it and the God who maintains it. They know not what they do, nor what they say: in their ignorance they calumniate that which is best both in their life and in themselves.
1.Definition
Dogma, in the strictest sense, is one or more doctrinal propositions which, in a religious society, and as the result of the decisions of the competent authority, have become the object of faith, and the rule of belief and practice.
It would not be enough to say that a religious society has dogmas as a political society has laws. For the first, it is a much greater necessity. Moral societies not only need to be governed; they need to define themselves and to explain theirraison d'être. Now, they can only do this in their dogma.
Dogma therefore is a phenomenon of social life. One cannot conceive either dogma without a Church, or a Church without dogma. The two notions are correlative and inseparable.
There are three elements in dogma: a religious element, which springs from piety; an intellectual or philosophic element, which supposes reflection and discussion; and an element of authority, which comes from the Church. Dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a law.
All the peoples of antiquity believed that their legislation came from heaven. In like manner all the Churches have believed, and many of them still believe, that their dogmas, in their official form, have been directly given to them by God Himself. The history of evolution, political and religious, has dissipated these illusions. Every law of righteousness and truth should, doubtless, be referred to the mysterious action of the Divine Spirit which works incessantly in the spirits of men; but, in its historical form, it bears, nevertheless, the stamp of the contingent conditions in which it is born. The genius of a people is nowhere more manifest than in its constitution and its laws, nor the soul and the original inspiration of a Church than in its dogmatic creations. The work always bears the moral impress of the workman.
It follows that a Church cannot claim for its dogma more authority than it possesses itself. Only a Church which is infallible can issue immutable dogmas. When Protestantism sets up such a pretension, it falls into a radical contradiction with its own principle, and that contradiction ruins all attempts of this kind.
In Catholicism the theory of the immutability of dogmas is opposed to history; in Protestantism it is opposed to logic. In both cases the affirmation is shown to be illusory. It is with dogmas, so long as they are alive, as it is with all living things; they are in a perpetual state of transformation. They only become immutable when they are dead, and they begin to die when they cease to be studied for their own sakes—that is, to be discussed.
Dogma, therefore, which serves as a law and visible bond to the Church, is neither the principle nor the foundation of religion. It is not primitive; it never appears until late in the history of religious evolution. "There were poets and orators," says Voltaire, "before there was a grammar and a rhetoric." Man chanted before he reasoned. Everywhere the prophet preceded the rabbi, and religion theology. It may be said, no doubt, that dogma is in religion, since it comes out of it; but it is in it as the fruits of Autumn are in the blossoms of Spring. Dogmas and fruits, in order to form and ripen, need long summers and much sunshine. The best way to describe their nature will be to trace their genesis.
2.The Genesis of Dogma
Dogma has its tap-root in religion. In every positive Religion there is an internal and an external element, a soul and a body. The soul is inward piety, the movement of adoration and of prayer, the divine sensibility of the heart; the body consists of external forms, of rites and dogmas, institutions and codes. Life consists in the organic union of these two elements. Without the soul, religion is but an empty form, a mere corpse. Without the body, which is the expression and the instrument of the soul, religion is indiscernible, unconscious, and unrealised.
Which of these two elements is primitive and generative? The answer is not doubtful. Modern psychology has learnt it in a manner never to be forgotten from Schleiermacher, Benjamin Constant, and Alexander Vinet. The principle of all religion is in piety, just as the principle of language is in thought, although it is not possible now to conceive of them as being separate. Consider a moment. That religion which time and custom have transformed, perhaps, into a mechanical round of ceremonies, or into a system of abstractions and metaphysical theories, what was it at first? Trace it to its source, and you will find that these cold blocks of lava once came burning hot from an interior fire.
But this is the parting of the ways. This is the point at which religious minds separate into widely different groups.
Regarding religion as a saving institution in the form of a visible organised Church maintained by God and provided with all the means of grace, Catholicism was bound to end in a sort of mechanical psychology, and to explain the sentiment of piety as the inward effect of the outward and supernatural institution. This is done by Bellarmine and de Bonald, the most consistent of the Catholic theologians. Protestantism, on the contrary, which makes of the faith of the heart, of the immediate and personal relation of the soul to God, the very principle of justification, and of all religious life, was bound none the less logically to end, by analysis, in a more profound psychology, and to refer to an inward principle all the forms and manifestations of religion. Religious history thus becomes homogeneous, and runs parallel with that of all the other activities of the human mind.
