4.A Necessary Distinction
At the close of this long meditation, one thing seems to me very clear, the necessity, or rather the obligation under which I stand henceforth of distinguishing between the purely moral essence of Christianity and all its historical expressions or realisations, even the highest and most faithful of them. If religion is an inward life, a real and felt relation between God and man, and if Christianity is that life carried to a higher degree, it is certain that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, must have the two characteristics of all living things. Life is a force, ideal in its essence, real in its manifestations. It can only manifest itself in the organisms that it creates and animates. But, while incarnating itself in its works, it does not exhaust itself or remain imprisoned in any of them. Jesus was well aware of this when He compared His gospel to the leaven which raises the dough and to the seed which germinates in the soil into which it falls.
This necessary distinction will neither be made nor admitted by everybody. Many who concede it in theory deny it in practice. Protestants smile at the Catholics, who identify Christianity with the Church. But while admitting and making the distinction, when it comes to particular churches and particular systems of dogmas, they resist and protest in their turn, if it becomes necessary to apply it to the Bible, and to distinguish between the Word and its human and historical expression.
Should we go further still? May we, ought we in all fidelity to apply the distinction to the Gospel of Christ itself and to the primitive form in which it has come down to us? Most of those who have accompanied us thus far will now recoil and leave us. They will employ against us the very same arguments which appear to them so pitiful when used with respect to the Church and to the Bible. For my part, I cannot comprehend this fear of the freedom left to criticism. It seems to me impossible to deny that in the teaching of Jesus there are parts which are uncertain, things which have been either badly understood or badly reported, an oriental and contingent form which needs to be translated into our modern languages. Who does not see that neither in His language nor in His thought is there anything absolute? Both of them are constantly determined by the generally received ideas of His time, the state of mind of His interlocutors; and unless you desire to deny that Jesus was a man of His age and of His race, how can you abstract Him from His environment and attribute to Him ideas which have neither date nor place? I have already compared Christianity to an oak which has lived and grown for eighteen centuries, and the Gospel to the acorn from which it sprang. But in that acorn itself, as in the tree, it is manifest that there are two things: a principle of life, and some matter borrowed from the Hebraic soil, with which the creating principle was obliged to amalgamate itself in order to enter into history and to become fruitful. The characteristic of life is to render possible and to institute the constant exchange of the materials with which it builds up its works. When this exchange has ceased, life has disappeared. If the Gospel of Jesus were something fixed and finished like a code of laws or a collection of formulas, it would no longer be a power of life. His words defy the centuries and never wither; they are truly eternal, because they leave free and do not imprison in a rigid and immutable letter the spirit of life which animates them.
Arrived at this point of view, I see the relations between Christianity and historical criticism change completely, and find myself once more in the greatest religious security. Criticism will always be a just cause of alarm to those who elevate any historical and contingent form whatever into the absolute, for the excellent reason that an historical phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never have the characteristics of the absolute. But criticism can do nothing against the Christian principle, which, brought back to the consciousness, always disengages itself from the relative and fleeting expressions in which it has clothed itself by the way. Criticism makes it to appear again in its ideal purity and eternal worth. Far from being injurious, it becomes necessary to it. It is not doubtful that the teaching and the work of Christ, having been preserved in the simple oral tradition for half a century, have not been transmitted to us without some corruptions and some legendary elements. What then does historical criticism, with all its rigour, do? Nothing but purify this uncertain tradition, remove the veils, set forth more certainly the authentic soul of Christ, and, consequently, place the Christian principle in its surest, clearest light.
What has been said of the Master's teaching is still more true of that of His disciples. The Christian plants have all sprung from the same seed; but they vary according to the soil in which they grow. They are all of the same species, but in that species there are innumerable varieties. How could the external result possibly have been the same whether the divine seed fell into the heart of a simple fisherman of Galilee, or a rabbi of genius, or a thinker brought up in the school of Alexandria? Could you possibly have the same Church, the same theology, the same ritual in Arabia and in Greece, among a savage race and in the university circles of Germany, at Rome or in England, in the Middle Ages in a feudal society, and in our democracies in a time of emancipated reason and free government?
And here it will be convenient to pause and reflect a moment on that wonderful variety in the historical forms of Christianity, none of which are perfect and none contemptible. A superficial examination may draw from this spectacle a lesson of indifference; a more conscientious and attentive study finds in it an opposite lesson, the lesson of an ever-pressing obligation on both individuals and churches never to repose in a deceitful satisfaction, but to progress unceasingly; for Christianity is nothing if it is not in us at once an ideal which is never reached and an inner force which ever urges us beyond ourselves.
5.The Corruptions of the Christian Principle
The differences which separate the historical forms of Christianity are, like those of religion in general, of two kinds: there are differences of kind and differences of degree. The differences of kind are those which arise from diversity of races, languages, civilisations, temperaments, genius. The differences of degree are those connected with the very intensity and purity of the Christian faith and life. Churches and peoples are diversified at once by their constitution and by their degree of culture and of moral life. It goes without saying that these two classes of differences are not juxtaposed; they are mixed incessantly and complicated endlessly. It remains none the less true that they provoke and legitimate two sorts of judgment. The first are accepted with tolerance and sympathy, since it would not be reasonable to blame a man for the colour of his skin. But the second may and should be discussed and analysed, for they imply intellectual errors or moral defects, the corruption or the weakness of the Christian principle, and they can only be corrected and remedied by discussion and criticism.
