There have been high civilizations in the past which have not
been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that civilization must have a Christian basis and must ultimately
rest on the Christian Church.
Lord Tweedsmuir
It was said in Chapter I of this book that the war is not so much the cause of the sickness of our civilization as a symptom or a demonstration of that sickness. We can now go further and say truly that the war is partly a means of hiding from us the serious character of the sickness. Since it is relatively easy to unite men negatively, i.e., for purposes of combat, we have come to be more optimistic about our culture than conditions warrant. Many of the wounds of our body politic have seemed to be healed during the course of the struggle, everyone being conspicuously patriotic, but actually the wounds are still present and the healing has been only superficial. The worst phenomena of racial hatred, for example, have been merely postponed. The new Fascism has not yet been openly espoused.
The most dangerous time that Western civilization has known for many generations is immediately before us. It is the period of convalescence. The threat of world tyranny having been surmounted, there will be a strong temptation to suppose that all is well, but the dangers will actually be far greater than they have already been. All kinds of malignant germs will be offered a splendid opportunity for growth in the post-war world.
Though the war has been carried on so far as a sordid but necessary business, with very little talk about ideals, it remains true that the spirits of many of our soldiers and civilian workers have been supported by the recurring thought of real oppression in the modern world. Eyewitness stories of what has occurred and continues to occur in concentration camps have aroused many of our people to a great desire to set the captives free. This has been combined in varying degrees with the motive of national or cultural survival, the latter motive being especially strong in our country after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not only in England but in America men have been given abundant reason to believe that they are fighting for their lives and liberties, and the spectacle of conquered countries has given point to this belief. When we have mentioned these two motives, we have said about all there is to say on the subject so far.
The chief point to note about these two motives, the motive of liberation and the motive of survival, is that they can suddenly come to an end, so far as their effectiveness is concerned. When the oppressor is forcibly deprived of his power to oppress, both motives are removed at once. Then the question is: What will hold us together in the Western world? The well-known fact that our young men have performed conspicuous deeds of gallantry against Japanese and Germans is no evidence that we have an adequate spiritual structure for our society when the pressure from Japanese and Germans is removed. Furthermore, one who is at all close to the men in the services cannot be blind to the perplexity of many of the men, even while the fighting continues.
The task, then, is still before us -- the task of making a decent world in our modern technical age, after the elimination of such open enemies of Christian civilization as Hitler and his kind. We have argued, in previous chapters, that this cannot be accomplished without ethical convictions, that the ethical convictions cannot be made to prevail if separated from their religious roots, and that the religious roots cannot be nourished apart from the organized church or something like it. If this reasoning is sound, we are carried forward to a final question concerning the nature of the organized movements without which civilization as we know it will perish. We need to be both precise and concrete in our proposals.
Men are saved by faith, but not by just any faith. Though the absence of faith means eventual spiritual death, the presence of faith does not ensure spiritual life, since there are many kinds of faith and there are radically different objects of faith. It is true that there can be no thorough regeneration of society except at the religious level, but this does not mean that any religion will suffice. There are good religions and there are bad religions and there are many that include some good along with some evil. The logic of events that points to the necessity of a religious reformation of civilization is no evidence of the sufficiency of any particular existent religion or even of all existent religions combined. Civilization may be hopeless on the basis of irreligion, but it may likewise be hopeless on the basis of some of the religions we know.
The church, broadly speaking, has been the chief means by which our most regenerative influences have been preserved, but, even so, we must admit that many of the parts of the church are now in a much-weakened condition. The Confessional Church of Germany has thrilled the world by its courageous stand against tyranny, but there are many churchmen who have, during the same critical period of history, compromised with tyrants. Civilization needs the church, as we argued in Chapter IV, but the church itself needs something to revive it. What do we do when even the salt has lost its savor?
The saving faith we need will not come of itself but must be consciously fostered and spread. It was in this kind of work that Augustine and his associates were so successful in the dark times following the decline of Roman culture. They made a church adequate to the needs of the time, something that could survive even when the empire went to pieces. The close parallel already suggested makes it reasonable to suppose, in advance of specific arguments, that our central need is for a contemporary redemptive society which will do for us what the redemptive society envisaged by Augustine did for his generation and for succeeding generations. Christianity won in the Roman Empire, not chiefly as a belief, though it was a belief, but more as a self-conscious fellowship, and there is nothing in subsequent history to make us suppose that the faith adequate for our day will win m any other way.
In this the children of light may profit by the wisdom of the children of this world, who, as Jesus said, are often wiser in their generation than the children of light are.(St. Luke, 16:8.) Perhaps the most original part of Mein Kampf and also the part which bears the marks of the greatest intellectual care is that in which Hitler outlines his conception of membership. He distinguishes between "supporters" and "members." The supporters are the many well wishers who can be reached rather easily by propaganda and are consequently helpful, but no great new movement could succeed if it merely had supporters. Far more important than the supporters are the actual members, the relatively few who can count on one another in every eventuality and who constitute the striking power. It is really better that the number of the members should not be large, since the moment it becomes large it is evident that the strict qualifications for membership have been relaxed.
The idea of membership involves the notion that the nation or the world is the mission field while the party is the missionary band. "The victory of an idea will be possible the sooner," says Hitler, "the more comprehensively propaganda has prepared people as a whole and the more exclusive, rigid, and firm the organization which carries out the fight in practice." Those who are to be influenced, so as to adopt the new thought, cannot, in the nature of things, be too many, but the membership can easily be too large. Accordingly any movement that hopes to be effective must guard against the natural temptation to show early numerical success. "If propaganda has imbued a whole people with an idea, the organization can draw the consequences with a handful of men."
The key to Hitler’s idea is the difference between propaganda and organization. "The first task of propaganda is to win people for subsequent organization; the first task of organization is to win men for the continuation of propaganda." The organization is just as crucial as is propaganda, and even more crucial, because the propaganda is wasted without it. Therefore entrance into membership is a serious matter, and, as soon as the movement begins to succeed, enrollment should immediately be blocked and the organization should be allowed to grow only with extreme caution. The following passage is a convenient summary:
In every really great world-shaking movement, propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. Thus it will indefatigably attempt to make the new thought processes clear to the others, and therefore to draw them over to their own ground, or to make them uncertain of their previous conviction. Now, since the dissemination of an idea, that is, propaganda, must have a firm backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization obtains its members from the general body of supporters won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more rapidly, the more intensively the propaganda is carried on, and the latter in turn can work better, the stronger and more powerful the organization is that stands behind it.(These quotations from Mein Kampf are from the new Houghton Mifflin edition, Boston, 1943, pp. 582-584)
We are foolish indeed if we permit our abhorrence of Hitler, both in his methods and his aims, to blind us to the practical wisdom that these quotations express. Hitler has demonstrated the wisdom of the indicated procedure by employing it with remarkable success in the service of a bad cause. There is no reason why it cannot be employed in a good cause. Hitler has spoken much that is false, but he was not speaking falsely when he said, "All great movements, whether of a religious or a political nature, must attribute their mighty successes only to the recognition and application of these principles, and all lasting successes in particular are not even thinkable without consideration of these laws."(Ibid.,pp. 585, 586.)
When we begin to apply these principles to the task before all men of good will, we get something like the following: We need a world-shaking movement to offset the planetary dangers that a peculiar combination of factors has now produced. What is required to save us from the destruction of which world wars constitute a foretaste is a new spirit. We need this far more desperately than we need any new machine or anything else. We are fairly clear concerning the nature of this new spirit, since it has been tested repeatedly in the religious tradition out of which our highest moral standards have come, even though it is now so largely ignored. We must spread this spirit by the written and spoken word, as many are already doing, though nowhere in sufficient force. But we must go beyond this to the formation of cells, made up of men and women who are as single-minded in their devotion to the redemptive task as the early Nazi party members were to the task of National Socialism.
The kind of organized movement that the need of the hour suggests does not at present exist. Certainly the existent church cannot function in this way because Christianity has long ceased to be scrupulous in membership. Some may be members because they are greatly concerned over the redemption of our civilization, but they are surrounded by millions who are members because they were born that way or because membership helps their social standing. Since the devoted and effective group cannot be found, it must be made.
The present is the time for some creative and urgent dreaming about the nature of the redemptive society that is so clearly necessary. This society may be as different from the conventional church of today as an airplane is different from a buggy. But just as a buggy and an airplane have the same fundamental purpose, namely, transportation, so the church of today and the religious society of tomorrow may have the same redemptive purpose, though new problems require new vision.
Our time is not unique in the need of new movements that can bring spiritual refreshment, since the process has been illustrated repeatedly in crucial times. We need only to remind ourselves of the immense importance of the Franciscan movement, of the Society of Jesus, of the Children of the Light as the associates of George Fox were called in the seventeenth century, of the new fellowships inspired and organized by the Wesleys.
The sad truth is that such unconventional religious movements, after being wonderfully salutary at the beginning, tend to become conventional until finally they take their place among those which require revivication. The Children of the Light did marvelous things in the seventeenth century; for a while, it looked as though the Quaker movement might be a renewing power in the whole culture of Christendom, but soon Quakers allowed themselves to become a mere sect, one church among others. Then they were merely a competing organization and no longer an activating force in the entire culture.
Now it is again necessary to create and organize a radically new kind of society engaged in a perennially necessary task. It is not within the scope of this book to engage in the question of what the precise nature of such a society must be. Such a discussion would obscure the outline of the logical structure that it is our purpose to present. But we may point out briefly that the specific character of the redemptive society is of crucial importance. For example, the redemptive society must be unconventional, but mere unconventionality is not enough. We have lately seen, in the experience of the Oxford Groups, a demonstration of the way in which a new and unconventional religious fellowship may fail of the highest purpose because of insufficiently rigorous thought.
The mistakes of the Oxford Groups and the consequent ill repute of their movement should make us realize how carefully we must think through the problem before us; but, at the same time, the relative success of this movement should open our eyes to the power that lies in really devoted groups. The same lesson can be learned from numerous cults, of which Jehovah’s Witnesses constitute one of the most striking examples. The path of wisdom lies not in rejecting a method, in itself successful, because it has had associated with it some unpleasant features. The path of wisdom lies rather in seeing how the successful method can be retained and employed while the unpleasant features are detached from it.
The idea that salvation, both for individuals and society, comes through the work of living fellowships is as old as Christianity and older. We have said that it is incumbent upon the children of light to borrow the wisdom of the children of this world but the earlier borrowing was the other way around, inasmuch as the technic which Hitler so carefully describes is essentially the technic of the first Christian victory. John the Baptist was a voice crying in the wilderness, but Jesus was not, because he depended on the way in which twelve men were bound together. The fellowship of the Nazi party members is a kind of parody of the Koinonia.
It is interesting to note that when Hitler wants to express the kind of relation which must exist among the individuals who make up an effective central organization, and when he wants a strong word to contrast with mere "supporters," he is forced to rely on specifically Christian terminology and speak of "members." Apparently nobody ever spoke of being a member of anything until the term was coined to express the relationship that existed, at least ideally, among the first Christians. In the beginning, when St. Paul first used it, the figure of speech must have seemed extreme or even grotesque. He said Christians had the relation to one another that exists between the parts of a body. As though the original figure were not strong enough, St. Paul went on to speak of a situation in which men are "members one of another." (Ephesians, 4:25 and Romans, 12:5. See also I Corinthians, 12).
Here lies a path of redemption for which many in the modern world are waiting, even though they do not realize what it is they seek. There is a vast amount of loneliness, and a consequent desire to belong to something. This is shown by the success of new cults and by the emergence of groups in which fellowship is genuine, even though, as judged by conventional standards, hardly respectable. For example, the organization called Alcoholics Anonymous appears to have an enormous influence in the lives of its members. Its paradoxical entrance qualifications sound peculiarly Christian, in that each man must admit that he is too weak to help himself and that each undertakes to help another.
Real fellowship is so rare and so precious that it is like dynamite in any human situation. Any group that will find a way to the actual sharing of human lives will make a difference either for good or ill in the modern world or in any world. But fellowship is always more likely to be genuine if men are united for something. The problem of purpose, however, really solves itself, so far as the present discussion is concerned. Those who see the danger in which our civilization lies and who have some intimation of the spiritual renewal without which our present order cannot possibly be saved have a ready-made purpose to draw them together. What we want is a group so devoted to this purpose and so tightly organized that it can work as effectively for redemptive ends in our time as the first Christians worked for redemptive ends in the first century of our era and as the Nazis have worked for divisive ends in the first century of their would-be era.
The way to begin is to take seriously Hitler’s principle of limitation of membership. Consider, for example, a university campus as a field of missionary labor. A group of fifty really devoted Christians who are not in the least apologetic and who are willing to make the spread of the gospel their first interest would affect mightily any campus in the country, no matter how great the initial opposition might be. The same can be said of an average town. The prospects for the gospel might be better if the average town had only a few dozen Christians in place of the few thousand church members now listed.
It is not necessary, in our spiritual enterprise, to lay the arbitrary limitation on numbers that Hitler undertook in forming the Nazi party, since the limitation appears in the nature of the situation. There are not actually too many potential members anywhere. The problem is to find them, to unite them, and to make them into an effective organization cutting across all existent barriers.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the churches as now organized is not merely that they include so many who are irreligious, but that they fail to include so many who are deeply religious, though they may not express their religion in traditional ways. Many of those who believe most strongly that there is no redemption of civilization apart from religion are not in the church, with the consequent loss both to themselves and to the organized religious forces. Characteristic men in this situation are Walter Lippmann and Lewis Mumford. It is easy to quote passages from the work of both these thinkers to show how much concerned they are over the religious life of the Western world. In his Good Society, Walter Lippmann reserves his religious discussion for the climax of his book, in which he shows why tyranny finds its mortal enemy in religion:
By the religious experience the humblest communicant is led into the presence of a power so much greater than his master’s that the distinctions of this world are of little importance. So it is no accident that the only open challenge to the totalitarian state has come from men of deep religious faith. For in their faith they are vindicated as immortal souls, and from this enhancement of their dignity they find the reason why they must offer a perpetual challenge to the dominion of men over men.(Walter Lippmann, The Good Society, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1937, p. 312.)