None the less, this subjectivity of the religious principle frightens many good men. Persons devoted to practice, and unconsciously dominated by the habits and necessities of ecclesiastical government and religious teaching, hesitate to enter upon a road so naturally opened. As, from generation to generation, religion has been taught and propagated externally by the Church, the family, or special agents, it is impossible for them to imagine that it was not always so, and not to trace back to God Himself that chain or tradition of external instruction. In which they are certainly right. Their only error, but it is a grave one, is to represent God as an ordinary teacher, the first of a series, who once acted, like the rest of them, upon His pupils from without; whereas God works in all souls, acts and teaches without ceasing through all human masters, and is present throughout the whole religious education of humanity.
Who does not see that to represent things otherwise is to remain in the crudest and least religious of anthropomorphisms? At bottom, these men are afraid of losing revelation, which they rightly judge to be inseparable from the very idea of religion. They object that piety and the awakening of the religious sentiment must have an objective cause, and that that cause can only be a revelation of God Himself. Nothing is more true; but this revelation which is effected without, in the events of Nature or of History, is only known within, in and by the human consciousness. This inward inspiration alone enables religious men to interpret Nature and History religiously. Now, this interpretation is made by their intellect and according to the laws and conditions which regulate it. The religious phenomenon therefore has not two moments only, the objective revelation as a cause and the subjective piety as an effect; it has three, which always follow each other in the same order: the inner revelation of God, which produces the subjective piety of man, which, in its turn, engenders the historical religious forms, rites, formularies of faith, sacred books, social creations, which we can know and describe as external facts. It will be seen what an error they commit, what a mistake they make, who identify the third term with the first, suppressing the second, which is the necessary link and forms the transition between the other two. Whoever will fathom this little problem in psychology, and reflect upon it with a little attention, will see that all religious revelation of God must necessarily pass through human subjectivity before arriving at historical objectivity.
*****
Passing now from the intellectual interpretation to the intellectual expression of religion, and noting the successive stages through which it must necessarily advance towards dogma, I remark once more that man's first language is that of the imagination. The imagination of the child or of the savage animates, dramatises, and transfigures everything. It spontaneously engenders vivid and poetic images. At the beginning, religion, consisting chiefly of emotions, presentiments, movements of the heart, clothed itself in mythologic forms.... But the age of individual reflection comes. The image tends to change into the idea. Men interpret, define, translate it. The religious myth is replaced by the religious doctrine. These are at first entirely personal interpretations. Nevertheless, these opinions desire to propagate themselves, to become general, and, as they are imperfect and diverse, they engender conflicts which threaten to become schisms. Myths, appealing to the imagination merely, and only professing to translate the common emotion, draw souls together and fuse them into a real unity; individual reason, private exegesis, inevitably separates them. But the consciousness of the community, thus menaced, naturally reacts by the instincts of conservation. There is therefore a struggle between the two, and out of this conflict dogma is born.
A new element must intervene. There must be a Church. Now, all religions do not form churches. The phenomenon is only produced in the universalist and moral religions. Strictly speaking, there is no Church except in Christianity; and no dogmas save Christian dogmas. In ancient societies, where religion was confounded either with the State, or with the nationality, the religious unity was maintained and guaranteed by the same means as the political unity. There were no dogmas, because dogmas were of no use. As much may be said of Hebraism and of Islam: in them there were rites, external signs and seals, which sufficed to weld and to maintain the religious bond.
Dogma only arises when the religious society, distinguishing itself from the civil, becomes a moral society, recruiting itself by voluntary adherents. This society, like every other, gives to itself what it needs in order to live, to defend itself, and propagate itself. Doctrine necessarily becomes for it an essential thing; for in its doctrine it expresses its soul, its mission, its faith. It is necessary also that it should carry its doctrine to a degree at once of generality and precision high enough to embrace and to translate all the moments of its religious experience and to eliminate all alien and hostile elements. Controversy springs up and threatens to rend it. The Church then chooses and formulates a definition of the point contested: it enacts it as the adequate expression of its faith, and sanctions it with all its objective authority: dogma is born. From that moment also the two correlative notions oforthodoxyandheresyare formed. Orthodoxy is official and collective doctrine; heresy is individual doctrine or interpretation.... By and by symbols or confessions of faith are formed, and these become the standards of faith and practice in the various churches that adopt them.