The Christian seed is never sown in a neutral and empty soil. No soul, no social state, is atabula rasa. The place is always occupied by anterior traditions of ideas, rites, or customs, by institutions in possession. Christianity cannot therefore root itself anywhere without entering into conflict with the regnant powers, without giving battle to prejudices, manners, and superstitions which naturally resist, and which, when conquered, spring up again in other forms in the victorious religion. Take the Ebionite Christianity of the first centuries: what is it but a mixture, a compromise between Jewish and Christian elements? What shall we say of the Catholic Church after Constantine? Is it not true that, in the religious transformation at that time effected, there was a double and mutual conversion, and that it is hard to say whether the pagan world was more modified by Christianity or Christianity more deeply penetrated and invaded by the manners and the religion that it was supposed to replace?
In this order the most striking victories are never complete. Even after the most radical conversion, the old man survives, at least by its roots, in the new man. The Pharisee long survived in St. Paul after he became an Apostle of Christ. The same in human societies: political or moral revolutions never abolish the past. After those great battles in which passions and interests have often as much weight as noble ideas and generous sentiments, there is always established a sort of equilibrium by mutual concessions and spontaneous alliances between the vanquished and the victorious tendencies. Hence come what we have named the corruptions of the Christian principle in the course of historical Christianity, for which alone should be reserved the name of heresies.
It must not be imagined, however, that these corruptions or heresies, against which it is the duty of Christian criticism ceaselessly to protest, are arbitrary things, or that their number is unlimited. On the contrary, they fall, and must necessarily fall, into two categories. The cause of the corruptions of the Christian principle in social life can only be found in the previous tradition, in one of the moral and religious tendencies that Christianity aspires to conquer and replace. Now, these tendencies may be reduced to two: the tendencies of the religions of Nature, or Pagan; and the tendency of the legal, or Jewish, religion. Closely examine all that has disfigured or that still disfigures historical Christianity, and you will see that each of these corruptions is connected, by its character, with a Jewish or a Pagan root. The Gospel as the religion of free spirit and pure morality has never had, and could never have had, any other enemies than Judaism or Paganism, ever ready to spring up in its bosom and transform it either into the religion of Nature or into the religion of the Law.
Christianity, for example, in its pure essence, implies the absoluteness of God—that is to say, His perfect spirituality and His perfect independence. Hence, worship in spirit and in truth, the only worship that can be universal, the only one that corresponds to the Christian idea of God. Therefore every tendency, even in Christianity itself, to shut up God in a phenomenal form, to bind Him to something material, local, or temporary, to blend the Creator with the creature, or to fill up the gap between them by a hierarchy of divine beings which, under pretext of serving us as intermediaries, interrupt our free and immediate communion with the Father, is, properly speaking, a resurrection of Paganism, and a return to idolatry. Paganism and idolatry, of which we pretend to have so much horror, are simply the localisation and materialisation, more or less conscious, of the divine spirit and of divine grace, whatever may be the visible organ to which you bind them, or on which you make their action to depend,—Pope of Rome or Pythoness of Delphi, images of gods or images of virgin and of saints, sacramental liturgies, the deification of a church, a priesthood, or a book.
Take another example: Christianity is not only the liberty of God; it is also His holiness; it is pure morality placed above all the instincts of nature; it is, finally, the unity of morality and religion. Hence, all that tends to break this unity, every blow at the divine law, every attempt to cultivate religious emotion apart from conscience, all magic and mystagogy, æsthetic piety, religious romanticism, Christianity à la Chateaubriand, sensuous mysticism,—these essays, so numerous in our day, at philosophic or at literary gnosis, these new religions without repentance or conversion, all these cults without any element of moral sanctification—these are so many corruptions of the Christian principle, and consequences more or less immediate of the Paganism always latent in the human heart.
By the side of this Pagan is the Judaising heresy. Christianity is not only moral law and intransigeant holiness; it is also unconditional love, grace, mercy, the inward action of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man in order to produce in it that which He desires to find, and to realise that which His law commands; it is everything that scandalised Pharisaism in the teaching and conduct of Jesus in regard to the sinful and the lost: pardon without reproach, rehabilitation and salvation through repentance and affection, the sincere impulse of the heart that has been raised above external works; the very opposite of legal compacts, meritorious and atoning virtue, formalist religion and ritual piety. All that tends to separate the Father from the child; that places the liberty and virtue of man outside and apart from God as having some merit in His sight; all Pelagianism, every theory of salvation by works, every condition laid down to divine grace except faith to receive it: adhesion to a doctrinal formula, sacramental usages, priestly absolution, outward mortification, asceticism whether monkish or puritanical, which divides morality and, in the name of a fantastic sanctity, introduces dualism into the work of God,—all this should be called by its right name; it should be taken for what it really is—a relapse into the legal and formalist spirit of Jewish Pharisaism.