In similar vein Lewis Mumford has made an unambiguous testimony. "The crisis, then, presses toward a conversion, deep-seated, organic, religious in essence, so that no part of political or personal existence will be untouched by it."(Lewis Mumford, Faith f or Living, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1940, pp. 193, 196.)
The redemptive society we seek must include men such as these and not merely those who have been identified with ecclesiastical enterprises. Many of the best people are not in the church precisely because they are the best people. We have, of course, some conspicuously vigorous minds actively at work within the church and wholly devoted to it, William Temple, T. S. Eliot and Reinhold Niebuhr being striking illustrations of this; but too many of essentially similar spirit are outside any self-conscious religious organization. Consequently the lines must be redrawn. "No religion," writes T. S. Eliot in his famous essay on Lancelot Andrewes, "can survive the judgment of history unless the best minds of its time have collaborated in its construction."(T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1936, p. 7)
The church of Elizabeth’s time, Eliot argues, succeeded because it had the advantage of the collaboration of men of the intellectual stature of Hooker and Andrewes. But on what do the intellectual giants of our day collaborate? They collaborate on economic planning, they collaborate on foreign policy, they collaborate on military strategy, but on the matters of the greatest possible importance and urgency they do not collaborate. Relatively few give themselves loyally to a consciously contrived fellowship of work and worship. Consequently the representative men of our day are closer to the tradition of John the Baptist than to the tradition of Christ. They are indeed voices crying in the wilderness. Many speak truly and well, but they are not members one of another and their influence is dissipated because they are not joined together in a redemptive society. Unless this situation is altered, there is little hope for our civilization.
Pessimistic as the more thoughtful spokesmen of this generation necessarily are, it would not be fair to bring this sense of the meeting to a close without reference to the deep faith that underlies so much of the intellectual and spiritual searching of our time. We have to strive to keep our faith, but we are keeping it. We are perplexed, but not unto despair. We believe that we can survive a civilization gone rotten and that the essential faith of Western man can be restored to this end. The moral decay of imperial Rome was overcome by the gospel for that day, and the moral decay of Western civilization will be likewise overcome by the gospel for our day. If modern man can be made to see and understand the predicament he is in, that very recognition may be amazingly salutary. As a fitting conclusion to this book, nothing better could be found than some sentences that Lord Tweedsmuir wrote just before he died, words that seem to the author to be the true conclusion of the matter. "I believe -- and this is my crowning optimism -- that the challenge with which we are now faced may restore to us that manly humility which alone gives power. It may bring us back to God. In that case our victory is assured. The Faith is an anvil which has worn out many hammers."
I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
Albert Einstein
The chief argument of this book up to this point represents the thinking of great numbers in the Western world and will presumably, therefore, be convincing to many readers who have given serious thought to the problem of the reconstruction of civilization in our time. The characteristic modern is not a sheer pagan and certainly will not be attracted to the claims of synthetic barbarism as presented by either its major or its minor prophets. Too many centuries of Christian culture have intervened between pagan times and our own for the resuscitation of paganism to succeed where it has been consciously attempted.
Just as most of the citizens of the Western world reject paganism, when they give the matter any attention, so likewise do they recognize the untenability of power culture. The experience of the last decade has been sufficient to convince great numbers, if they were not convinced before, that civilized life cannot prosper, or even survive, without the undergirding of strong ethical convictions. The neglect of ethics means decay, no matter how great the initial power may be.
The average modern, we believe, goes at least one step further than this. As he is not a pagan, so he is not irreligious. He will agree that mere ethics is unable to produce the required regeneration, and, humanist as he is, he sees that the strength of humanism comes from something beyond humanism. The need of religion, if our culture is to be saved, is widely recognized, not merely by theologians, but by men concerned with science, with the humanities, and with the social sciences.(See Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What, Princeton, 1939, especially pp. 239 ff.) Theoretical and explicit atheism is comparatively rare and is frequently denied by those who might be supposed to espouse it. The belief in God may be both weak and attenuated, but there is great reluctance to renounce it wholly.
Not only is the average modern not irreligious; he is also not anti-Christian. He recognizes, when he thinks about it, that he stands within the Christian tradition, and he has no practical acquaintance with any other. He may never read the Bible, but the value judgments of the Bible, and especially the gospel, have become in large measure his own standards, even though he gives them little conscious attention. Twentieth century man, if pressed for an answer, admits that he believes in a moral order, that he believes in religion, and that he believes in the Christian religion, but there he stops. He is trying to live in the midst of the world storm, not as an adherent of paganism and not as an opponent of the Christian faith, but as one who adheres to that faith in the most vague and tenuous manner conceivable. He claims to be a shareholder in the Christian corporation, but the stock has been watered almost to the vanishing point and is held, moreover, by absentee owners.
If we are to speak truly to our age, therefore, we can assume, not (1) the complete ignorance of Christian principles, such as existed in the decaying civilization of early Greece and Rome; (2) the thoroughgoing knowledge and acceptance of Christian principles, such as existed in the time of most of our grandparents; or (3) the vigorous antagonism to the gospel, such as now exists among those who accept either the Marxist or the Fascist interpretation of history; but (4) a vague and tenuous residuum of Christian piety, devoid of any intention of doing anything about it. To know our spiritual situation is something, for it at least saves us from dealing with straw men. The hopeful side of the picture is that the number of persons who are disturbed by this state of affairs, because they doubt if a vague and tenuous piety can sustain a civilization, is obviously growing.
The notion that we cannot have a decent world apart from a faith sufficient to inspire high ethical standards and action is now gaining ground. Not long ago the majority of our educated citizens appeared to suppose that ethical standards are self-supporting and that a humanistic culture is self-sustaining. Now most of them know better, having been convinced not so much by the logic of words as by the logic of events. They have been led by experience to conclude that the only power in human life able to counterbalance the dark and divisive faiths of our time is a still stronger faith, a faith concerned with Reality rather than human wishes.
The question before anyone who cares about the fate of men and women in the modern world is the question how a really saving faith can be encouraged and promoted. How can modern man, whose world seems to topple about him, regain a living faith in the Living God, so that he can feel once more both the dignity of his own life and the dignity of the lives of his fellow men -- everywhere?
In this great task the work of those who use their mental powers to show that the theistic hypothesis is true is, of course, absolutely essential. No matter how helpful a faith is, if it is not true, we want nothing of it. We would rather go to pieces on the basis of honesty than to patch up a civilization on the basis of fiction or wishful thinking. But that, fortunately, is not the point now most pressing. The rational arguments for theism were never stronger than they are today and never better presented. There are no philosophical or scientific discoveries that have outmoded them. The point to make now is that intellectual convincement, necessary as it is and valuable as it is, is not sufficient. For faith to become concrete it must be embodied in a human society. Separated, individual believers will not be able to make any headway against the present storm.
What is sobering in this regard is the fact that so many of the intellectual leaders of our time are willing to stop with intellectual convincement. Distinguished men of letters, essayists, novelists, and poets, have recently asserted their conviction that the only thing which can save our sagging culture is a revival of religious faith, but many of these men make no contact whatever with the particular organizations in their own communities which are dedicated to the nourishment of the very faith they declare necessary for our salvation. There are countless people who would resent being considered irreligious but who reject the practice of group religion. "I have my own religion," has become a cliché. Some prefer to say they believe in Christianity but not in Churchianity. In short, they believe in religion, but not in the church. They are keenly aware of the weaknesses of the church as they have known it and they propose the experiment of churchless religion. Since this way of thinking is so widespread, we must consider it seriously.
When we think of the awful need of humanity at this hour, it seems almost grotesque to turn to the church for help, if by the church we mean not some idealization, but the actual human organizations we know. On the face of it, the hypothesis that the church can play a major part in saving civilization seems an outrageous hypothesis. While it is manifestly true that there is a great faith which has long been the secret of life in Western man, does not the ordinary church, whether in New York, Middletown, or Gopher Prairie, provide such a caricature of this faith that it is really a joke? What mankind desperately needs is Justice, Mercy, and Truth, but what we are offered is some ugly stained-glass windows and a holy tone and a collection plate full of dimes.
Any candid observer will agree that most of the popular criticisms of the church are justified. It has hypocrites in it, and it is weak when it ought to be strong. But the urgent question is the question of a better alternative when the nature of our present crisis is such that our option is a forced option. The only live alternatives to the church are the pseudo religions of totalitarianism or vague religiosity. Since we have already seen reason to reject one of these, the other, i.e., vague religiosity, is really the only alternative to the church that our present culture offers. Loyal identification with the church may have difficulties, but the alternative position may have more. Since no position on any fundamental question is wholly free from difficulties, the path of wisdom lies not in rejecting a position because it is found to have difficulties but rather in making an honest comparison of difficulties involved in alternatives. John Baillie’s report on the effectiveness of this approach is interesting and instructive:
I am happy to count among my own friends a rather remarkable number of men of high intellectual distinction who have returned to the full Christian outlook after years of defection from it, and I should say that in practically every case the renewed hospitality of their minds to Christian truth came about through their awakening to the essential untenability of the alternative positions which they had been previously attempting to occupy.(John Baillie, Invitation to Pilgrimage, p. 15)
What, then, are the real difficulties of the position in which so many of our sensitive contemporaries have halted, the position of the man who has his own religion but who does not throw his efforts into the establishment and enlargement of any religious group or church? The first important difficulty is the moral one that such a person is a parasite. He is taking more than he is giving. He lives in a world many of the desirable features of which have come about by the slow, painful efforts of just such groups of weak and sinful men as he now refuses to join. Since the position of the social parasite is one that cannot be universalized, it is indefensible to the sensitive conscience when the true position is made clear. Consequently, it is desirable to put as forcibly as we can the following query: Do I profit by a spiritual movement and yet dissociate myself deliberately from the practical task of keeping it going when my help is needed?
A second difficulty, closely allied with that of parasitism, concerns family life. The moral foundations of our culture, which organized religion has done so much to maintain, are often reasonably secure for one generation, even when actual sharing in the corporation is given up. Sometimes, under favorable conditions, it is secure longer, but those who engage in personal counseling are aware of the constant problem of the religiously detached family in which the parents are amazed at the moral bankruptcy of their children. They cannot see why their children fail to have the same standards as their own, but in truth they have denied their children any practical contact with the ongoing tradition that is chiefly concerned with keeping these alive in our culture. A strong religious movement often has enough momentum to carry over in effect for one generation, but seldom for two. The highly publicized Hollywood type of morality may not actually characterize Hollywood as a whole, but it is what we have a right to expect and what we actually find in many families that have drifted away from organized religious influence.
Those who are concerned today with the nurture of student religious life report consistently that the best work in holding the loyalty of students is carried on by those denominations which constitute a self-conscious minority, so that the members feel that they have much in common with one another. Critics of such faiths as Christian Science and Mormonism cannot but be impressed with the beneficent effect that the reality of group life has on many young people. They present a sharp contrast to the rank and file of students, most of whom call themselves Protestants merely because they are neither Roman Catholic nor Jewish and who often have little appreciation of a heritage that is precious.
There are millions of families in which the parents believe in God and live virtuous lives but in which, inasmuch as they are separated from organized religion, the children miss the steadying influence of those institutional practices which serve as constant reminders of what otherwise it is easy to forget. Young lives are formed, not chiefly by the intellectual beliefs of their parents, of which they may be wholly ignorant, but far more by family practices, such as attendance at public worship, which become habitual and are eventually unconscious influences of incalculable importance
It is historically correct to say that Christianity has never been a saving force in civilization when it has been looked upon as a set of noble precepts which men may observe in isolation. In the beginning the Christian faith was, above all, a fellowship. In the decaying empire of Rome there arose a fellowship so powerful that, for a while, Christians had all things in common. The fellowship was not always perfect, as the Corinthian Letters of St. Paul so clearly demonstrate, but that it should be a fellowship was central to the gospel.
The basic difficulty with vague religiosity is that human beings are weak and fallible and need artificial or consciously constructed supports. It is theoretically possible to be a good man without participation in the life of a religious community, but in practice the difficulties are enormous. We know what we ought to do, but we need reminders; we believe in a moral order, but we need inspiration and fellowship. We are small indeed, and we need to participate in something bigger than we are. The person who says so proudly that he has his own religion and consequently has no need of the church is committing what has been well called "the angelic fallacy." If we were angels, we might not need artificial help, but, being men, we normally do need it. And, whether we need it or not, others need it and we have some responsibility to them.
By participation in an ongoing religious community, particularly of the type we know in the Western world, an isolated individual is partly lifted above himself, not only because he may, in a group, be more recipient of God’s help, but also because he there shares in the distilled wisdom of our race. Week after week he hears the reading of great classics, such as the Psalms or the parables of Jesus, so that the total impact is great indeed. The reading can hardly be so poor as to spoil utterly the noble words. He shares in ancient hymns that weak men like himself have used for generations. He may still find that his highest experiences come to him as he walks alone with his dog, but these experiences are more likely to come to him if he walks with the richness of memory that participation in the ongoing community makes possible.
Finally, our vague religiosity faces an insuperable difficulty in that it provides no way by which the precious insights of our religious heritage are to be maintained. Had we always been limited to individual religion, like that which is fashionable now, we should not even be aware of the great testimonies which have survived so many crises and which the average individualist cherishes. Apart from the church, we should not have kept the Bible or the great hymns or the great prayers or even the very notion of the gospel.