This long evolution is fully justified in the eyes of reason. It is a movement of the mind as legitimate as it is necessary. The germ must become a tree, the child grow to manhood, the image be transformed into the idea, and poetry give place to prose. It is possible to be mistaken as to the nature, origin, and value of dogma, but not as to its necessity. The Church may make a different use of it in the future, but it will not be able to dispense with it, for the doctrinal form of religion answers to an imperative need of the epoch of intellectual growth at which we have arrived. No one can either reverse or arrest its development....
The word dogma is anterior to Catholicism. It had two senses in Greek antiquity: a political and authoritarian sense, designating the decrees of popular assemblies and of kings; this is the meaning which dominates and characterises the Catholic notion of dogma. But the word had also in the schools of Greece an essentially philosophical and doctrinal meaning; it designated the characteristic doctrine of each school. The Protestant Churches have inherited this latter sense of the word: it is in perfect harmony with the spirit and the principle of Protestantism. Dogma, in the Protestant sense, means the doctrinal type generally received in a Church, and publicly expressed in its liturgy, its catechisms, its official teaching, and especially in its Confession of Faith.[1]
[1] Originally the word dogma signified a command, a precept, and not a truth (Luke ii. 1, and the Septuagint of Dan. ii. 13; vi. 8; Esther iii. 9; 2 Maccab. x. 8, etc.). Ignatius of Antioch still uses the word in this sense. It is not until towards the time of Athanasius or of Augustine that it begins to be used of the doctrinal decisions of the Fathers, the Councils, and the Pope. (Cf. also Acts xv. 28, 29. This is afterwards called a dogma, the only time it is used in the N.T. with reference to a decision of the Church.)
3. The Religious Value of Dogma
The intolerance of Catholic dogmatism has had consequences so revolting, and, in Protestantism, wherever this dogmatism has revived, it has given rise to conflicts so sterile and so lamentable, that certain minds have gone so far as to deny the utility of dogma in the largest sense of the word, and have wished to suppress all doctrinal definition of the Christian Faith. To call dogma either divine in itself or evil in itself is to go to an unwarrantable extreme. In religious development, whether individual or social, it has an organic place that cannot be taken away from it, and a practical importance that cannot be contested.
Religious faith is a phenomenon of consciousness. God Himself is its author and its cause; but it has for psychological factors all the elements of consciousness—feeling, volition, idea. It must never be forgotten that these verbal distinctions are pure abstractions; that these elements co-exist, and are enveloped and implicated with each other in the unity of the ego. In the living reality there has never existed feeling which did not carry within it some embryo of an idea and translate itself into some voluntary movement.... As it is impossible for thought not to manifest itself organically by gesture or language, so it is impossible for religion not to express itself in rites and doctrines.
No doubt, in the first period of physical life, sensation dominates, and at thedébutof religious life, feeling and imagination. But as science springs from sensation, so religious doctrine springs from piety. To say that "Christianity is a life, therefore it is not a doctrine" is to reason very badly. We should rather say, "Christianity is a life and therefore it engenders doctrine;" for man cannot live his life without thinking it. The two things are not hostile; they go together. In apostolic times the greatest of missionaries was the greatest of theologians. St. Augustine at the end of the old world, Calvin, Luther, Zwingle, at the beginning of the modern world, followed the example of St. Paul. When the sap of piety fails, theology withers. Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a decline of religious life. Spencer, by re-opening the springs of piety, renewed the streams of theology. Without Pietism Germany would have had no Schleiermacher; without the religious revival at the beginning of this century we should have had neither Samuel Vincent nor Alexander Vinet.
If the life of a Church be compared to that of a plant, doctrine holds in it the place of the seed. Like the seed, doctrine is the last to be formed; it crowns and closes the annual cycle of vegetation; but it is necessary that it should form and ripen; for it carries within it the power of life and the germ of a new development. A Church without dogmas would be a sterile plant. But let not the partisans of dogmatic immutability triumph: let them pursue the comparison to the end: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground anddie," said Jesus, "it bears no fruit." To be fruitful, dogma must be decomposed—that is to say, it must mix itself unceasingly with the evolution of human thought and die in it; it is the condition of perpetual resurrection.