Finally, I see on what condition Christianity may remain faithful to itself while realising itself in history. It is only by an incessant struggle of the Christian principle against all the elements of the past which find, alas, in human propensities, and in the inertia of the multitude, a complicity so constant and effectual. So far from religious indifference being permissible, critical action and Christian prayer become, in every church and every life, permanent duties. I now understand the paradox of Christ: "I am not come to send peace on the earth, but a sword." For the Christian principle, in fact, war is life. To cease to fight is to succumb; it is to allow yourself to be submerged by the rising tide of human superstitions; it is to die. Who does not see the danger of allowing Christianity to become absorbed in one church form, Christian truth in one formula, the Christian principle in one of its particular realisations? All these contingent expressions, being imperfect, must be reformed sooner or later. How can they be unless the spirit of Christianity disengages itself without ceasing and floats above them as an ideal? For eighteen centuries a river of life has flowed through human history. Break down the barriers which fanaticism and superstition are always setting up athwart its course. If the waters cease to flow they stagnate, and corrupt and poison the very land it was their mission to fertilise.
1.The Evolution of the Christian Principle
The distinction between the Christian principle and its successive realisations renders it easy to resolve the question, formerly so much debated, as to the perfectibility of Christianity. It is perfect piety, plenary union with God, consequently the absolute and definitive Religion. But, regarded in its historical evolution, not only is it perfectible, but it must ceaselessly progress, since, for it, to progress is to realise itself. The germ could not be perfected in its essence, as germ and ideal type of the tree that it potentially contains. But the tree itself only comes into existence by the development of the germ. No reform, no progress, no perfecting, could raise Christianity above itself—that is to say, above its principle; for these reforms and this progress only bring it into closer conformity with that principle—that is, make it more Christian. On the other hand, the principle itself must enter into evolution in history in order to manifest its originality and its force, to realise in individual and social life, in the realm of thought and in the realm of action, in a word in the whole of civilisation, all its virtualities and all its consequences. Jesus saw this when He spoke the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matt. xiii. 31-32).
This distinction has another advantage. It alone permits the Christian thinker to be equitable in his judgments in regard to all religious forms, to place himself at a truly historical point of view, and to reconcile, without weakness and without violence, what is due to truth and what to charity. Every sincere endeavour to express or to realise Christianity in a system or in a church becomes respectable so soon as you know how to discover in it, under formulas however strange and practices however gross, some effects of the Christian principle or some signs of its presence. If disdain and contempt are not permissible with regard to any type of Christianity however different from our own, neither is illusion to be tolerated with regard to our own church or to our personal piety. Perfection is nowhere to be found. Each community may repeat, and the larger, older, and more numerous it becomes the more will it need to repeat, the words of the Apostle Paul: "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended," etc. (Phil. iii. 13, 14). The habit we have got into of putting all the truth on our side and all error on the side of others, of thus opposing light and darkness, not only falsifies the judgment; it sours the heart and poisons piety, it dries up the feeling of fraternity, and is the perpetual sign of individual or collective vanity. Let each examine himself, let him judge his church without complacence in the light and spirit of Christ; he will soon attain to more humility and truth. He will never identify any particular church or its dogma with Christianity itself. However pure its teaching, however generous its deeds, he will reckon that this is, after all, but a commencement of Christianity, a mere nothing compared with what the Christian principle should have accomplished in the world in eighteen centuries.
Such is the feeling with which we should approach the history of Christianity. The field is vast; the vegetation in it is infinite; we must content ourselves with incompleteness. Being neither able nor desirous to say everything, I have been obliged to seek a commanding point of view from which it would be possible to take in that history in its entirety, and to take a bird's-eye view of the course it has followed. Faithful to this idea, namely, that the Christian principle is like leaven or a seed thrown into a gross, heavy mass of anterior traditions which it was meant gradually to raise and to transform, it is this struggle and this progress that I desire especially to describe. I shall endeavour to show how Christianity, always borrowing its forms from the environment in which it realises itself, after enduring them for a time, subsequently frees itself from and triumphs over the inferior and temporary elements which fetter it, and manifests from age to age a greater independence and a purer and higher spirituality. This progress is slow, obscure, oft interrupted, hindered by reactions or by moments of arrest; none the less striking, however, does it appear when, rising above these secondary complications, one measures the distance between the points of departure and arrival. Not only has Christianity never been better understood than in our own day, but never were civilisation or the soul of humanity taken in their entirety more fundamentally Christian. When one follows the history of Christianity from this higher point of view, one sees that it has passed through three very distinct phases and assumed three essentially different forms: the Jewish or Messianic, the Graeco-Roman or Catholic, the Protestant or modern, form. Let us see how it has passed from the one to the other.
2.Jewish, or Messianic Christianity
The first of these periods is usually omitted or suppressed. Being unable to admit that Catholicism is not the work of Christ and the apostles, or that the Church has varied its dogma or its institutions, Catholic theologians naïvely imagine that the first Christian communities of Jerusalem and Antioch resembled those of Rome, Milan, and Lyons in the fourth century; that Peter was the first of the popes and exercised for five-and-twenty years the supreme pontificate; that the apostles appointed bishops everywhere as their successors and the heirs of their power. In this way the history of Christianity became, in the Catholic tradition, a tissue of legends.