Poor and weak as it is, the church may become the means of our cultural salvation because, with all its human mistakes, it includes certain contributions that otherwise the world may lose and that men have actually lost temporarily in some areas. The great testimonies, which it is the mission of the church to make and without which human life would be even more savage and degraded than it now is, are many, but four are of paramount importance in the reconstruction of civilization.
(1) The first great testimony that the church makes in all times is that of equality before God. Because every man, whatever his color, his knowledge, his station, or his financial standing, is a child of God, there is a profound level at which men are equal. They are not equal in that they have the same powers, but they are equal in that each is equally accountable. The upshot of this doctrine, perhaps the most disturbing that the human mind can hold, is that king and commoner are equally subject to the moral law. The result of this is bound to be democracy or something very much like it.
According to the gospel, the king is as much subject to the moral law as is the humblest subject, because he did not make it. It is grounded in the nature of things, which is to say it is part of the will of God. So long as there is a suggestion that some nations or some persons are above the law, there can never be a decent world, for then there is no brake on sheer power. The conviction that no nation and no person is above the law is the contribution of the Judaeo-Christian revelation to the whole world. The ancient Hebrews saw it in a way that would be shocking to us if we were not already so familiar with the idea. The Hebrews were a people among whom even King David could be judged for his cowardly treatment of the husband of Bathsheba. This testimony has come over into the Christian tradition and has been at the base of countless revolutions. Slavery and social stratification and entrenched privilege are of long standing in human society but they are never really secure so long as the gospel is known.
(2) The second great testimony is the testimony for peace. We take this for granted as wholly natural until we are stabbed awake by contemporary prophets who reject the gospel and hold that a condition of war is better, lifting and cleansing a nation. Actually the Christian teaching about peace is at variance with many other cultural traditions and could easily have been lost, apart from conscious fostering. The major Christian tradition has not been pacifism, in the sense of refusal to share in any war, but it has been a testimony for peace in the sense that war is seen as a necessary evil at best and never something in which to glory. It has frequently been accepted as the least of alternative evils but seldom as a positive good.(Excellent historical treatments of this subject are available, especially Umphrey Lee, The Historic Church and Modern Pacifism, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, New York; 1943, and C. J. Cadoux, The Early Church and the World, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1925.) Here the position of Augustine is representative. It was his conviction that the Christian must always contemplate wars with mental pain and that "if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, his is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost all human feeling." (The City of God, XIX, vii.)
It is the sad truth that wars have raged intermittently in Christendom and that the present conflict, the worst yet, has broken out in Europe, which has been under Christian influence for at least a millennium and a half; but the Christian faith has never accepted this situation or failed to deplore it. Given the inventions of our day, life might be even worse if there were not the leavening influence for peace, which shows itself in the renewed determination, on the part of millions, to try to make a world in which war is no longer a recurrent phenomenon. But the point to remember is that these millions are voicing a conviction which it has been the role of the church to foster for centuries. The world is bad enough with the leaven; it is frightening to contemplate what it might become without the leaven.
(3) The third great testimony of the church is that of universality. Though the church itself is a fractured body, it has never lost sight of the fact that it is a body, namely, the body of Christ. The notion of the Church Universal has been maintained. Actually the degree to which the natural divisiveness of mankind has been transcended has been very great. Men of all colors and all nationalities worship together and maintain bonds of friendship across boundaries, even in wartime. Men of every nationality, in all churches, listen to the same gospel, sing the same hymns, read the same Bible, and revere the same Lord.
The situation in regard to the testimony for universality is similar to that in regard to the testimony for peace, in that both have seemingly been honored chiefly in the breach and yet both have been maintained as leaven.
Man is naturally divisive and would be more so than he is were there not a conscious fostering of the universal principle of essential oneness. Our faith has never fully succeeded in bringing together men of various nations and races as one family conscious of their common origin and destiny, but it has never ceased to preach that this is the true way. There has been in the world for many centuries a continuous society devoted, not to the glorification of one race or nation or class, but to the notion that Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, Oriental and Occidental are really brothers because they are all children of a common Father. We have denied this in practice by slavery, by racial discrimination, and in a thousand other ways, but the leaven has been always at work, so that we cannot contemplate these things with equanimity or complacency. The contribution of the church to civilization is not to be measured so much by the actual degree of unity it has achieved in mankind as by the manner in which it has kept alive the ideal of world unity. Racial discrimination can never be wholly acceptable to a people who have heard from their youth that God has "made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth . . . ." (Acts 17:26) There is no evidence or even likelihood that this testimony would have been preserved apart from the action of the organized body of believers. Separated individuals could not have done it.
(4) The fourth great testimony is that of renunciation of worldly pride. This, also, appears to have been honored in the breach, in that we find the emergence of power politics in Christian countries and even in the church, which has sometimes aped the world by the honor it gives to its "dignitaries." But here, again, the leaven is always at work. So long as we claim to be part of Christendom we can never wholly ignore the fact that Christ said, "You know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; but it is not so among you." We tend to take a worldly satisfaction in being called "Doctor, Doctor," but our satisfaction is dimmed when we remember that Jesus said, "Be not called, Rabbi, Rabbi," which means the same thing. The medieval world goes in for splendor; but along comes a man like St. Francis, who drinks again of the fountain that is the gospel, and his subsequent life is a tacit criticism of the splendor about him.
In spite of the recurrent failure of the church to be true to Christ’s teaching, in this important matter, the fact remains that the gospel continues to this day to be the chief antidote to the cult of power which has been the worst scourge of our distraught century. The real brake on Hitler’s doctrines, as on those of Nietzsche before him, is still the gospel of Jesus Christ. If it did nothing else but keep alive in the world the disturbing and revolutionary notion that humble service is better than strutting power, wise men would support and foster the church with all the strength at their command.
After we listen to all the familiar criticisms of the church, including its provincialism, the hypocrisy of its members, the self-centeredness of its leaders, and after we have agreed with all these criticisms, we may still find it reasonable to believe that the church is the only foundation on which our tottering civilization can be restored. It is the stone that our modern builders have rejected, but it may actually be the indispensable cornerstone. We begin to suspect that this is the case when we see the record of the church in the midst of our world storm The record of the church has not been perfect, but it has been better than its despisers expected. This is conspicuously true in China, where the identification of Christian missionaries with their wounded and broken Chinese friends has made thoughtful men everywhere a bit ashamed of their rather cheap jibes at the missionary enterprise.
All the world knows of the way in which representative members of the Confessional Church of Germany have given the Nazis their toughest opposition. It is part of the record that the labor unions and the universities and learned societies bowed the knee to Baal, when Pastor Niemoeller and his kind stood up like men. The testimony of Albert Einstein in this connection is well known, but it cannot be repeated too often:
Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks....
Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
(Time, December 23, 1940, p. 38.)
This is an extremely sobering report, coming as it does from one who has no conceivable private stake in the success of the church. And such a witness does not stand alone. Lewis Mumford, who specifically disclaims being a theologian, has made observations like those made by Einstein and comes to the conclusion that the church is humanity’s hope. "And a Church," he writes, "that taught one part of mankind to walk upright and unafraid through one Dark Age may yet summon up the power that will enable us to avert another Dark Age, or to face it, if it begins to descend upon us, with unyielding courage."(Lewis Mumford, Faith for Living, pp. 173, 174.)
At this point the average modern faces a real problem. He may be convinced that individual religion is insufficient, especially in the present storm, either to strengthen the individual or to maintain the testimonies which we prize, but when he proposes to join a church he is baffled. Instead of a church, he finds churches. Shall he join the Roman Catholics, or shall he seek fellowship with one of the many Protestant churches, perhaps the one nearest him or the one where he already has friends? He would like to join the trunk, but he cannot find anything but branches.
There is no doubt that the difficulty is sometimes great, but it is one which the unfriendly critic tends to distort. Sectarianism is often, though not always, an evil. Sometimes a special Christian group keeps alive some testimony that might otherwise be lost and all others are consequently indebted to them. In the little churches, so easy to caricature, there are frequently found a genuine sharing of life and a generosity of giving that are sufficient to make the average critic ashamed of his criticism. It is the funny little churches, all over the land, that have provided the money that has made possible the courageous work of the missionaries in China who have, in great numbers, stayed with their Chinese friends in the face of invasion and personal danger or death.
The truth is that a good part of the objection to denominationalism no longer applies to the present situation. The refusal of the Roman Catholics to have any part in the ecumenical movement is a genuine difficulty, but, in spite of this, the amount of agreement among most Christian groups is now very great indeed. The great ecumenical conferences of recent years have shown that most of the denominations have more in common than was generally supposed. We begin to realize that this is the case when we try the experiment of hearing various Christian leaders and guessing what their denominational affiliation is. We have little success. The point is, then, that, though various denominations still exist, it often makes little practical difference which one a man joins since they have so much essential unity.
It may be, however, that some, while convinced of the insufficiency of individual religion, cannot find a church which satisfies them. Since the necessity of social witness remains, anyone in this situation ought to start a church of his own. The imperfection of the present churches does not absolve a man who cares about civilization from seeking to join in the kind of group action that will help to conserve what cannot be conserved by mere individual faith and worship.
Instead of being baffled by any difficulties that we may feel about church membership we need to ask ourselves quite seriously where else we may turn. What organized institution is there, apart from the church, that has as its major purpose the fostering of Justice, Mercy, and Truth and the Freedom that they jointly make possible. Bad and divided as the church may be, it is the only organization really working at the job of affecting men’s lives in the deep way in which they must be affected if what we prize is to survive.
It might be supposed that we could turn to the schools, since the task of the schools is constantly being enlarged, but the very nature of the modern school precludes this, as we have already noted in Chapter I.(For a careful and scholarly study of this problem see Alvin W. Johnson, The Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States with Special Reference to the Public Schools, University of Minnesota Press, 1934.) It cannot be the universities, since they touch only a small fraction of the population at best and, furthermore, many universities reject the notion that they are responsible for the spiritual life of their students. There are, of course, many different agencies keeping up different phases of what we have defined as the life of the spirit, but they are not sufficient, even when taken all together, for they do not give the dynamic of an organized faith.
If faith is to be effective in undergirding civilized society, it must be given some concrete embodiment. Civilization will not be saved because there are men and women who make the mere affirmation that God exists. Life is not raised to new levels by the mere fact that we have been intellectually convinced by the cosmological argument. Our predicament is too great and too serious for our salvation to come in so academic a manner. What is needed is something that can set men’s souls on fire. What is required is a vision of man’s life under God’s Providence which so thrills us to the center of our beings that we are willing to commit ourselves, soul and body, to the incarnation of that vision.
What, in historical experience, has most often been able to do this? It is that hypocritical, bickering organization that we call the church. Without it we might long ago have been submerged. If our civilization is to be saved, we must have it or something like it, for man is the kind of creature who needs it. The rock on which the church is built often appears to be weather-beaten rubble, because it is all mixed up with human frailty, but the lesson of history is a continual verification of the judgment that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.
We have inherited, in the Western world, a cluster of ideas which we regard as precious and about which there is more agreement than superficially appears. Apart from a conscious rejection of these ideas, such as is described in the previous chapter, it is generally agreed throughout the West that human individuality is precious and that things must be used for the sake of man rather than man for the sake of things. When it comes to actual practice, we may depart from this standard rather markedly, but there is little argument about the principle. Furthermore, we hold that the state, being only a human device for the benefit of man, is not an object of absolute loyalty and ought not to be. The state exists for man, not man for the state. Most of us give hearty consent to Edmund Burke’s dictum that "all political power which is set over men ought to be in some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit." Acceptance of these ideas constitutes, in general, what we call humanism; and, whatever else we are, most of us are humanists in this broad sense.
Another part of the cluster of ideas, to which general assent is given, concerns human equality. We hold that there is no favored race and no nation which ought to be dominant. Consequently, racial discrimination and all forms of slavery are believed to be wrong. We assert this proposition with a bit more hesitation than might be expected of those who mean what they say, but in any case we are ashamed to deny it.
A third part of this precious cluster is the concept of peace as the desirable condition for mankind. Very little of the Western world is pacifist in the extreme sense of refusal to participate in war after war is declared, but large portions of the Western world are pacifist in the sense that they hate war and all its works, and they participate in it only with troubled consciences and heaviness of heart. It is generally agreed amongst us that war is a sorry necessity at best, always a means to an end, and that the end is peace. We do not glory in war or maintain that it is needed as a stimulus to the heroic in man. We fight when we must to clear away the barriers to peace, and we make peace as rapidly and as securely as our conditions permit. War, in the Western mind, is an unfortunate interlude and nothing more.
On all this, we say, there is substantial agreement. This agreement has come not merely from the judgment of the rank and file, but even more strikingly from our moral philosophers who have given their lives to critical inquiry. Though our moral philosophers have differed in many details, especially in regard to the sources of moral judgment, they have agreed amazingly in regard to what men ought to do. Thus there is very little disagreement with Kant’s famous dictum: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only." Since this cannot be a genuine basis of conduct unless it depends, in turn, on a true experience of personal fellowship, the one permanently valid form of the categorical imperative, so Western man believes, is "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Most thoughtful members of our Western society will give hearty assent when the highest official of the Church of England says that "the essence of morality is personal fellowship or respect for persons as persons.’’(William Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 254.)
Precious as this heritage is, there is grave question whether it can be made either to continue or to prevail. How can anything so mild be maintained in open competition with Blut und Boden? The problem is vastly accentuated by the fact that great numbers who accept this Western creed accept it halfheartedly and conventionally, while those who espouse a creed of blood or soil or race or nation or class usually espouse it with fanatical zeal. We take our creed for granted; we have little interest in how it came to be; and we assume uncritically that it will naturally survive. This is the pathetic faith of Western man in the middle of the twentieth century, a faith utterly unjustified by experience.