Without being either absolute, or perfect in itself, then, dogma is absolutely necessary to the propagation and edification of the religious life. The Church has a pedagogic mission that could not be fulfilled without it. It bears souls, nourishes them and brings them up. Its rôle is that of a mother. In that educative mission, we may add, the mother finds the principle and aim of her authority, the reason and the limit of her tutelage. In this sense, dogma is never without authority. But this same pedagogic authority is neither absolute nor eternal; it has a double limit, in the nature of the pupil's soul, which it ought to respect, and in the end it would attain, the making of free men, adult Christians, sons of God in the image of Christ and in immediate relationship to the Father. If dogma is the heritage of the past transmitted by the Church, it is the children's duty first to receive it, and then to add to its value by continually reforming it, since that is the only way to keep it alive and to render it truly useful and fruitful in the moral development of humanity. It is therefore to this idea of necessary dogma, but of dogma necessarily historical and changing, that we must henceforth accustom ourselves; and we shall most easily habituate ourselves to it by tracing its evolution in the past.
1.Three Prejudices
I here encounter three prejudices which are, I think, the most inveterate in the world. The first is that dogmas are immutable; the second, that they die fatally the moment they are touched by criticism; the third, that they form the essence of religion, which rises or falls with them. I wish to show that dogmas have neither this pretended immobility nor this delicate fragility; that they live by an inner life extraordinarily resistant and fecund, and that the criticism of dogmas, so far from injuring the Christian religion, frees it from the chains of the past and permits it to manifest its marvellous gift of rejuvenescence and adaptation to circumstances.
The proof that dogmas are not immutable lies in the fact that they have a history. That history is as full of conflicts, controversies, revolutions, as the history of philosophy.... One Church has said of its dogmas what a Jesuit General said of his Order:sint ut sunt aut non sint! It is an illusion. Momentarily arrested at one point, the movement begins again at another. In one half of Christendom, and certainly the most living half, criticism of dogma has never ceased since the sixteenth century. Even in the bosom of the Catholic Church, its most skilful advocates, the Moehlers and the Newmans, unable to deny that Catholicism is not to-day what it was in the first centuries, have made this strange concession to history; they have applied to dogmas the theory of development. At Paris in 1682 the dogma of the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome would have been condemned as an error. Since 1870 the orthodoxy of 1682 has become the gravest of heresies. There is no fiction more evident than that of the immutability of dogmas, whether in the Catholic or in the Protestant Churches. Like all other manifestations of life, they have an evolution as natural as it is inevitable. The proof that dogmas are not religion, and that criticism does not kill them but transforms them, will appear in what I now proceed to say.
2.The Two Elements in Dogma; and its Historical Evolution
Dogma is the language spoken by faith. In it there are two elements: a mystical and practical element, the properly religious element; this is the living and fruitful principle of dogma: then there is an intellectual or theoretical element, a judgment of mind, a philosophical proposition serving at once as an envelope and as an expression of religion.
Now, it is not an arbitrary relation which unites and amalgamates these two elements in dogma; it is an organic and necessary relation. Go back for a moment to the origin of religious phenomena, and to the formation of the first and simplest doctrinal formulas. In presence of one of the great spectacles of Nature, man, feeling his weakness and dependence with respect to the mysterious power revealed in it, trembled with fear and hope. This is primitive religious emotion. But this emotion necessarily implies, for thought, a relation between the subject which experiences it and the object that has caused it. Now, thought, once awakened, will necessarily translate this relation into an intellectual judgment. Thus, wishing to express this relation, the believer will exclaim,e.g."God is great!" marking the infinite disproportion between his being and the universal being which made him tremble.[1] He obeys the same necessity which makes him ordinarily express his thought in language. Religious emotion then is transformed in the mind into the notion of a relation,i.e.into an intellectual notion which becomes the expressive image or representation of the emotion. But the notion and the emotion are essentially different in nature. In expressing it, and thanks to the imagination, the notion may renew or fortify the emotion, and dogma may awaken piety; but the two must not be confounded. The notion is like an algebraic expression which ideally represents a given quantity, but it is not the quantity itself. This must be clearly kept in mind if we are to avoid the most disastrous confusions. In religion and in dogma the intellectual element is simply the expression or envelope of the religious experience....