The theologians of Protestantism arrived by another road at an analagous conclusion. Under the influence of the dogma of the verbal inspiration of the New Testament, they were led to make of apostolic Christianity an ideal and abstract type which all the ages ought to force themselves to imitate and reproduce. And, as they profess to have returned to this type both in regard to ideas and to institutions and morals, they have made of this apostolic period the first chapter of the history of Protestantism, just as the Catholics have made of it the first chapter of the history of Catholicism. In both cases, it loses all distinct physiognomy and all reality.
By dissipating these prejudices, historical criticism has completely resuscitated that first form of Christianity. It is no longer possible to confound it with any other. It had its contrasts, its passions, its storms. Neither Jesus nor the apostles lived in the ideal or in paradisiacal peace. They quarrelled and were divided in the Church of Jerusalem as in our own. The subjects of the quarrels were different, but they did not consider them less grave than those which vex and trouble us. Peter, James, and Paul were not less divided in the first century over the question of circumcision and of the relations between Jews and Gentiles, than were Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin in the sixteenth over the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. From both camps, then as now, they sent forth pamphlets and anathemas. There were two opposite parties. There were the stubborn holders of tradition and its authority, and there were the innovators, or the partisans, sometimes as rash as they, of liberty of faith and individual inspiration; and between the two there were the men of conciliation and the golden mean who were preoccupied especially in preventing schisms and arranging truces and treaties of peace, to be followed in their turn by new crises and fresh storms.
In this first form of Christianity, as in all that have followed it, there was a certain dualism, a mixture of heterogeneous and soon hostile elements. The struggle was bound to arise between the Christian principle and Jewish tradition. The new seed sown in that ancient soil could not germinate without rising in it and in places breaking up the thick hard crust. In the books of the New Testament that have preserved to us the picture of that first and powerful germination, side by side with the principle to which belongs the future we necessarily find old things which are on the way to death. It will be seen what an error they commit and what a wrong they do themselves who, misconceiving this historical complexity, sanctify and deify both these opposite elements, and place on the same level the eternally fruitful grain, and the chaff to-day dried up and utterly inert, a mere remnant of the Jewish stalk that bore it.
Conceived in this religious matrix of Judaism, the Christian principle, if I may so speak, could only take in it a body essentially Jewish in structure, substance, colour. I only speak, of course, of the body of this primitive Christianity, not of its soul, which, as I have shown, was altogether new. Now, its body was Jewish on two sides and in two aspects: by the persistence of the authority of the Law of Moses, and the practical observance of its precepts, from which the disciples of Jesus did not dream of detaching themselves; and, secondly, by the apocalyptic Messianism which dominated Jewish thought from the time of the Maccabees, and with which the first Christians were perhaps more imbued and more possessed than all the rest of their people.
Faith in the evangel of Jesus, full and joyful communion with the Father, habits of Jewish devotion, Messianic hopes,—all this formed, in the consciousness of the first disciples, a mixture of various elements and of things of very unequal value. These elements, in gradually revealing their disparate nature, could not fail to enter into contradiction and to engender conflicts in the very heart of apostolic Christianity. It was these contradictions and conflicts which set Christian thought in movement, and produced the life and progress of that early age, so that one may always rightly consider it as a creative and classic epoch, and hold it up as a normal example to the churches of all time; on condition, however, that it be not considered as an immutable mass of eternal verities, but taken in its natural movement, in its constant effort of progressive enfranchisement with regard to the past, in its heroic ascent towards religious forms and ideas, freer, more human, more conformed to the universal character, to the spirituality, and to the pure morality of the religion of Jesus.
"What, then," it will be said, "did not the Christ set His disciples free at the outset from all the errors and superstitions of the past? Did He not at once give them perfect dogmas, a completed form of worship, an immutable and completed system of ethics?" No; Jesus did nothing of the kind. So far from formally and systematically criticising the traditional religion of His people, so far from makingex cathedrathat selection which the vulgar looked for, Jesus expressly refused it, as a method essentially false and irreligious. He did not wish to abolish anything by mere authority; He preferred rather to confirm the tradition in its totality, of which He was the heir and not the executioner. "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matt. v. 17).
His method was quite different. It was the method of the sower to whom He loved to compare Himself. In the furrow made by His word in the ancient soil of Judaism, He quietly and gently deposited new germs. In the traditional and theocratic notions of His race He placed contents altogether different drawn from His own religious experience, and from the sense of His filial relation to the Father. He then left time to do its work, to develop one after another the consequences of the principles He had planted in human souls. He sowed, and He and others reap from age to age the harvest He has sown.