We can take no comfort from the fact that the pseudo paganism, which we have described under the category of power culture, is perverse and fundamentally decadent. The barbarism is, indeed, synthetic, as Reinhold Niebuhr has told us, but it is not weak. "For the first time in history," writes Niebuhr, "the barbarisms which threaten civilization have been generated in the heart of a decadent civilization. The barbarism which threatens us is ‘synthetic’ rather than genuine." (Reinhold Niebuhr, Christanity and Power Politics, New York, 1940, p. 118.) But, synthetic as it is, it is far too strong an adversary for the easygoing Westerner who says, complacently, that he has worked out a "philosophy" which is personally satisfactory to him and that he believes in being kind.
As we have already pointed out, the system of power culture must eventually fall because of its inner contradictions, and in this we can take comfort, but our sense of comfort is premature if we suppose the failure of one evil system means the reinstitution of that which sensitive men have most prized. Evil structures are indeed precarious, but evil structures are not automatically followed by something better.
One of the most disturbing of the parables of Jesus is the parable of the empty house.(Matthew, 12:43-45) The house, we are told, was emptied of the unclean spirit that had occupied it and was swept and garnished. But it could not remain empty. Not only did the original evil spirit return, but seven other devils, worse than the first, accompanied him. We have already seen this development in parts of our culture, and we shall see it in other parts unless we follow a more intelligent course of action. The empty condition, spiritually, is a condition of the greatest danger.
The danger of emptiness is seen vividly in the desire for unity and community. With the breakdown of legitimate bases of solidarity, men, and especially young men, could not remain satisfied with the amorphous heterogeneity of atomistic individualism. They longed to belong to something, and thus arose the new solidarities, which are of so perverted a kind as to menace the future of the human race.
Here, then, is our predicament: We have inherited precious ethical convictions that seem to us to be profound, central, and essential. But they have a curious inefficacy. They are noble, but they are impotent. We are amazed, by contrast, at the power that an alternative creed can engender. It is clear that something more is needed, that moral convictions, while necessary to the good life, are not sufficient. Perhaps an analysis of recent experience will give us our clue as to what this "something more" is.
Most careful observers agree that the two systems of life which have recently inspired the youth of Germany and of Russia are quasi-religious. They are much more than economics, and they are much more than politics. They are undoubtedly inadequate as religions, and in large measure false religions, but they have the effect that only religion can have. Millions now dying on both sides of the eastern front are dying for a faith. When we say that the system of which Adolf Hitler has been the prophet (and that, to an increasing degree, is his rôle) is fundamentally religious, we mean that it includes the element of absolute commitment which is everywhere the distinguishing mark of religion. The sad truth is that this commitment can be given to base objects more easily than it can be given to the Living God.
We understand much of the distinction between religion and other phases of our lives when we sense the profound difference between faith and belief. Faith is closer to courage than it is to intellectual assent. Faith is easily understood by the gambler as both Blaise Pascal and Donald Hankey knew because the gambler stands to win or lose by his play. This was brought out in Kirsopp Lake’s now classic definition, "Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequences." Faith, as the plain man knows, is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations.
The lesson of history is that those lacking such a faith are no match for those inspired by such a faith, whatever its object. The fearful aspect of the present situation is that those who have inherited the major tradition of the West now have an ethic without a religion, whereas they are challenged by millions who have a religion without an ethic. The former group will win the war, because they have the preponderance of men and resources, as well as a fortunate alliance with Russia, but that is by no means the end of the story. We should be gullible indeed if we supposed that mere military victory would end the powerful threat of the faith which is proposed as a successor to the religion of the West.
Little do we know what evil faith may grip our people when the war is over. Since men cannot live long without a faith, the choice is always a choice between competing faiths. The only practical alternative to an evil faith is a better faith. Though this is the lesson of history, we are now trying the utterly precarious experiment, in which the odds are against us, of attempting to maintain our culture by loyalty to the Christian ethic without a corresponding faith in the Christian religion that produced it.
The characteristic intellectual, at least in English-speaking countries, is much influenced by the Christian ethic. He is brave and kind, he tries to obey the Ten Commandments, or in any case the last six, and he gives full intellectual assent to the Golden Rule. If he thinks seriously about the Hebrew Decalogue, he thinks that the ancients put the commandments in the wrong order. He would put the moral commandments first and the strictly religious ones last. (A large class in an American university was asked, recently, to regroup the commandments in order of importance. More than 90 per cent of the students put the first two commandments last.) He would seldom be aware that, in this regrouping, his judgment is in sharp opposition to the judgment of Jesus on the same subject.
The average Western intellectual appears to think of himself not merely as a humanist, which we all are, but as a humanist and no more. As such he is not necessarily antagonistic to religion, since there is obviously no contradiction between interest in human values and faith in God. Indeed, the main historic tradition in humanism has been Christian humanism, consciously refreshed at Christian sources. But, though the modern humanist does not oppose religion, he usually does something worse -- he ignores it. He acts in practice as though God does not exist and, without arguing the matter, assumes rather uncritically that religion is something outgrown. The result is that much of our current humanism is atheistic in practice, though not in theory. It is supposed that the fruits of the ancient faith can be enjoyed without attention to its roots.
Since the fashionable humanism of our day does not lack for able and eloquent spokesmen, we can select representatives with ease. They were numerous in pre-Hitler Germany, and they are numerous in the democracies now, though they are not so numerous as they were before the storm broke. If we were writing in England, it would be suitable to use as representative the writings of Julian Huxley or C. E. M. Joad. In America, an equally suitable representative is Alexander Meiklejohn, whose brilliant career as a philosopher and public servant entitles his words to respect. Meiklejohn has recently published a book called Education between Two Worlds, in which he espouses the creed of ethics minus religion with great clarity and discrimination. The reviews have shown that his following is great, especially in educational circles.
Though Meiklejohn is representative of the current tendency in one way, there is another way in which he is not representative. He is representative in the content of his belief or unbelief, but he is unrepresentative in his expression of it. He is an excellent spokesman who says clearly what so many think, but think in a confused or truncated manner. In particular, he sees, better than does the average man, the dangers of the position he champions. Most of the atheism of our time is unconscious, unargued, and unexplicit, whereas Meiklejohn’s atheism, while it is unargued, is at least conscious and explicit:
The cosmos as a whole, out of which human life emerges, gives no evidence of being, or wishing to be, intelligent. The human spirit is alone in an otherwise non-human, nonspiritual universe. Whatever it has, or may ever have, of sensitiveness, of wisdom, of generosity, of freedom, of justice, it has made, it will make, for itself.(Alexander Meiklejohn, Education between Two Worlds, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1942, p. 200)
The confidence with which such a sweeping statement is made surprises us, especially in view of the brilliant contemporary studies that do show evidence of Mind outside our little planet, (See Temple, op. cit., Chapter V) but perhaps it has not occurred to writers of this type that there might be exciting new thinking in contemporary theology. It is to Meiklejohn’s credit that he has some idea of the gravity of the human problem which such a change in conviction entails. "If we can no longer believe in God," he asks, "can we maintain, can we carry on, the civilization which was founded on that belief?"
Perhaps no question of this kind is ever permanently answered, but it is important to point out that there is a great body of evidence which suggests a negative answer to Meiklejohn’s question. And the chief evidence is to be found in the actual experience of men, especially in our part of the twentieth century. Since there is so much evidence of the moral decay that follows a loss of theistic conviction and so little evidence of the maintenance of civilization apart from this conviction, the burden of proof is on the person who answers Meiklejohn’s question in the affirmative. For the most part he has nothing more than speculation to offer as against the actual logic of events.
It must be remembered that there were many people in Germany who, during the time that Hitlerism was rising, accepted the benevolent and humane creed which Meiklejohn champions. But their humane creed was impotent in conflict with the narrow doctrine of race. The country seemingly was divided between those who embraced a humane creed with no enthusiasm and those who embraced the dogma of synthetic barbarism with abounding enthusiasm. Wherever this situation occurs, the crude doctrine will win. The excellence of humane sentiments is no guarantee of success, at least in the short run. If men are told the Golden Rule, they listen and give assent and do nothing. If they are told they belong to a master race, they proceed to demonstrate the truth of the statement.
The notion that an atheist is an evil man has little justification in experience. A pragmatist like John Dewey is often good and kind. The chief criticism to be leveled at the atheistic moralist is not that he is wicked, but that he is naïve. His assumption that the kind of life he prizes can stand up rootless against the contemporary storm has nothing to commend it in the actual experience of men. The impotence of contemporary moralism arises from the fact that "we are trying to maintain a political valuation of man which had roots in a religious understanding of him, when that religious understanding has been forgotten." (William Paton, The Church and the New Order, Student Christian Movement Press, London, 1941, p. 152.)
The cluster of ideas that we prize in our Western culture has been with us so long that we often forget how these ideas first came into the world. We owe a great deal, of course, to the classic cultures of Greece and Rome, but we tend to read back into the ancient literature conceptions that the classic authors did not really hold. Not until the rise of Christianity did the ancient world discountenance infanticide; likewise, it was Christianity "that ended the scandal of taking human life for sport," (H. G. Wood, Christianity and Civilization, p. 11. Professor Wood’s other examples are instructive.) and altered the status of women. Humanitarian ideals existed in classic culture, but the humanitarianism we prize in the West owes most of its original impetus to the gospel. It is interesting to note that this is the conclusion to which Alfred Loisy came, on the basis of his immense scholarship.
The best thing in present-day societies is the feeling for humanity which has come to us from the gospel and which we owe to Christianity. You will object that we have made this Christianity ourselves or at least perfected it. That is true, but it is not under the predominant influence of Greece and Rome that we have perfected it; it is by lending an ear to the voice of Jerusalem to which the ancient world finally listened, finding that it could not continue morally, humanely, by its own wisdom.(Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine, p. 251.)
Even Meiklejohn, who makes no claim to being a Christian, appreciates perfectly what the source of so many of our humane ideals is, and he is especially clear about this in regard to the principles of education. In his account of the influence of Comenius, he points out that the advanced educational notions of Comenius came directly as applications of his Christian faith. His faith in God, as revealed by Christ, made him support a double universalism, the unity of knowledge and the unity of mankind. The strength of the educational idealism of Comenius came from the fact that it had roots. "Comenius believes in God," writes Meiklejohn. "Therefore he is a democrat. Therefore the unified study of the world is for him a normal part of the healthy living of every human being."(Meiklejohn, op. cit., p. 27)
The terrible danger of our time consists in the fact that ours is a cut-flower civilization. Beautiful as cut flowers may be, and much as we may use our ingenuity to keep them looking fresh for a while, they will eventually die, and they die because they are severed from their sustaining roots. We are trying to maintain the dignity of the individual apart from the deep faith that every man is made in God’s image and is therefore precious in God’s eyes. Certainly we cannot maintain this if we accept a metaphysical doctrine that refuses to admit any difference in kind between a living mind and a mechanical structure. We do not reverence a mechanical structure -- we use it. We are trying to keep the notion of freedom, especially freedom of speech, while we give up the basic convictions on which freedom depends. Freedom of research, for example, loses all its point unless there is an objective truth to which the scientist is loyal. Freedom of moral action likewise loses its point unless there is an objective right that the individual seeks to follow, whatever the personal cost. But belief in objective truth and belief in objective right are part of what we mean by belief in God.
If there is any suspicion that our standards are of our own making, weakness is bound to set in. Those who make can also set aside. What we need in order to give power is not an assertion of our own ideals, but contact with the eternally real. The ideal may be our own imaginary construction, wholly devoid of cosmic support. What men need, if they are to overcome their lethargy and weakness, is some contact with the real world in which moral values are centered in the nature of things. This is the love of God, for which men have long shown themselves willing to live or to die. The only sure way in which we can transcend our human relativities is by obedience to the absolute and eternal God.
Our major tradition is one in which men have had the courage to be free and to uphold the sacredness of individual personality because of their religious convictions. The appeal of democracy is not very great if we are concerned merely with democracy. It is easy, then, to make democracy seem ridiculous, as the apologists of totalitarianism have already done so effectively. But democracy has great attractive power if its appeal is derivative, if it is the practical application of profound convictions about God and man as it was for so many of the founding fathers of both British and American democracy in the seventeenth century.
The trouble with so many of our fine ideals is that they tend to be abstract. What, actually, do we mean when we speak of the love of humanity? We certainly do not mean that we love all the existent miserable people in the world, most of whom we have never seen. The abstract duty of being humane is not such as to dominate men’s lives, but there is something else which can dominate them. We get a hint concerning what this is when we note that Jesus apparently said nothing about "the indefeasible value of the individual," but He did say that not a sparrow "shall fall without your Father,’’(Matthew, 10:2) and "take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones. . . ." (Matthew 18:1.) Here is concreteness that gives power.
An ordinary man, merely in and of himself, is not of so great worth and may be a very poor creature. We shall not make an effective answer to the apostles of blood and soil by pointing to him. But there is something else to which we can point, as the late William Paton said in a memorable paragraph:
But if this humble and obscure man is in reality one whom God has made, whom He has made in love, so that he shall never know peace except in loving God in return; if this man is one to whom God speaks; if this man is the object of a Divine solicitude so great that the Word became flesh for his salvation, the Son of God died for him -- if this be true, then this humble and obscure man has a link with eternity, with the creative love that made the world. He cannot then be rightly treated as a cog in a machine, or a sample of a racial blood-stream, or one of the individual atoms that make up a nation.(Paton, op.cit.,pp. 150, 151)
It is especially in our Christian tradition that we find the power which is so conspicuously lacking in mere moralism. We must not forget that, in the Roman Empire, Christ won, and won against tremendous odds. He won because the faith in Christ really changed the lives of countless weak men and made them bold as lions. He has taken poor creatures who could not even understand the language of moral philosophy and shaken the world through them.