[1] It might be supposed that I make of this elementary experience the primary root whence all dogmas, including the Christian, have sprung by a process of evolution. Nothing of the kind. This is but a particular example. The revelation of Nature is the principle of the dogmas of the Religions of Nature. Christianity has behind it another revelation and other experiences: the revelation of God and of a higher life, in the historical appearance of Jesus Christ. Let a man morally prepared to hear the Gospel begin to follow Him, listen to His words, penetrate His soul, comprehend His death, and he will cry out: "God is Love!" as the spectator of Nature was supposed to exclaim: "God is great!" And this new proposition, translating a new religious relation, will, in its turn, become the principle of all Christian dogmas.
The intellectual will therefore be the variable element in dogma. It is the matter united to the germ, and it is ceaselessly transformed by the very effect of the movement of life. The reason of this is simple. We said just now that a religious emotion, like every other, translates itself into a notion which fixes the relation of the subject to the object, implied in the emotion itself. But what will this notion be? With what materials, with what concepts, will the religious man construct it? Clearly with those at his disposal. His religious formula will depend on his state of intellectual culture. A child, he will think and speak religiously as a child. Religious reason and language have followed the same steps as the general reason....
I am well aware that many Christians imagine that God has revealed to us dogmas in the Bible, and that they will accuse me of denying revelation. God forbid! We believe with all our soul in Divine Revelation and in its particular action in the souls of prophets and apostles, and especially in Jesus Christ. Only, the question is whether the revelation of God has consisted of doctrines and dogmatic formulas. No. God does nothing needless, and since these doctrines and formulas can be and have been conceived by human intelligence, He has left to it the care of elaborating them. God, entering into commerce and contact with a human soul, has produced in him a certain religious experience whence, afterwards, by reflection, the dogma has sprung. That therefore which constitutes revelation, that which ought to be the norm of our life, is the creative and fruitful religious experience which first arose in the souls of the prophets, of Christ, and of His apostles. We may be tranquil. So long as this experience shall be renewed in Christian souls, Christian dogmas may be modified, but they will never die. But why should we retain dogmas which, in the nature of things, must always be imperfect? Why not have religion pure and simple without dogmas? What would happen if we listened to this cry for pure unmixed religion? By suppressing Christian dogma you would suppress Christianity; by discarding all religious doctrine you would destroy religion. How many great and eternal things there are which never exist, for us, in a pure and isolated state! All the forces of Nature are in this case. Thought, in order to exist, must incarnate itself in language. Words cannot be identified with thought, but they are necessary to it. The hero in the romance, who was said to be unable to think without speaking was not so ridiculous as was once supposed, for that hero is everybody. The soul only reveals itself to us by the body to which it is united. Who has ever seen life apart from living matter? It is the same with the religious life and the doctrines and rites in which it manifests itself. A religious life which did not express itself would neither know itself nor communicate itself. It is therefore perfectly irrational to talk of a religion without dogma and without worship. Orthodoxy is a thousand times right as against rationalism or mysticism, when it proclaims the necessity for a Church of formulating its faith into a doctrine, without which religious consciousnesses remain confused and undiscernible.
The mistake that orthodoxy sometimes makes is in denying or desiring to arrest the constant metamorphosis to which dogma, like all living things, is subject. So long as they are alive, dogmas have the faculty of changing and evolving. How is their evolution effected? The analogy between dogma and language will help us to the answer. A language is modified in three ways: (1) By disuse,i.e.by the disappearance of words whose contents have vanished; (2) by intussusception,i.e.by the faculty which words have, without changing their form, of acquiring new significations; (3) by the renaissance of old or the creation of new words,i.e.by neologisms.
Nothing is easier than to establish these three kinds of variations in the history of dogmas. Some religious formulas perish from disuse; others acquire a new content; while still others are themselves renewed. Many doctrines that were once alive and prevalent are seldom heard of now; they gradually passed out of use. There is hardly a dogma dating from the seventeenth or the sixteenth century that has now the same signification that it had at the beginning. The new wine that has been put into them has modified the old skins. There are limits, however, to the elasticity of words and formulas. There comes a moment when the new wine bursts the old skins, and when the Church has to construct other vessels to receive it. In this way neologisms spring up in languages, and new dogmas in theology. In the sixteenth century the dogmas of Justification by Faith and of the universal priesthood were resuscitated with a new energy. The verses of Horace, on which I might appear to have been commenting, are eternally true:
Ut silvæ foliis pronos mutantur in annos,*****Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere cadentqueQuæ nunc sunt in honore, vocabula...*****