Consider His attitude towards the Law of Moses. Not a jot or tittle of it is to fail or be neglected. He strengthens it rather than relaxes its claims; He deepens it, carries it inward, makes it infinitely more spiritual and searching. He gathers it up into two great commandments, and constrains the Law itself, if I may so speak, to surpass itself and transform itself into pure evangelical morality. That is what He meant by declaring that His work would be the fulfilment of the Law. Nothing was less violent; but nothing, at bottom, was more revolutionary.... It is easy now to see the consequences of this method; history has revealed them. But those who heard the words of Jesus could not perceive these consequences. They had no idea probably that the day would come when to be faithful to the Master they would be obliged to break with Moses. They did not suddenly break with Judaism. Indeed, they had found in their new faith new motives for fervour and exactitude in their Mosaic piety. The first Christians in Jerusalem were honoured of all the people because of their assiduity in the Temple worship and for their exemplary devotion. They are therefore not enfranchised yet; they will have to free themselves from Judaism in the school of events into which they will be led by the Spirit of Jesus that is with them and dwells in them. The Christian principle will have to reconquer its independence of the Judaism which dominates and hems them in on every side. This will be the work of more than a century of conflict and controversy. All Christians will not enter into the movement with the same decision; they will not march abreast on the path of liberty. Many will be stupid and turn back. Progress would not have been made if the Divine Spirit that had raised up Jesus had not raised up valiant men like Stephen, Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and that of the Fourth Gospel, to carry on the struggle against the bondage of Judaism and carry it to complete victory. When you pass from the one to the other, from the discourse of Stephen to the Epistle to the Galatians, from the Epistle to the Romans to the Johannean theology, you clearly see the march of progress. At the end of the first century Christianity is so independent of national and traditional Judaism that the one treats the other, without any further scruple, as an alien and hostile religion.
More adhesive still to the Christian principle, less easy to strip off, was the second Jewish wrappage, apocalyptic Messianism. Jesus had so thoroughly consecrated it by calling Himself the Messiah and by inaugurating the kingdom of God, that His Gospel might be named a "Christian Messianism." In His discourses He seems to have confirmed it still more expressly than the Law of Moses. No doubt He proceeded in both cases alike. In all the theocratic notions which constituted this popular Messianism, He lodged a new content, a religious and moral element which must, in the long run, make them burst their trammels and elevate Messianism above itself. But He did not bring to it any negative and abstract criticism, any more than He did to the divers parts of the Mosaic tradition; He never said either that it must be abandoned or that it must be retained; He deposited in it the new principle; but He left in it many obscurities, abandoning to time and to the force of things the care of drawing forth the consequences and clearing up confusions.
For His own part He wished simply to maintain intact beneath these apocalyptic forms the principle and the inspiration of His inward piety. It was in accordance with these that He interpreted the popular beliefs, adapting them with a perfect sovereignty to the moral aim and nature of His work. As with the Mosaic Law, so with Messianism; He is its Master, not its slave. He uses it, but does not abandon Himself to it. These hopes never trouble the clearness of His religious vision; they do not take away His self-possession, or alter the direction, always exclusively moral, of His acts. He accepts the title of Messiah, but only after substituting the idea of the suffering and humiliated for the national and triumphant Messiah. If He preaches the kingdom of God, He takes care to explain the conditions and the true goods of the kingdom—humility, repentance, childlike confidence, righteousness, disinterested love, the joy of serving God and man. He leaves to men of the flesh the pomp and splendour which dazzle the eyes of the flesh. He admires the grandeur of John the Baptist more than that of Herod. The kingdom of God will not come with ostentation. It will begin like an unseen seed that a man puts into the ground.
At the outset of His work Jesus encountered a mysterious temptation. This was the conflict of His consciousness with the seductions of the popular Messianism. He triumphed over it with difficulty; but thenceforth He was always on His guard in that direction. Is it not remarkable that this very temptation returned to Him through the mouth of Peter? Jesus treats as Satan the first of His apostles, and refers to the devil in person and the prince of darkness suggestions of this nature which tend to make Him deviate from the road marked out by the inspiration of His heart. He avoids the title Messiah until the day when He is able to join with it the image of the Cross. He disdains the title, "Son of David," preferring to all others that of "Son of Man," a title that was not open to the same mistakes. On this road of renunciation He must sacrifice not only His ease, His joys, and His repose, but also, at each step, some of the beliefs of Israel, and some of the glories of the Messiah. He never hesitates. His people reject Him, and He turns to His Father and says to Him: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." He agonises in Gethsemane, the Messiah agonises in Him, and He prays thus: "Father, not My will, but Thine be done."
Hence comes His freedom of spirit, the elevation of His view in the interpretation of events, as also His pious and trustful reserve in face of the enigmas and obscurities that His glance cannot penetrate. John the Baptist is beheaded in prison: singular destiny for that formidable Elijah who was to inaugurate by thunder and lightning the Messianic era, the dream of all patriots! Is Jesus offended by it? Does He hesitate to declare that John at that very moment is "the Elias which was for to come"? What a defiance to the oracles of the popular Messianism! When the sons of Zebedee desire Him to reserve for them the foremost places in His future kingdom, He merely speaks to them of the baptism of martyrdom, and teaches them that they must leave such things at the disposal of the Father. No doubt, He never contradicts apocalyptic predictions; on the contrary He applies to Himself all the promises of glory and of triumph; but always in subjection to the Father's will. Asked as to the date of the Messiah's advent, He answers that He does not know, that they must observe the blossoms on the fig-tree and the signs of the times around Himself; that they must watch and pray, possess their souls in patience, and abandon to the Father the decisions of which He keeps the impenetrable secret.