This has been said brilliantly by John Baillie:
Christ did not come to earth to tell us merely what we ought to do; He came to do something for us. He came not merely to exhort but to help. He did not come to give us good advice. That, if it were no more than that, was possibly not a thing of which we stood greatly in need, for there are always plenty of people who are ready with their advice. Advice is cheap, but what Christ offered us was infinitely costly. It was the power of God unto salvation.(John Baillie, Invitation to Pilgrimage, p. 51.)
It is easy enough to hate Hitler, but what is it that we propose as an alternative to his proposal for mankind? We now have a good opportunity to know, since we see suggestions daily in our propaganda sheets and even more in the expensive advertisements that so many large commercial firms are using for the building of morale, now that they have nothing to sell to the average reader. They all say about the same thing. We are to oppose the new paganism in the name of humanity, liberty, brotherhood, the sacredness of the individual soul. These are all very fine, but the question is whether they go far enough. John Baillie’s analysis is so good that his words should be cited again:
These indeed are the ideals of the Christian ages, or some of them, or at least they sound very like them, but in the Christian Ages they were all deeply rooted in something bigger and grander, in something that was no mere ideal but an eternal reality. They were rooted in the love of God as manifest in Jesus Christ our Lord . . . . It was Christ who taught us the indefeasible value of the individual soul. It was Christ who taught us of fraternité when He said, ‘One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren’; and St. Paul when he said that ‘we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one member one of another.’ Hence the doubt that keeps raising itself in my mind when I read these fine pronouncements about our ideals . . . is whether these ideals have sufficient strength of conviction in them, or sufficient power of survival, in face of so powerful a contrary force, when they are no longer allowed to breathe their native air or draw daily sustenance from their original source.(Ibid., pp. 125. 126)
Moralizing cannot stand against a burning faith, even when that faith is an evil and perverted one. It is almost as ineffective as an umbrella in a tornado. The only way in which we can overcome our impotence and save our civilization is by the discovery of a sufficient faith. Goodness we must have, but the way to goodness is to find our peace in the love of God who, as the Source of goodness, makes us know that, even at best, we are not really good. This is the peace that passes understanding, though it is not a peace that negates the understanding.
Some of the hardest problems of our day are moral problems; rather than economic or political ones; but, moral problems as they are, many of them cannot be solved except on a religious basis. One example of this is provided by the problem of racial antipathy, a problem that has been accentuated rather than diminished in the recent development of our civilization. So great is the hold of race prejudice on men’s minds that it must be counteracted by something powerful and revolutionary. Men do not transcend the prejudice and hatred based on race by physical proximity or even by the reasonable evidence that all need each other. What is needed is a genuine conversion, striking at the roots of the sinful pride on which race hatred thrives. The great known examples of history in which this kind of animosity has been really overcome have been chiefly religious examples, like that of John Woolman. In all honesty we are compelled to state that religion does not have this effect universally, but that we should hardly expect, knowing what we do about the ability of the human heart to keep its cherished hatreds. What we can honestly state is that the religious approach is more likely to be successful in our particular culture than is any other. The reason for the greater probability of the success of the religious approach is that the problem is fundamentally a religious problem. Race hatred comes, primarily, not from ignorance, but from sin. We will not accept all men as brothers until we are really humble, and we are not really humble until we measure ourselves by the revelation of the Living God.
A second relevant example of a problem which is essentially insoluble except on the religious level is that provided by our sense of national destiny. In many ways the democratic nations will be in greater danger after the war than those nations which have been more obviously guilty. What if we should begin to feel like a Herrenvolk, sure of our superior virtue as well as of our superior power? Since we shall not have the sobering experience of defeat, what is there to keep us steady? One of our major debts to the thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr is at precisely this point. "There is no cure," writes Niebuhr, "for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion. The pride of a powerful nation may be humbled by the impotence which defeat brings. The pride of a virtuous nation cannot be humbled by moral and political criticisms because in comparative terms it may actually be virtuous." (Reinhold Niebuhr, "Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility," Christianity and Crisis, October 4, 1943, Vol. III, No. 16, P. 3)
The only experience we know that is revolutionary enough both to support the downcast nation and to chasten the victorious nation is the sense of existing under the eternal Providence of the Living God. In this, as Lincoln discovered in the tragic days of the Civil War, we find a level of experience which does the seemingly impossible of making us firm in the right, "as God gives us to see the right," but also humble because we are conscious that "the Almighty has his own purposes." It is religion and religion alone that does this for men. For this reason we can never have a real civilization without it.
Partisan, religious, humanitarian and all other criteria in general, are completely irrelevant. Adolph Hitler
Not all who note the sickness of Western civilization are saddened by this. There are some who are glad that it is sick and hope it will die. The sooner it dies the better, they suppose, because they believe the central faith of Western man has been a mistake. This is especially true of those who look upon the Christian religion as an impediment to the full development of a strong, heroic age. With its constant emphasis on a moral imperative it has dampened natural enthusiasms and made man a tame creature. What is desirable, they think, is to set men free from the shackles of the Christian centuries and thus make way for the restoration of the old gusty life in which the strong are able to glory in their strength.
It might be argued that this way should be given a fair trial, inasmuch as the Christian way has already been tried a long time and does not seem to have been a marked success. Why not see what frank neo-paganism would do for the world?
Fortunately, so far as our decision is concerned, the problem is not a purely speculative one, since the suggested basis of culture has already been tried. It has been tried, not only in the ancient world, but in our own twentieth century. We are living in a time that is as exciting as it is sad, because we have seen a laboratory test of the old idea in a new setting. To a degree that would have seemed fantastic in prospect, the Nazi youth have been trained in the entire renunciation of the Christian ethic. It is a controlled experiment. Thousands of young people have been deliberately cut off from the cultural tradition that Western man has known for many centuries; they have been taught either to despise or to ignore the Christian ethic. The experiment has been carried on long enough, over a large enough area, and with sufficient methodological rigor to make it a ground for reasonable conclusions.
The experiment that has been undertaken with conscious deliberation in Germany is an accentuation of what has been happening in lesser degree in the entire Western world. In many areas of the West there has been the tacit rejection of our ancient culture, but without a pagan apologetic. The loosening of the marriage tie is one of the many evidences of this development. There have, of course, always been difficulties about monogamy, but acceptance of the Christian estimate of the sacredness of the marriage tie made men have a bad conscience when marriage failed. Now we have great numbers who appear to be able to contemplate their failure with entire complacency. And the reason is that marriage seems to them, not a sacramental act, but rather a temporary convenience. The Hollywood mentality is, in this regard, merely a grotesque accentuation of the general spirit of the times.
What is so amazing in our day is not the rejection of Western civilization in practice, for that has always occurred, but the rejection of Western civilization in theory. So long as the theory remains intact, there is always hope of regeneration, since some men will be disturbed by their hypocrisy. But when the theory goes, too, there is no hope; there is nothing to give men a bad conscience. It is bad enough to fail to live up to humane standards, but it is far worse to glory in that failure.
The reconstruction of human history which is presented to us as a live option is so revolutionary that we have had great difficulty in taking it seriously. It is well known that one of the reasons for Hitler’s initial and long-continued success is that his propositions seemed so preposterous that even those who stood most chance to be ruined by them refused to take them seriously. We did not understand him at first because we could not grasp the notion that his concept of culture was "non-Euclidean.’’(The introduction of this illuminating term in this connection originated, I believe, with Lewis Mumford. See his Faith for Living, pp. 182 ff.) We could not really believe that here was a system which introduced, not merely different conclusions, but different rules and different meanings for major terms. We have been slow to realize that a generation has now grown up in one part of the Western world in which terms used for more than fifteen centuries in Europe now have no meaning at all or vastly altered meaning. Sir Richard Livingstone has stated this point in words that should be repeated:
They do not know the meaning of certain words, which had been assumed to belong to the permanent vocabulary of mankind, certain ideals which, if ignored in practice under pressure, were accepted in theory. The least important of these words is Freedom. The most important are Justice, Mercy and Truth. In the past we have slurred this revolution over as a difference in "ideology." In fact it is the greatest transformation that the world has undergone, since, in Palestine or Greece, these ideas came into being or at least were recognized as principles of conduct. (Sir Richard Livingstone, The Future in Education, p. 109)
This new conception of civilization which presents itself as an alternative to that which has done duty so far in Western life in our era must be taken seriously. Its proponents will be defeated in Germany as they have already been defeated in Italy, but the idea will not, for that reason, be dead. Not only will there be the hosts of young people who have been indoctrinated in the non-Euclidean ethics, but there will be the many temptations to introduce similar ideas throughout other parts of the West.
It is convenient to refer to this alternative proposal for the human race as power culture. We have long used the term "power politics," and it is reasonable to expand the usage to include the entire cultural situation. The essential notion of power culture is the effort to organize human life independent of moral inhibitions. It is the non-ethical creed.("They carried to the logical limit the new cult of power. In the face of all human experience, they assumed that politics and industry could be completely divorced from morals." Mumford, op. cit., p. 182). It is the supposition, which Mussolini and his pupils have acted on thoroughly, while the rest of us have acted on it amateurishly, that civilization consists primarily in scientific, technical, and artistic achievements and that it can reach its goal without ethical considerations. We see this more clearly if we note, in some detail, the chief items of this creed.
(I)The first item in this creed is the accent on sheer power. The notable fact about human life is that some are strong and others are weak. Consequently the fundamental human relation is that of master and slave. Christianity has been a kill-joy because it has hampered the natural power of the master, which must no longer be hampered. Justice, as Thrasymachus said long ago in The Republic, is nothing more or less than the interests of the stronger.
Though this doctrine is a very old one, never wholly dead, it gains modern significance, when openly espoused, because human power has been so greatly enhanced in our day. Science, indeed, is power. Therefore the proponents of power culture will seek to foster science because science makes the strong man’s arm longer and his feet swifter. Apart from the infinitely careful and sometimes painful labor of science we should not have the machine, and the machine is absolutely necessary as a tool for those who wish to make their will felt in the modern world. So great is the power of the machine that it is wholly conceivable that a ruthless minority might inaugurate a reign of terror which would include all parts of the planet. "Technics," says Berdyaev, "rationalize human life, but this rationalization has irrational results."(Nikolai Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, P. 73.)
It is important to note that skill in war, an essential element in the power concept, may be marked while moral sensitivity is weak. There is no guarantee of balanced development in the human animal. An interesting illustration of this unbalance is afforded by the experience of the Aztecs, who, for a while, were able to combine great and ruthless military skill with a decadent general culture. They produced some art, including poetry, but it was of a uniformly morbid character. The appearance of the Aztec type of life on a large scale would be a terrifying prospect.
(2) The second item in this creed is the concept of leadership. The way is made clear for the emergence of this concept when the notion of human equality is categorically denied. Equality is a pure fiction; it does not exist physically, intellectually, morally, or culturally. It is entirely satisfactory that there should be masters and slaves, leaders and led. This is a situation, not to be outgrown, but to be accentuated and maintained.
As usually presented the doctrine has two aspects, one personal and the other racial or national. The personal aspect is the emergence of the single leader, who at once commands his people and becomes identified with them, so that his decisions are somehow theirs.(Spengler predicted the rise of Caesarism as a national development in our period of declining vigor. See The Decline of the West, Vol. II, Chap. XIV. But, long before Spengler, William Penn wrote, "Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.") The racial aspect is that one people is superior to all others, just as there are superior horses or cows, and these exemplify the leader principle in the human race as a whole. They must keep themselves pure biologically by refusal to mate with inferior breeds, and they must keep themselves pure spiritually by refusing to accept any inferior status or to grant equality when equality does not exist.
The leader principle thus sets itself in sharp contrast to three fundamental Christian teachings. It renounces, first, the Christian notion of human equality, it renounces, second, the Christian notion of the oneness of the human family, and it renounces, third, the Christian rejection of pride. Christ’s words, "Call no man master," are arrant nonsense to one who accepts the leader principle as valid.
(3) The third item in the creed of power culture is the principle of authority. This does not mean merely the acceptance of the authority of the expert, without which we could not even live; it goes much further. It means that the ideal organization is that in which the individuals live in unquestioning obedience and glory in doing so. The people, we are told, will be happy because they are set free in a curious manner; they are set free from freedom.
This conception is the direct renunciation of two highly prized features of our Western civilization, experimentalism and individualism. The experimental spirit, which takes as its text, "Try all things; hold fast that which is good," has been the source of much that we have prized, especially in science, but it has very little place in power culture. In a wholly authoritarian system the experimenter would not be free to declare his disquieting results, since, if they did not contribute to the success of the race or nation, they would not be "true."
That individualism is incompatible with the proposed creed is easy to see. The notion that each person is a separate object of infinite worth because he is a child of God made in God’s image must be rooted out if sheer authoritarianism is to flourish.
Our age, which began as a revolt against authority, became in short order one more addicted to authority than has usually been the case with mankind. When we wish to refer to an authoritarian epoch, it is no longer necessary to find our illustrations in the past. Few events are so instructive in this connection as the quick metamorphosis of the German Youth movement and its incorporation into the Hitler movement. If we understand the reasons for this change from revolt against authority to meek acceptance of authority, we are in a better position to appreciate the dangers in all parts of our Western life. Why cannot similar developments take place elsewhere?
As he faces this daring composite proposal, which amounts to a secession from Christendom with the avowed intention of making the secession movement dominant, the ordinary man is curiously helpless. He does not like Hitler and he does not like Hitler’s creed, but he has very little notion of what to do about it. He understands what to do in a military way, but he does not understand what to do in an intellectual way. He mumbles something about democracy, but he seldom examines the moral grounds that make democracy possible, and he has no living faith to put in the place of the heretical one that is so vigorously preached. He will, we agree, win the "war," in the sense that the Nazis will be stripped of their power to hold others in physical slavery and tyranny, but he may, nevertheless, lose the "struggle." The Kampf is much broader than the "war."
