Paradoxes of Catholicism Part 5

_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the knowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing its citizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failure to grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more free than an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to think that two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on the other hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher and more real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am more effective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use the forces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I have submitted my intellect to facts.

III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to its nature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at all believe also that it has an environment, and that this environment is as much in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, for example, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it.

Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came.

David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin, and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and of their temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongst others: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's minds some at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which they lived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws, to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be the Revealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace.

He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge, as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose.

Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before G.o.d and brings its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed, that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before, when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then, to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every understanding to _His obedience_.

(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to a.n.a.lyze it and to state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church, divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and makes it at once comprehensible and effective.

What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.

Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it obscured instead of revealing the true relations between G.o.d and man; because it _made the Word of G.o.d of none effect through its traditions_.

But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes; for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of Christ_.

VIII

CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26.

No recorded word of our Lord better ill.u.s.trates than does this the startling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew what was in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt and spoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxical nature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only by being ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development of self only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson Christ teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest object of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be attained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality can be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up this thought and consider it more in detail.

I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish people in the whole world, since all that they do and say and think is directed and calculated, so far as they are "good Catholics," to the salvation of their own souls. It is this that continually crops up in their conversation, and this that presumably is their chief pre-occupation. Yet surely this, above all methods, is the very worst for achieving such an end. One does not pull up flowers to see how they are growing. The very secret of health is to be unconscious of it.

Catholics, on the other hand, scarcely ever do anything else; they are for ever examining themselves, for ever going to confession, for ever developing and cultivating the narrowest virtues. The whole science of Casuistry, for example, is directed to nothing else but this--the exact definition of those limits within which the salvation of the soul is secure and beyond which it is imperilled; and Casuistry, as we all know, has a stifling and deadening influence upon all who study it.

Again, see how the true development and expansion of the soul must necessarily be hindered by such an ideal. "I must not read this book, however brilliant, since it might be dangerous to my faith. I must not mix in this company, however charming, since evil communications corrupt good manners." What kind of life is that which must always be checked and stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be that can only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is n.o.ble and inspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; in going out from self into the world, not in retiring from the world inwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves in humanity, forget self in experience, and leave the rest to G.o.d!

(ii) So much for the one side, while from the other comes almost precisely the opposite criticism. Catholics, it is said, are not nearly individualistic enough; on the contrary they are for ever sinking themselves and their personalities in the corporate life of the Church.

Not only are their outward actions checked and their words guarded, but even their very consciences and thoughts are informed and made by the collective conscience and mind of others. It is the highest ambition of every good Catholic _sentire c.u.m ecclesia_; not merely to act and speak but even to think in obedience to others. Now a man's true life, we are told, consists in an a.s.sertion of his own individuality. G.o.d has made no two men the same; the mould was made and broken in each several case.

If, therefore, we are to be what He meant us to be, we must make the most of our own personalities; we must think our own thoughts, not other people's, direct our own lives, speak our own minds--so far, of course, as we can do so without interfering with our neighbour's equal liberty.

Once more, therefore, we are bidden to live our life to the full; not in this case, however, because we all share in a common humanity, but because we do not!

We Catholics are wrong, therefore, for both reasons and in both directions. We are wrong when we put self first and we are wrong when we do not. We are wrong when we launch out into the current of life, and wrong when we withdraw ourselves from its waters. We are wrong when we insist upon our personal responsibility, and wrong when we look to the Church to undertake it.

II. (i) Here then, indeed, is a Paradox; but it is one which our Lord Himself expressly emphasizes. For, first, there is nothing on which He so repeatedly insists as the supreme and singular value of every soul's salvation. If this is not attained, all is lost. _What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?_ All else, then, must be sacrificed if this is in peril. No human possession, however great, can be weighed against this. No human tie, however sacred, can hold against its claim. Not only must _houses and lands_, but _father and mother and wives and children_ must take second place, so soon as eternal life is at stake. And yet, somehow or another, this salvation can only be attained by loss; self can only live if it be mortified, can only be saved by its own denial. Individuality, as has been said, can only be preserved by the loss of Individualism.