I speak of freedom of interpretation and of pious reserve, not of hypocritical and sceptical accommodation. We cannot doubt that Jesus accepted at the outset, and shared, at bottom, the Messianic beliefs in which He had been trained like all the children of His race. That His disciples, in reporting His discourses on this point, exaggerated and materialised them, need not be denied. But, on the other hand you can hardly explain the unanimity of the earliest Christian tradition in expecting His return upon the clouds if Jesus had professed entirely opposite ideas. After all, is there anything more astonishing in His sharing on this matter the hopes of His time than in the fact of His having explained certain mysterious maladies as His contemporaries did by demoniacal possession, or of His attributing Psalm cx., as did certain of the rabbis, to King David; to the first Isaiah the work of the second, and to Moses the redaction of the Pentateuch? These current and traditional ideas, however, which came to Him, not from heaven, but from His race and His environment, never succeeded in corrupting the immutable purity of His inner piety or in falsifying the divine inspirations of His heart. Whenever there was contradiction between the Messianic beliefs or the Law of Moses, on the one hand, and the consciousness of Jesus, on the other, it was not the latter but the former that gave way and were transformed.
The disciples were not so free as the Master. Their faith remained a long time bound to these hopes of the future. Why had they left all and followed Him but because He had appeared to them to be the bearer and the depository of the divine promises? His death, which seemed to belie their beliefs, only served to give them another turn. They corrected prophecy. Instead of one Advent of the Messiah they imagined two, the first in humiliation, the second in glory. The one having been realised, they expected the other with a more ardent confidence. No one doubted it was near. The apostle Paul lived in this hope as well as the author of theApocalypse, the compilers of the synoptic gospels, and the editors of "The Teaching of the Apostles." The time is short: the Master comes:Maranatha. This was the watchword of all the early Christians. This faith in the imminent return of Christ and of the end of the world dominates all the thoughts as well as the feelings of the apostles: it determines and colours their Christology, their theory of Redemption, their ethics, their idea of salvation, so that to expound their writings and estimate the worth of their reasonings, the historian must always read them and explain them in this light. It is for this reason that their Christianity merits the name of Messianic, and could not be, in this Jewish form, an absolutenormfor all the ages.
The disciples of Jesus, however, found themselves in a school in which they could not perpetually mistake the lessons. The Christian principle had appeared to be at one with Messianism; it was something altogether different and could not continue for ever to be mixed up with it. Under the contradiction of events and the action of the spirit of Jesus, they soon began to see the dawn of a process of spiritualisation in their apocalyptic beliefs. This progress is manifest in the letters of St. Paul when read in their order and with attention. In the first, he hopes before he dies to witness the advent of the Lord. But, from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the image of death and martyrdom begins to interpose itself between his faith and that glorious ideal, which evermore seems to recede into the future. It never entirely disappears, but this preoccupation with the return of Jesus diminishes and occupies a smaller space in his later epistles. On the contrary, the work of Jesus, considered in the past and in its redemptive efficacy, the Christian life conceived as a life of faith and love, as an imitation of Jesus Christ and an inheriting of His Spirit, receive ever-increasing developments. Insensibly, the centre of gravity of apostolic Christianity changes; from the hypnotising contemplation of the Messianic future, it passes to the sanctifying meditation on the passion of Christ, on His teaching, and redeeming work. This is best seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the Fourth Gospel, in which the Jewish Messiah is transformed into the eternalLogos, the light of all men here below, and the principle of the universal religion.
The work of emancipation that men alone could not accomplish, God Himself achieved. The conquests of the Church in the Empire, and especially the double and irreparable ruin of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation under Titus and under Hadrian, opened on the future other prospects. The world continued. It was necessary to settle down and live in it. Montanism was merely a last outburst of fever. By the end of the second century, Jewish Messianism was so nearly dead that its obstinate adherents were regarded as heretics by the Church at large. Organised into a hierarchy, the Church substituted itself resolutely for the ancient people of Israel, and represented itself as heir to the ancient promises. The advent of the kingdom of God becomes the advent and the victory of the Catholic Church over all the other powers of earth. The Messianic Theocracy is transformed into a Church Theocracy. Messianism gives place to Catholicism.
3.Catholic Christianity
Transplanted from the poor and arid soil of Hebraism into the rich and fruitful loam of Graeco-Roman civilisation, the Christian plant was sure to grow apace and be transformed. Catholicism is as much Pagan as Apostolic Messianism was Jewish—from the same causes, and according to the same law. More Greek in the East, more Roman in the West, it bears always and everywhere the traces of its origin. Study successively all the features of the Catholic Church, and you will find on each of them this indelible mark.