The chief weakness of modern Western man is weakness of the head rather than weakness of the heart. He is sympathetic and full of good aspirations; he is mild and kind; and he hates war. His strange delusion is the notion that the kind of world he seeks can be supported in mid-air, without a foundation. He denounces the Nazis but fails to see that they merely represent the logic of the modern position, which all of Western life has adopted to some degree. The Germans are more thorough and see the implications sooner. Modern man is, therefore, a pathetic creature -- pathetic in his hope.
Many of those who have lost their Christian faith but are revolted by the experimental evidence of what happens when the concept of power culture is taken seriously are beginning to see that a civilization which prides itself on artistic and scientific development, independent of ethical considerations, may become a hell on earth. German education and German science have been promoted and organized to an almost incredible degree, and German art has been encouraged, but the truth is that these are not enough. Without something else the end is moral chaos. Since the characteristic products of the hard labor of the laboratory can be used for a variety of ends, it is no surprise that these have made possible the strategy of terror in a way utterly unknown in the world before. Without the fruit of the labors of countless honest and brilliant men the present domination of so many small countries would be absolutely impossible. This is not to say that science is to blame for what occurs, but it is to say that the belief in science as sufficient for the development of a good society is fatuous in the extreme.
A convincing illustration of the possible role of science is seen in the Nazi use of psychology. There is no subject more carefully treated in Mein Kampf than propaganda, especially scientifically organized propaganda. This explains the great emphasis that has been put on the work of Dr. Goebbels. Dr. Goebbels is, we have reason to know, a first-rate psychologist. He knows, to a remarkable degree, the foibles of the human heart, and he knows how to exploit them. He has made some mistakes, but his major service to a bad cause has been phenomenal. Here is as good an illustration as could be desired of scientific knowledge and insight divorced from ethical considerations. The fears of an entire nation are fostered with the kind of skill and detachment that other men employ when dealing with rats.
In a brilliant analysis of our present culture, Professor H. G. Wood has dealt directly with the claim that ethical standards can be derived from science and has used as a test case the scientific estimate of the race mysticism of the Nazis, especially the claim made for the Germans as a Herrenvolk. But, as Professor Wood shows, the scientific criticism of the doctrine is one thing, while the ethical criticism is another.
. . . It is a good thing that so many of our biologists and anthropologists have torn to shreds the theory of racial purity promulgated by the Nazis; but the policy of the Nazis is not wrong because the theory of blood and race assumed as its basis will not stand scientific investigation. If the theory of blood and race advanced by the Nazis were acceptable to science, the Nazi policy would still be wrong, and we do not need the scientific refutation of their race-mysticism to see that their policy is wrong. Their policy is wrong because if they were the Herren-volk that they claim to be, the world has the right to expect from them something very different from their present contribution to world affairs. A Herren-volk should be subject to the principle "noblesse oblige." They should justify their racial superiority by what they give to mankind, and not by what they demand; but when I say this, I am judging them by a certain standard of greatness, and this standard of greatness is not derived from any particular science or from any scientific attitude; it is derived from the Gospel. The scientific criticism of the Nazi philosophy is comparatively trivial. The criticism of it in the light of the Gospel is final.(H. G. Wood, Christianity and Civilization, p. 28.)
Since our age is so strongly marked by the development of science and the technical products of science, we need to engage in more searching inquiry concerning the place of science in a civilization. We soon note that, in the nature of things, science may be good but that it is always a conditional good. The goodness of science is conditional because science is an instrument and the same instrument can be used for various or contrasting ends. It is like fire, which can burn valuable libraries or warm men’s dwellings with equal success. Science can help us to know the facts in most situations and it can help us to perform intended tasks, but it cannot tell us what we ought to do. Professor Wood’s reasoning is so helpful at this point that it is desirable to quote him again:
If we accept as our guiding principle the second great commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," science can help us not only by providing us with means to fulfill the law, but also by defining the obligations of neighborly love in detail. But the command is not a deduction from science or the scientific attitude, and if it be denied, the scientific attitude cannot reaffirm it. Ultimate ethical principles are not deductions from natural science. Indeed the boot is on the other leg. Natural science depends for its existence and progress on the acceptance of some ethical distinctions and ethical disciplines.(Ibid., pp. 30, 31)
This last point is the one that needs most clarification now. Since science is such an undoubted good, though a conditional good, we must try to discover in which cultural situations it can flourish or is likely to flourish. It is abundantly clear that there are some kinds of life in which science either cannot flourish or will actually decline. For example, science will not be long possible in any society that denies complete freedom of research. Scientists will not be able to do good work over a long period if they are controlled by any consideration other than the unprejudiced search for the truth. It is particularly clear that any limitation on freedom of inquiry will lead to the decline of a university. "A university," as President Hutchins has told us, "is a place where people think. It follows that the criterion of a university is intellectual." But in a system of power culture there is another criterion that supplants the criterion of intellectual integrity.
How the limitation on freedom works in practice was made clear as early as 1936, when the University of Heidelberg held its jubilee celebration. Though the foreign representatives were relatively few, there was a strong effort to impress them, but, even so, the limitations on academic freedom were not denied. The Reich Minister of Education, Herr Bernhard Rust, sought to defend the system by saying:
National Socialism is justly described as unfriendly to science if its appraiser assumes that independence of presuppositions and freedom from bias are the essential characteristics of scientific inquiry. But this we emphatically deny. National Socialism has recognized the fact that to construct a system of knowledge without presuppositions and without certain value judgments at its foundation is totally impossible.(John Brown Mason, "Academic Freedom under Nazism," Social Science, Vol. XV, No. 4.)
Value judgments are undoubtedly inescapable, but the value judgment on which science in the Western world is based is the sacredness of truth. It is incompatible with a system that breeds a disregard for objective truth or undermines the standard of personal honesty that requires a man to submit unfavorable as well as favorable evidence when he is testing a hypothesis. Science is possible because there are men engaged in it who willnot sell out to the political boss, who will not falsify reports to support a preconceived notion, who will stay on the job even when the ordinary rewards are denied. Science, then, depends on ethical foundations, the chief of which is the unmercenary love of truth.
A consideration of the ethical foundations of science leads us to the clearest evidence that the system of power culture is bound to fail, no matter how successful it may seem for a time. It will finally fall of its own weight, because it involves inner contradictions. The power ideal in the modern world rests on the instrumental value of technics, and technical advance is impossible without faithful groundwork in the natural sciences. If truth is interpreted as referring, not to what is objectively the case, but to what advances the party or the nation, this faithful work cannot long be fostered. The best spirits will be driven out, as Einstein was driven out of Germany, and those who remain will find themselves working in an unhealthy atmosphere. Genuine science is something so delicate and so precious that it cannot thrive except under the best conditions.
The condition which, so far, has been most conducive to science is that in which the Christian world view is generally accepted. (The supposed conflict between science and the Christian faith has been much overestimated. Even the conflict that has occurred has been no more than an episode. It is in universities that owe their origins to Christian inspiration that a great share of scientific advancement has been made.) Men who undertake to think God’s thought after Him are working under a powerful stimulus. It is interesting to note that much of this mood carries over into the lives of men who, on the basis of the evidence with which they are acquainted, are forced to declare themselves as atheists. Frequently they have the reverent attitude toward the truth and the search for it that makes sense only in a theistic world view and is obviously inherited from such a view.(The Archbishop of Canterbury says, in his Gifford Lectures, that he attaches great importance to this point. Speaking of the sense in which Truth is august and compelling, he says: "This feeling is quite unreasonable if the order of reality is a brute fact and nothing else." -- William Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 250.) Why should men be so finicky about the "truth" if the only relevant considerations are our subjective desires and brute matter? Indeed, the Nazis have carried out quite rigorously the logic of the non-theistic position. In doing so they have done the rest of mankind the service of showing the dire results of adopting the non-Euclidean faith that we have already described. Their pragmatism may be a bastard pragmatism, but it at least demonstrates to us the vast difference between a cultural system that accepts an order of objective truth and one that does not. It is a serious question whether the specific features of Western civilization that we have learned to prize are possible at all if their ancient foundations are removed. "It is perhaps a strange thing" writes Professor Flewelling, "that so little attention has as yet been paid to the necessity for moral and spiritual integrity in the scientist. In reality an integrity is called for which is no less than religious in its scope and sense of responsibility, and the field of science has never been wanting in its martyrs to the cause of truth.’’(Ralph Tyler Flewellin, The Survival of Western Culture, Harper & Brothers. New York, 1943, p. 211. Professor Flewelling’s ambitious book will reward the careful reader.) A culture that does not encourage this kind of integrity will not have genuine science very long.
Just as some declare their faith in science without inquiring sufficiently into the structure that makes science possible, others assert that their faith is in democracy. But a democratic way of life can by no means stand alone. Its success or failure depends, not primarily on political technics, but on the unargued principles and premises that the citizens of a democracy already espouse. Ultimately it depends on the faith of the people, and this fact is demonstrated by the failure of the most modern democratic technics when the supporting faith is weak or non-existent.
Democracy does not succeed by creating a system of counting votes. It depends far more on whether we retain the essential dignity of man. Can man, the individual, respect himself and his neighbors. If he cannot, the most elaborate system will break down. Lacking respect for himself and failing to trust others, he is easily appealed to by a demagogue who asks the citizens to trust him and him alone. Loss of the sense of human dignity leads thus directly to Caesarism. But how is this sense of human dignity to be maintained and preserved?
Just as science and political order are dependent on more fundamental considerations, so economic justice also is dependent. Professor Von Beckerath has done good service in showing how economic reconstruction is largely dependent on moral stamina. If faith in the pledged word should break down, we should have a marked lowering of the economic standard of living no matter what fine instruments of production we might invent.(Cf. Herbert Von Beckerath, In Defense of the West.)
The question that faces mankind at this juncture is not which civilization we like but how civilization is possible. We are especially interested in how that civilization is possible which produces science and art and the various improvements on raw nature. The meaning of civilization, as most of us understand it, is the supremacy of reason, not merely over the forces of nature, but more truly over our human dispositions.(Cf. Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, pp. 37 ff.) This sounds like a matter of education, but the problem goes far deeper than that. Mass education brings its own dangers and may actually lead to degradation since the resultant literacy makes it easier to reach a people with propaganda. The conclusion, then, is that there can be no enduring or generally satisfying civilization apart from ethical foundations. A mere power culture will eventually cease to be a culture at all.
What would happen if worse came to worst and the moral foundations that have been so laboriously constructed in several centuries were to be destroyed, as they have already been temporarily destroyed in some parts of the West. Most of our external structure would still stand, just as most of the external structure of Rome stood after the ancient pattern was shattered. Some observers might even be impressed, for a while, with trains that run on time. But the external structure of society would be an empty shell. All combinations between different power groups would be temporary arrangements of ultimate rivals, and everyone would understand their transitory and cynical nature. There would be continual planetary civil war, either a war of bullets or a war of nerves, and most of the fine things that man has produced would eventually be destroyed. Finally, restoration might come, but it would come only by the slow, hard way of ethical reconstruction.
Modern Western man should be wise enough to engage in this practical and necessary task while he still has allies and while he has great resources. The chief of these resources in the Western world centers in a precious cluster of ideas, which has been well described by Professor Stace as follows:
Western civilization, especially as it appears in democratic countries and institutions, has for its inner soul or substance a special and peculiar cluster of ideas. I call them a cluster because they cling together. They imply one another. The chief members of this cluster are the ideas of (1) the infinite value of the individual; (2) the equality of all men (in some sense or other), (3) individualism; (4) liberty.(W. T. Stace, The Destiny of Western Man, p. 124.)
Modern man has many important tasks, but it is difficult to think of one more important than the maintenance, growth, and application of this cluster. The question how this can be done will be approached in the next chapter.
We are living today under the sign of the collapse of civilization. The situation has not been produced by the war; the latter is only a manifestation of it.
Albert Schweitzer
In the year 410 A.D. Alaric and his Goths sacked the city of Rome. This event was of vast importance in the ancient world, not so much because of its direct effect on political or economic organization, but because of its effect on the minds of men and women who shared in the Mediterranean civilization. The sack was not the most terrible of visitations, but it was a profound shock, and it was likewise a revelation. For centuries men had thought of Rome as a stable feature of civilized existence. She had been intact from the invader for nearly a thousand years. Provinces might revolt and provinces might be pacified, but Rome was the Eternal City. She was the assurance of order, and men had come to believe, without argument, in the dependability of that order. But the shock of invasion revealed to men throughout the Mediterranean theater the inadequacy of that on which they had depended with such implicit faith. The consequence was that they were forced to question the entire civilization on which they had relied. We see evidence of the enduring effect of this shock throughout the structure of St. Augustine’s great work, The City of God, which was not finished until sixteen years after the event that precipitated its writing. The whole book is a monumental attempt to speak to the condition of men and women suffering from a profound intellectual and spiritual shock. Augustine’s arguments show clearly the questionings and probings in men’s minds. They all recognized that the trouble was more than superficial and that 410 represented more than an isolated military defeat. The fall of Rome was, not the cause of the decay of their culture, but rather a symptom of that decay. The decay, they realized, must have been much further advanced than was generally recognized.
What was the cause of the decay? Did it come, as some supposed, from disloyalty to their old pagan faiths, or were there other and far different reasons for failure? What could events teach them concerning the foundations on which civilization might be rebuilt?
We have now a counterpart of the ancient situation. Much as men lived for years under the shadow of 410, we shall live for years under the shadow of 1940. The chief problems we face are not the problems of the war, great as these are. If they were, they would end when the war ends, but they go too deep for that. The shadow of 1940 will not be removed by the technical conclusion of military hostilities nor by the organization of a peace conference. This is because the war is only a symptom of the sickness of our civilization and not the primary cause of that sickness.