(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradox that is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic, intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring his intellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch must continually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows, continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, and indeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point of view, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he must be content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged, changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far as he withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mental isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.

So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits, who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But the man to whom art is a pa.s.sion, to whom nothing else is comparatively of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual aphorism of Jesus Christ.

(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a means of fulfilling our end.

For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the cry, Save your soul, a.s.sert your individuality, follow your conscience, form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily, enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all that for which G.o.d made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.

_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say, when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own behalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my own conscience apart from that informing of it that comes from G.o.d, or to live my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won my Individuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost the whole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonistic to G.o.d's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality.

For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_.

IX

MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE

_Blessed are the meek_.--MATT. V. 4.

_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away_.--MATT. XI. 12.

We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things as wealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use and sometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper and understand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying att.i.tude of hers.

I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, and therefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for so long its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequate representative, that it has fostered virtues which r.e.t.a.r.d progress.

Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made this charge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, as we are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compa.s.sion or tenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms by forces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is not protected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn to pieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all these instincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradual improvement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective.

So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echo his teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects the weak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism.

Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking to preserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, would eliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and not its friend, since Christianity has r.e.t.a.r.ded, as no other religion has ever succeeded in r.e.t.a.r.ding, the appearance of that superman whom Nature seeks to evolve.... It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher of such a doctrine himself died insane.

A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who call themselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness and compa.s.sion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtues for those who can afford them, for women and children who are more or less sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffective people who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to make their own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more stern code is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action as Nature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-a.s.sertive then, not meek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your own opportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care of themselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commerce in order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. In a word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial or political progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemy rather than a friend.

(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to inherit the blessing which He p.r.o.nounced. On the contrary there are no people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise, for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such inst.i.tutions as that of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with which they cast out from their company those who will not p.r.o.nounce their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used, and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find rest to their souls?_

Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-a.s.sertive, too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action, first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?

II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine.

(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached both to one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced system of human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, though coming indeed from G.o.d, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists to some extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined and worked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men could have worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light of reason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, so fundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set it aside.

At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charity came with Him. The Law of Justice still remained; men still had their rights on which they might insist, still had their rights which no Christian may refuse to recognize. But such was the torrent of Divine generosity which Christ exhibited, so overwhelming was the Vision which He revealed of the supernatural charity of G.o.d towards men, that a set of ideals sprang into life such as the world had never dreamed of; more, Charity came with such power that her commands actually overruled in many instances the feeble claims of Justice, so that she bade men henceforward to forgive, for example, not merely according to Justice, but according to her own Divine nature, to _forgive unto seventy times seven_, to give _good measure, heaped up and running over_, and not the bare minimum which men had merely earned.

It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentially Christian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprang which Nietsche condemned as hostile to material progress.

For, from henceforth, if _a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloak also; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if he strike thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also_. The Law of Natural justice is transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrifice reigns instead. _Resist not evil_; do not insist always, that is to say, on your natural rights; give men more than their due, and be yourself content with less. _Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and find rest to your souls. Forgive one another your trespa.s.ses_ with the same generous charity with which G.o.d has forgiven and will forgive you yours. _Judge not and you shall not be judged._ Do not, in personal matters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on that scale and by those principles by which G.o.d Himself has dealt with you.

Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it is obligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, in any case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory of Christianity to create.

(ii) But there are other elements in life besides the human and the natural, beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may, if he is aiming at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church is Divine as well as Human.

For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, which may be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of G.o.d, which none but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, for example, a Revelation of truths and principles which, springing out of His own Nature or of His Will, are as immutable and eternal as Himself.

And it is precisely in defence of these truths and principles that the Church exhibits that which the world calls _intransigeance_ and Jesus Christ _violence_.

Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to be educated in his religion, or rather, the right of G.o.d Himself to teach that child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truth that marriage is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of G.o.d.