The dogmas of the Councils and the theology of the Fathers, who does not see at the first glance their true character? Who does not see that the material is Greek in form, in colour, in every fibre of its tissue? Whence came those terms and notions, of which Hebraism knew nothing, but which the theologians of all the schools will henceforth bandy to and fro—those abstract concepts, substance and hypostasis, nature and person, essence and accident, matter and form? Whence came the science of the Fathers of the Church, their exegesis, their history, their logic, their psychology, and that lofty metaphysic which has so completely transformed the Prophetic into a Platonic firmament? All this came from Athens, Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus,viâAlexandria and Rome. The Justins, the Athenagorases, the Clements and the Basils, Athanasius even more than Arius, Jerome as well as Augustine, had been nourished from their childhood on Greek and Latin literature. They had read Plato, Heraclitus, Zeno, Philo, Cicero, Posidonius, and Seneca as much and more perhaps than the Old Testament. What is there astonishing in the fact that their theology should have followed step by step the theology of neo-Platonism until this latter, for Augustine, should have become the true introduction to the Gospel, and that in the Middle Ages the names of Plato and Aristotle should have been invested with an authority not less than those of Isaiah, St. Paul, and St. John?
Or shall we pass to the constitution of the Church? What is that but the exact counterpart of the constitution of the Roman Empire: the parish modelling itself on the municipality, the diocese on the province, the metropolitan regions on the great prefectures, and, at the top of the pyramid, the bishop of Rome and the papacy, whose ideal dream is simply, in the religious order, the universal and absolute monarchy of which the Cæsars had first set the pattern? Or would you consider the moral life and the type of piety? It is true that at the outset, and so long as the persecutions continued, there is a great contrast between Jewish or Christian morals and manners and those of Roman or Greek society. But, with time, the contrast is singularly attenuated. If the Church conquered the world, the world had its revenge within the Church. What is that monkish asceticism imposing celibacy on the clergy, exalting virginity, multiplying pious works of merit, and replacing, by factitious and sterile duties, the duties dictated by nature and essential to society,—what are all these but survivals of a dualism and the imitation of an ideal which, come from the East, seduced the feverish imagination of an expiring world? The monks, the anchorites and their theology of impotent celibates, did they save Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium?
During this time, what did worship, adoration, religion, properly speaking, become? Between earth and heaven there reappeared the whole ancient hierarchy of gods and demi-gods, of heroes, nymphs, and goddesses, replaced by the Virgin Mother, angels, demons, saints. Each town, each parish, every fountain, had its patron or its patroness, its tutelary guardian, to whom they addressed themselves more familiarly than to God in order to obtain temporal blessings and the grace for every day. The saints have their specialities like the minor deities of former times. Some cured fevers, some diseases of the skin. This one had charge of travellers, that of harvests, a third of articles that had been lost, a fourth of needed heirs in families in danger of decay. With this mythology, all the superstitions were revived, down to the grossest fetichism: pilgrimages, chaplets, litanies, the veneration of images, signs of the cross, rites and sacraments conceived after the manner of the ancient mysteries. And all this is done with a sort of unconsciousness, very gradually, and as the effect of a zeal that was supposed to be Christian. The heads of the Church recommend missionaries not to destroy the temples of the false gods, but to consecrate them to the true one, and to replace their images by images of the saints, and the rites of the old cults by similar ceremonies. Names and etiquettes were thus changed, but not the things themselves. At Rome, beneath the basilica of St. Peter, a superb statue was erected to the Prince of the Apostles. This was formerly a statue of Jupiter. Its great toe has been worn down by the kisses of the faithful. Before Christianity, they kissed the foot of the master of the gods; now they kiss the foot of Peter. Is the cult of a different order and the devotion of a higher quality?
These, however, are but the forms of Catholicism; let us go deeper and try to reach its generating principle. This principle should be found in the central dogma of the Catholic system, that in it which commands and regulates all the parts, which constitutes its unity and strength. To designate this central dogma is not difficult. The catechism teaches us that it is the dogma of the Church, of its infallibility and traditional continuity, of its divine origin and supernatural powers. Protestants affirm that they belong to the Church because they belong to Christ. Catholics reverse the terms: no one is in communion with Christ, no one really belongs to Him, unless he belongs to the Church. Thus faith in the Church and submission to the Church are put into the forefront and remain the one thing needful and essential. One is a Catholic by the fact of his implicit acceptance of the sovereign authority of the Church; one ceases to be a Catholic when that submission ceases. From which it is easy to conclude that the principle of Catholicism is the realisation of the Christian principle—that is to say, of the reign of God and of Christ, in the form of a visible institution, an organised social body, an external power, exercising itself by means of that which is the very soul of the institution—a priesthood endowed with supernatural functions and attributes.