The vast importance of 1940 in our time lies in the fact that the weakness of an entire system in which we had great faith was then revealed to civilized mankind. The fall of France, though only one item in this historical situation, has been the most striking and the most shocking. France was a symbol of an entire kind of life that we had come to take for granted in the Western world. It represented the urbanity, the individualism, the humaneness, the intelligence that we had come to prize. Frenchmen were internationally minded, Frenchmen were relatively free from race prejudice, Frenchmen were thrifty, Frenchmen believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of worship. Here, it seemed, was the quintessence of Western civilization, which we had taken for centuries as our standard of comparison, and suddenly we realized that the new Rome was no more a match for the barbarian than the ancient Rome had been. In short it was demonstrated, in such a manner that all could see, that Western civilization lacked the security which we, in our innocence, had attributed to it.
The spiritual crisis engendered by this shock could by no means be limited to Europe, but was bound to affect the entire life of man on the planet. In the fall of Rome it was chiefly Mediterranean civilization that was at stake, while other areas of the globe were largely unaffected. The civilization of Christendom, on the other hand, has so penetrated all parts of the world that all are affected by what happens to us.
The civilization of the West, that is to say, the Christian civilization, is only one of several concurrent civilizations. It is a mistake to regard our society as identical with civilized mankind and all others as "natives" of territories that they inhabit by sufferance.(See Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. I, p. 33. Toynbee holds that there are at least four other living societies of the same species as ours.) The white man’s burden is not that heavy. But, though our civilization is only one civilization among others, the relationships between civilizations is now such that our civilization involves all others in its own predicament. There are two major reasons for this. First, the development of modern technology is such that all parts of the planet are close to all other parts in time and in the consequent impossibility of isolation. In the words of Mr. Willkie’s inspired title, ours is really One World in the technical sense. Any new flood is bound to cover the entire earth.
The second reason for the inclusion of all in our predicament is the fact that Christian culture has penetrated other cultures much more than they have penetrated ours. Western man has penetrated all parts of the globe educationally, industrially, and religiously. Our predicament is not a local matter, but a matter of planetary concern because Western man, partly through his aggressiveness, though chiefly through his technical prowess, is the dominant man on the planet.(The fact that this dominance is now being challenged does not alter the truth of this observation. It is the titleholder who is challenged.) The predicament, therefore, is not merely the predicament of Western man, but of man.
The recognition that something has gone wrong with our civilization is now so widespread as to be almost universal. Much of this has arisen from the obvious discrepancy between the promises and the achievements of our age. There is no doubt that faith in a more or less automatic progress was widespread a generation ago, when it was assumed that the fruits of our cleverness would be good fruits. The increase of science, many supposed, would ensure a brave new world. Science was to unify the world (which it has) and bring in a day of universal brotherhood (which it has not). Characteristic of this pathetic faith is the following conclusion of F. S. Marvin, whose words were widely read twenty years ago:
And now, of all consolidators, science is showing its supreme fitness and its kinship with the sense of a common humanity. It would be a fascinating and untrodden path, to follow in the ancient world the extension of scientific knowledge and note its coincidence with the growth of a more humane spirit in religion, in poetry, and in law. We believe the agreement would be close and that it is more than a mere coincidence. But here the evidence would be slighter and less conclusive: in the modern world the case is clear. Side by side with the growth of science, which is also the basis of the material prosperity and unification of the world, has come a steady deepening of human sympathy, and the extension of it to all weak and suffering things. . . . Science, founding a firmer basis for the co-operation of mankind, goes widening down the centuries, and sympathy and pity bind the courses together.(F.S. Marvin, The Living Past, Oxford, 1923, pp. 270, 271)
This hope, by no means rare, is now seen to be utterly unjustified. At the precise time when our vaunted education comes to mature development we see all about us the outbreak of man’s inhumanity to man in such fashion that our faith is shaken. We are not so gullible as we were. How can we be so sure that Western civilization is really better than any of its alternatives, if we are to judge it by its fruits after years of opportunity? After all, the epidemic has broken out, not in some primitive area, but in the supposed heart of Christendom.
This seems to be the chief ground of the often-mentioned lack of enthusiasm on the part of our people. Whereas the Germans, especially the youth, have entered the conflict with fanatical zeal, comparable with that of those who extended Islam with the sword, our people are extremely shy about any emotional appeal. The Axis propagandists are able to arouse their countries to a furious crusade, but the few who try to arouse us in a similar way are met with a quizzical look. The band-playing hilarity of leave-takings, which the fathers knew, is quite unknown to the sons. For the most part the struggle goes on as a sober, hateful business, with little romance and with few illusions. It may be that we are too dull and businesslike today, but at least we are safe from the kind of disillusionment that occurred so disastrously before, when romantic idealism was followed by general cynicism. If we experience a revolt this time, it will have to be a revolt in the other direction.
We cannot, of course, expect so much suffering without the emergence of skepticism, but the skepticism of one period is not the same as the skepticism of another. The mood in which we find ourselves may be accurately termed the "New Skepticism." Those to whom men turned for spiritual counsel in the earlier struggle were forced to deal with skepticism about God. "Why," men asked repeatedly, "would God allow this terrible calamity? Why does God permit His children to destroy each other?" Today, however, this inquiry is seldom heard. In place of it there has come another kind of inquiry, which represents a deep skepticism about mankind. Instead of asking, "Why does God allow it?" thousands now ask, "How could man have made such a mess of things?"
The change in popular sentiment is great though not sufficient. The chief ways in which this change appears are the rejection of the belief in the essential goodness of man and the twin belief in automatic progress. We have not arrived at a sufficient substitute, but in any case we have escaped from the chief dangers of optimism.
It is hard to tell how much of the present skepticism about the worth of our human civilization has come as a result of revealing experience and how much has come as a result of published thought on the subject. In any case it is true that many thoughtful people had already arrived at grave doubts about the true value of our boasted culture when the great majority appeared to have no doubts at all. Now the public has caught up with the prophets, so far as their pessimism is concerned.
The men who began to challenge the sense of security of our age arrived at their conclusions on various grounds. Thus Henry Adams, believing in the universal applicability of the second law of thermodynamics, predicted necessary cultural decline in The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, while Spengler espoused a theory of cycles that was neither democratic nor Christian. Later there appeared several independent thinkers who began to reveal the sickness of our civilization in the light of Christian theology.
Twenty-one years ago Albert Schweitzer said, "It is clear now to everyone that the suicide of civilization is in progress. What yet remains of it is no longer safe. It is still standing, indeed, because it was not exposed to the destructive pressures which overwhelmed the rest, but, like the rest, it built upon rubble, and the next landslide will very likely carry it away."(Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, London, 1923, p. 3.) Of course, this was not clear to everyone. The amazing thing is that it was already clear to this lonely man, living, not in Europe, but on the edge of the African jungle. Many of his contemporaries were wholly convinced that man had come into a new time, a time of general prosperity and of happiness through abundance. One hot night that summer President Harding died in San Francisco, and Calvin Coolidge became head of the nation. With him came added prosperity, and who then cared about a philosophical doctor in Africa?
Nikolai Berdyaev was already expressing, at the same time, a similar skepticism. His book, The End of Our Time, was written when most people appeared to think we were both safe and sound. Spengler’s Decline of the West had been taken seriously by a few, but not by the masses. The surprising fact is that so many prophets saw the weakness of our civilization when it seemed strongest. Just as we were ridding the world of Kaiser and Czar, Spengler predicted the rise of Caesarism. The prophets, writing in 1922 and 1923, sensed that the Armistice was only an armistice. The uniting conviction of a number of advanced theologians was the notion that the war was really a revelation. It revealed, said Berdyaev, "the superficiality of the process of humanization and how thin was the layer of human society which had really been affected by the humanizing forces."(Nikolai Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, p. 9)
An important fact, which we do not sufficiently realize, is that Adolf Hitler was one of these prophets writing two decades ago. His conclusions were poles apart from those of Schweitzer and Berdyaev, but he was in full agreement with these men about the decay of the received culture. His error, as we see it now, lay not in his quick perception of a profound trouble, but in the false simplicity of his diagnosis of causes and in his prescribed cure, which did so much to heighten the existing fever. He knew that the breakdown of a world view was far more important than the breakdown of an economic or political structure and that we must go beyond the outward sickness to the inner causes. "All those symptoms of decay," wrote Hitler in 1924, "are in the last analysis only the consequences of the absence of a definite, uniformly acknowledged philosophy and the resultant general uncertainty in the judgment and attitude toward the various great problems of the time." The defeat of Germany, he maintained was not an isolated catastrophe, but wholly reasonable and wholly deserved. "It is only the greatest outward symptom of decay amid a whole series of inner symptoms, which perhaps had remained hidden and invisible to the eyes of most people, or which like ostriches people did not want to see."(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943, pp. 266, 229, 230.)
The point is that the world has now caught up with Hitler and Berdyaev and Schweitzer. We now know that the disease of Western civilization was much further advanced than it appeared to be when attention was paid to superficial symptoms. It took a prophet to know that the First World War was a revelation instead of a mere war, but the common citizen knows that the present struggle is far more than a war. The old fashioned "war" now seems a relatively decent affair, in which most of those who were killed were in the army and in which psychological warfare was not the dominant phase. If there had been no "war," i.e., if the Munich idea had succeeded and Hitler had been able to pose as a man of "peace," there would be just as many symptoms of the fundamental sickness as there are now. Perhaps there would be more!
The sickness is all one sickness, but it was at a far more advanced stage in 1939 than it was in l914. Indeed, the sickness was so much further advanced that it produced radically new symptoms or old symptoms so altered and so heightened that they appeared in new ways. All through the autumn of 1938 we tried to persuade ourselves that the disease was not so bad as it seemed. After the Ides of March, 1939, we knew just how serious the malady was, and there has been little doubt since.(The author was in England during the critical days of 1939 and was able to note the great change in public opinion that came with the open violation of the Munich Agreement on March 15. For many the strain was gone. At last they knew how serious the situation was and how long the road to peace might be.) Man’s life on this planet has never been a bed of roses, and a certain amount of physical suffering we naturally expect, but a great part of the suffering of our time is of the mind. The worst ravages have not happened to men’s houses or even to their bodies. There is no record in history of such widespread violence and anxiety as mark our time.
The emphasis on the sickness is very important because only through accurate diagnosis is there a chance of successful recovery. For one thing, the recognition that we are enduring more than a war keeps us from dividing the world neatly into two camps, ourselves and our enemies. We are not free from the basic trouble ourselves. If what we had on our hands were merely a war, we might expect to have a reasonably secure future, by means of treaties and the like, if and when we gain the victory. But treaties are superficial remedies indeed when the trouble is as deep as ours now is. Neither political nor economic re-arrangements will suffice. Just as the difficulty lies deeper than we at first supposed, so the path of recovery will lie along deeper lines than we have realized.
It is obvious that there must be a peculiar combination of factors which have produced the present crisis. We cannot account for the present series of calamities merely by reference to the natural depravity of the human heart, however great it may be, for that is presumably a constant factor and there are aspects of the present situation which are by no means constant. Since the phase of man’s life which makes modern man’s situation most obviously different from that of all his ancestors is technical or mechanical achievement, it is reasonable to suspect that our predicament is associated, in some way or other, with this development.
The human crisis involves a combination of factors that is paradoxical in the extreme, and much of the paradox lies in the relationship between the means and ends of our culture. The means of our culture, i.e., our technics, are developed wonderfully by rational experimental and precise thought, but the ends have not kept pace. The technical progress, though it makes for dehumanization, involves the great hope of universalism, since it provides the means of making mankind physically one. It is our technical progress that now brings any one spot on the globe within a few hours’ travel of every other spot, which makes it possible to send messages to all the earth at once and which makes no spot safe or secure against aggression.
The awful truth is that our wisdom about ends does not match our ingenuity about means, and this situation, if it continues, may be sufficient to destroy us. Just at the moment of history when the technical conditions for the oneness of the globe have finally appeared, we are woefully lacking in the moral conditions that are required if this situation is to be a blessing. It is not merely that this contrast removes us from a fortunate situation; it actually produces a situation far more evil than any formerly known. Because of lack of moral direction, what might have been a blessing becomes a terrible curse.
The moral failure to match the technical achievement is seen in three different ways in three different groups. It is seen first in Japan, a country that has taken over the instruments of Christendom without the moral and religious principles of Christendom. It is seen second in Germany, and to some extent in Russia, where the moral and religious conceptions of Christendom have been deliberately rejected, after having long been known. It is seen, in the third place, in the Western democracies, where we still pay lip service to the moral and religious principles of Christendom but have actually lost a great part of this heritage.
The gravity of our situation in regard to means and ends becomes clearer when we realize that the present combination of means and ends is the worst of all possible combinations. The contemporary contrast in the relative development of engineering and ethics is the most dangerous that could be. If we have regard to the factors unifying or dividing mankind, there are four possible combinations, as follows:
(1) Divisive purposes served by inadequate instruments. This, we suppose, was the situation throughout most of human pre-history and much of human history. The leaders of the clan may seek the destruction or harm of all outside the clan, but the tools available are such that these purposes remain unaccomplished for the most part.
(2) Unifying purpose served by inadequate instruments. This has been the situation of most of the dreamers of world brotherhood. Their desire for the general welfare of mankind has been baffled, not only by the opposite desires of their contemporaries, but also by the lack of technical ability to accomplish desired ends.
(3) Divisive purposes served by potent instruments, i.e., universalizing instruments. This is the actual situation in many parts of the present world and the potential situation everywhere. The possible blight which might come to the human spirit if a minority of wholly ruthless men should achieve a monopoly on the instruments of power that make the world all one province, technically, is a reasonable cause for fear.