The immediate consequence of this first principle was the rupture of the organic union realised in the Gospel of Christ between the religious element and the moral element. Nothing is more striking in the Sermon on the Mount and in all the Parables of Jesus, nothing better attests the superiority of Christianity to anterior cults, nothing proves with greater force and clearness that it is the perfect and definitive Religion, than that mutual penetration, that fusion, that identification, in a word, of religion and morality, till then separate and often opposed to each other. The Christ did not desire in religion anything that was not in morality, or in morality anything that was not religious. Thus did He bring back piety from without, and made of it the inner inspiration which penetrates and transforms the whole life, a hidden flame, a ferment acting from the centre to the surface, the soul in the body, ever invisible and everywhere present. He thus founded the absolute autonomy of the religious and of the moral life which no longer are divided, but appear simply as the two sides of consciousness; the one interior and turned towards God, the other exterior and turned towards the world. In creating in us the sense of our sonship to God, Jesus did not admit the intervention of any external authority between the Father and the child. The universal priesthood, with which, by His spirit, He invests the least of His disciples, excludes in principle all supernatural priesthood. "Call no man master on earth, for one is your Master in heaven; and all ye are brethren." The children must have free access to the Father.
But, from the moment the Christian principle, instead of entering as divine inspiration into the consciousness, sets itself up as a visible institution in society, it is evident that this organic union is broken, and the autonomy of the individual consciousness compromised. The religious element affirms itself on its own account, and imposes itself from without on the mind of the faithful as a divine authority. The ancient dualism, which the Gospel surmounted, reappears in a profounder form; it brings in its train a universal supernaturalism—that is to say, a mechanical conception of the relations between God and the world. Instead of a penetration we have a superposition of two elements. The clergy separates itself from the laity and superposes itself upon it as the necessary intermediary between earth and heaven. Religious society, constituted under the form of a government, superposes itself upon the civil society that it desires to rule; grace superposes itself upon nature, acting on it from above in the sacraments; the morality of the Church, in so far as it is a supernatural morality, superposes itself upon the natural morality of conscience; revelation upon reason; divine dogmas upon human science; the spiritual power of the priest upon the temporal power of the family and of the State. Everywhere, within and without, the division breaks out, and you see arise in man and in society an intestine struggle which will never end; for these two original forces that it brings into conflict, religion and nature, are equally powerful and eternal.
Catholicism began, then, in the Church of the second century when, under the unconscious action of tradition and of pagan habits, the need was felt of objectivising and materialising the Christian principle in an external fact, of imprisoning the kingdom of God in a visible institution, the immanent revelation of the Holy Spirit in the decisions and acts of a priesthood. This tendency, once born, would be irresistible. Ideal and transcendent as it was at first, the Christian principle would become ever more external and political. Absorbing all Christianity, and holding in its hands all the graces of God, the Church would naturally present itself to the world as the permanent mediator and the grand magician. It was its part to effect the salvation of sinners, and, for this, it would need, like the ancient priests, to offer daily to God an agreeable oblation, an expiatory sacrifice of infinite value to atone for the infinite sins of the world. Thus the Church transformed the commemoration of the death of Christ into arealrenewal of the sacrifice on Calvary; the Holy Supper became the mass; the fraternal table was turned into an altar; the elder or presbyter was changed into a priest and pontiff, and the bread of the communion into a divine victim. The dogma of transubstantiation was bound to follow; to the materialisation of Christianity in the Church corresponds the materialisation of God in the host.
By virtue of the same principle, Christian piety becomes devotion,i.e.a ritual and meritorious practice, as in the ancient cults. But we must not be unjust and attribute something to Catholicism that it condemns. It does not say that external practice is sufficient; the Church esteems it vain and even culpable unless accompanied by the affections and the will.
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The first and principal act of piety is submission to the Church. Its dogmas may be irrational, contradictory; its commandments may seem arbitrary, foreign to the natural conscience, sometimes in contradiction with it; no matter.
Reason, conscience, all must abdicate, and all submit.... In the Church, the Christian state must always be a state of minority, for the tutelage that it accepts will never cease. And the authority of the Church, being on this point sovereign and indefectible, could not remain invisible and indeterminate. An imperious logic pushed it from the first to incarnate itself in its organs, more and more apparent and simplified. First it was lodged in individual bishops, then in councils, until the Pope when speakingex cathedrabecame the sole authority. In 1870 the Council of the Vatican, by promulgating the dogma of Papal infallibility, drew the irresistible conclusion from the premises laid down in previous centuries. The evolution of Catholicism was completed. The transformation of Christianity into a sacerdotal theocracy was achieved. The first is realised and exhausted in the second, and the distinction we established, when speaking of the essence of Christianity, between the Christian principle and its historical realisations, is not merely effaced; it no longer has any meaning.
From which follow two consequences which every day become more clear and patent. The first is that the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the desires of Leo XIII., is fatally condemned to be intolerant and intransigeant towards all others. The second is that it is contradictory to expect any reform in that Church, or even to speak of it; for the Church could not admit the necessity of reform without renouncing all its pretentions. A river never turns back to its source. Catholicism can only exist by struggling for supremacy. It must be all or nothing.
At the same time, things are not so simple as our systems. The logic of ideas does not exhaust the reality of life. Behind abstract principles there are pious souls.... In Catholicism there has always been a latent Protestantism, by which I mean a protest, mute or spoken, direct or indirect, of the Christian principle against the oppressions of external and tyrannical authority.... Without the continuous presence of the Christian spirit in the Catholic Church, the Reformation would have been impossible. Without the triumph of the sacerdotal spirit it would have been unnecessary. Protestantism sprang out of Catholicism because it was virtually contained in it.