(4) Unifying purposes served by potent instruments. This situation, which has never yet appeared in any large way, would be the most conducive to the flowering of the human spirit that we can imagine. If our ends sought were as rational and as catholic as our technology is, man would still have his evil impulses but the world would be such that most of us would be glad for the chance to live in it. It is the situation we earnestly seek.
We are now in the tragic third possibility inasmuch as man has been more successful in making engines than in achieving the will and wisdom to use his engines for humane purposes. This is the predicament of Western man. He has built up a complex civilization, but he may lose it because, in his proud hour of achievement, he has so largely lost or never developed the inner resources that are needed to keep a possible boon from becoming a calamity.
It is important to make it abundantly clear at this point that the crucial problem is the spiritual problem, and we here mean by spiritual that area which is the object of attention in philosophy and theology as against that area in which the object of attention is mechanical contrivance. The fact that our life is so gravely threatened in the brightest day of technical achievement is not a criticism of the engineers qua engineers, but it is a criticism of all of us as men. The paradox of failure at the moment of success is by no means a condemnation of technical progress, for such progress is morally neutral. It gives the surgeon’s knife, and it gives the gangster’s weapon. Our predicament is a commentary, not on instruments and instrument makers, but on the human inability to employ both scientific knowledge and technical achievement to bring about the good life and the good society. Man is an animal who is peculiarly in need of something to buttress and to guide his spiritual life. Without this, the very capacities that make him a little lower than the angels lead to his destruction. The beasts do not need a philosophy or a religion, but man does.
When we say that the most urgent problem of our time is the spiritual problem we are opposing directly the popular opinion. Most people do not believe it. It is curious to note the way in which our world calamity has destroyed some of our comfortable delusions, but not others. Thus we have been pretty well emancipated from the dogma of automatic progress and even from faith in the goodness of man. In these matters we have shown some ability to be taught by experience. But we have not been equally emancipated from the belief that economic and technical reconstruction are enough. We suppose, quite naïvely, that the problem of spiritual reconstruction will take care of itself or that it can be left to the experts as a departmental matter.
The lesson of our time is that this delusion is no better than any other delusion. The problem will not take care of itself. Unless the spiritual problem is solved, civilization will fail; indeed, we already have a foretaste of that failure in many parts of the world. Man’s sinful nature is such that he will use instruments of power for evil ends unless there is something to instruct him in their beneficent uses. Without the conscious and intelligent buttressing of what has been demonstrated as precious, human society goes down.
It ought to be clear to us that such a task is so amazingly difficult that we should employ our greatest single effort in this direction. If we had even the beginning of wisdom, we should encourage our brightest men and women to devote themselves to the task of spiritual reconstruction. We should put our best thought into the elaboration and promulgation of an adequate faith rather than into some new machine.
How far we are from doing this is obvious. In our public schools we teach our children many things about our modern world, such as our system of manufacture and distribution, but we make almost no effort to give them a living knowledge of the spiritual sources of our civilization. We deliberately cut them off from their heritage. In America we actually work, in many states, on the preposterous theory that it is illegal to teach our children the faith on which our democracy rests. The public school teacher can tell all she likes about Nero, but she cannot tell about his distinguished contemporary, St. Paul. In any case she cannot tell what the open secret of St. Paul’s life was. In most of our universities there are hundreds of young men devoting themselves to careful preparation in engineering or the natural sciences as against one devoting himself to careful preparation in philosophy or theology. A similar unbalance is shown in university curricula and budgetary allotments.
The sober truth is that, as a people, we do not believe we are engaged in a race with catastrophe. We are not aware of the dangers we face, and consequently we are doing relatively little to meet them. If we could put the same keen intelligence and careful judgment into the revival of faith and the discovery of the proper objects of faith that we now put into the production of magnificent machines, man’s life on this earth might come into a new and glorious day. We fail to do this because we do not read the signs of the times or listen to our prophets. The situation, which would appear alarming if only men were apprised of it, is stated by one of these prophets as follows:
If you allow the spiritual basis of a civilization to perish, you first change, and finally destroy it. Christianity and Hellenism are the spiritual bases of our civilization. They are far less powerful today than fifty years ago. Therefore, we are losing that spiritual basis, and our civilization is changing and on the way to destruction, unless we can reverse the process.(Sir Richard Livingstone, The Future in Education, Cambridge University Press, 1943, p. 113.)
"Unless we can reverse the process" -- there is the heart of the problem. Perhaps we cannot do so; perhaps we are dealing with a wave of the future or a renewed wave of the past that is already bearing us forward in frightening or eventually heartening ways. But until we know this is the case, our task is to make every effort to build our society as free men.
The two most striking examples of how human life may be guided, so far as our tradition is concerned, are seen in Greek philosophy and the Christian religion. In ancient Greece there was a widespread popular teaching of philosophy, with Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans preaching a rule of life. Eventually this gave way to the Christian faith, which has been the dominant spiritual force in the West through most of the succeeding centuries. Even fifty years ago, in our English-speaking countries it was still effective. Nearly everyone read the Bible and engaged in public and private prayer, as well as family prayer, and great numbers heard, once each week, sermons that expounded the gospel. Once a week there was a day that reminded all people of a dimension of their lives other than those of the surface.
Now most of this is gone. Philosophy today touches only a tiny class of people who happen to take courses in universities or read an occasional book. The Christian faith has lost much of its hold. Of course, it is still possible to present impressive census figures showing that the number of church members in this country is the largest in relation to the total population that it has ever been, (There are now 67,327,7l9 church members in the United States of America according to the Yearbook of the Churches) but these figures are not convincing. Nearly all the membership rolls are padded, since, in many churches, all baptized persons are included in membership. Everyone knows that great numbers of these are totally dissociated from the influences of public worship.
The signs of the decay of the Christian faith are so great on every side that only wishful thinking can deny it. Convenient illustrations are the contemporary ignorance of the Bible, the decline of the observance of a day of worship, and the loosening of the marriage tie. It is possible that Christianity is now lingering very much as paganism lingered on into the Christian era. Those men in Rome who supposed their woes came from disloyalty to the pagan gods were fighting a hopeless battle, and the same may be true of the contemporary apologist for the Christian faith.
We continue to call our era the Christian Era, but this may be for no better reason than the difficulty of changing a frame of temporal reference when it has once been established all over the world. Mussolini’s attempt to introduce his own system of dating from the beginning of the Fascist Era, referring to his own definitive speeches of the year Twelve (Benito Mussolini, The Corporate State, Florence, 1938, XVI, p. 62) seems to most of us merely ridiculous, but he might be nearer right than we think. The truth is that we still have not decided which century this is. We do not really know whether it is the twentieth century or the first. There are few more important questions that man can ask.
Regardless of the personal position he takes, it is not possible for a thoughtful person to view lightly the apparent crumbling of the Christian pattern. Whether for good or ill, such a development is momentous. If Western man, who has long been the dominant man on the planet, should now lose those ultimate convictions which have been partly regulative for at least fifteen centuries, the change would be enormous. Temporarily, at least, the change has already occurred, and this change has been more crucial than any battle or other external event. It is the chief event that has occurred. A change in the meaning of truth or of justice is far more important than a change in the government of any given territory. "The Axis powers would not have initiated the crisis in civilization or forced this war on the world if they had not repudiated these values in advance." (H. G. Wood, Christianity and Civilization, p. 5.)
The greatness of the possible change becomes clear when we realize the degree to which the civilization of the West has been the civilization of Christendom. It is far more Christian than Greek or Roman, since classic culture contributed to modern culture, not directly, but only as assimilated by Christianity. The late Professor Bosanquet, who had drunk deeply from classic sources, saw this so clearly and expressed it so tersely that his dictum is here repeated: "Christianity is the form in which the progressive civilization of Greece and Rome expressed its tendencies when time and experience had partly matured them.’’(Bernard Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom, London, 1893, p. 75. See also Walter Horton, Can Christianity Save Civilization? p. 67 n.) Greece and Rome did not survive as cultural entities; instead, they contributed to that which did survive; and that which did survive is Christianity.
The magnitude of our possible revolution becomes clearer when we think of the degree to which the gospel has permeated the unargued groundwork of our culture. This permeation is shown by the reasons people give for what they do and especially in the excuses they give for their moral failures. The ultimate appeal is usually made to the welfare of others rather than to the capricious desire of the person whose actions are under consideration. The ideological leaders of the Fascist and Nazi revolutions have tried to alter this form of ultimate appeal, but even they have had difficulty in maintaining a consistent rejection of the ethical presuppositions of Western civilization. Mussolini himself, perhaps in a weak moment, defended the conquest of Ethiopia on grounds that he owed more to the New Testament than to the neo-paganism which he claimed to preach. "Italy," he wrote, "is conquering territory in Africa, but in doing so she is freeing populations who for thousands of years have been at the mercy of a few bloodthirsty and rapacious chieftains.’’(Op. cit., p. 86) Of course, if he had been consistent, the writer would have extolled the bloodthirstiness and rapacity of these chieftains, seeing in them models of the new and strong morality, but it is hard to be consistent all the time. It is especially hard when one is dealing with fundamental presuppositions that have influenced human judgments for so many centuries.
Now it is these particular presuppositions that are in jeopardy. The West has turned against its own genius. We have seen it break down before our eyes in the huge and terrifying object lesson that Central Europe provides. What frightens all reasonable people is the fact that we see about us, in our own neighborhoods, some of the same factors which, existing in greater degree, made that object lesson actual. How can we keep the evil from spreading? Certainly the mere defeat of the Axis Powers will not be sufficient to prevent this. Our greatest menace is not from Germany, great as this has been, but rather from the same mood that gripped Germany so powerfully and so destructively.
We are superficially safe in the Western democracies so long as the war lasts, but the danger will be enormous when the fighting ends. A host of new problems will arise, bringing new temptations. We must remember that, after the First World War, the epidemic broke out first in Italy and then in Germany because these patients were weaker. The germs are everywhere, and we shall be weaker later. Epidemics, like empires, often move West.
Now the problem is this: What is going to buttress our spiritual life in this time of unparalleled danger, when the ancient supports are gone? What are the modern equivalents of the philosophies of the ancient world and the Christian faith of our fathers? Is it the gospel of "freedom" in the sense of rejection of all limitations on private whim? Is it some dark revival of paganism? Is it some general talk about the democratic way of life? These are among the most important questions that a man can ask.
Our problem is not to save Western culture, in the sense of merely keeping something from the past. Much of what we have had we do not wish to see restored, because it is bad. What we are concerned with in Western civilization is not its restoration, but the achievement of the promise that has long been implicit within it. In any case, the ideal is clear. What we seek is a situation in which we so combine scientific and technical skill with moral and spiritual discipline that the products of human genius shall be used for the welfare of the human race rather than their harm and destruction.
Since the practical task now is the spiritual task, as we have defined it, we must consider the genuine alternatives before us. These are essentially three, (1) the new gospel of power culture, which rejects our historic faith; (2) some effort to keep the fruits of our culture apart from its religion; or (3) a reaffirmation of the Christian faith. It is conceivable that, apart from such a reaffirmation, there is no possibility of a really civilized life on the global scale that modern conditions require. But this is a question that we must decide on the basis of the available evidence. In the succeeding chapters of this book we shall examine some of the available evidence, beginning with the first major alternative and following the argument wherever it leads.
A book about a great subject should be either very long or very short, long enough to cover the subject adequately or short enough to permit the presentation of the main line of argument without cluttering detail. Usually both the long book and the short book are needed, but the short book is needed first.
The present volume is the outcome of the conviction that most of our talk about post-war reconstruction misses the point in that the treaties, political organizations, and economic arrangements, about which we speak and write so voluminously, are only surface phenomena. Before any of these can succeed there must be fundamental changes in the foundations of our civilization. It is the conviction of the author that the trouble we face is more profound than we normally suppose and that the solution of our difficulties will likewise lie along deeper lines than we normally suppose. There is nothing more needful at this time than the exploration, by as many minds as possible, of the conditions of the reconstruction of civilization. Since it is civilization itself that is in jeopardy, we must consider, as carefully as we can, what the necessary conditions and presuppositions of any genuine civilization really are.
Any reasonably alert person is aware that there is no single solution to the world’s ills now or at any time. The problems before modern man are so complex that neither any single solution nor all solutions put together will give us a really decent world. We do not expect Utopia. A thousand years from now our descendants will be facing difficult times, some of their problems being new and others being the same old problems that plague us today, because they will share inevitably in the perennial human predicament. But we are foolish indeed if we permit a recognition of these limitations on our efforts to dissuade us from effort. To say that no one solution is a panacea is not to deny that some approaches to a problem come nearer to the center of the difficulty than others do. To say that we shall not make a perfect society in the next century or the next millennium is no excuse for failure to do our best to create an order relatively better than the one in which we now live.
One of the heartening facts of our day is the emergence of a philosophy of civilization about which there is great and significant agreement among many who are willing to engage in the intellectual labor which such an inquiry demands. This book is an effort to report faithfully this emerging philosophy, to which many are led who are more concerned with the problems at the center than they are with those at the periphery. Consequently, the function of the author has been the relatively humble one of a clerk of a Friends’ meeting who seeks to state faithfully what the "sense of the meeting" is.
Our subject is the Second Vatican Council. Innumerable people have said innumerable things about it. I do not think that my task can be to act as chronicler of the Council and above all of its third session. What would have to be said on that score is clear enough. Everyone knows what schemata were approved and the main lines of their contents; everyone has heard of the not particularly gratifying circumstances that accompanied the last week of the third session. These were often represented in an exaggerated way -- there was exacerbated feeling on the side of the majority too -- but in fact they made no difference to the actual result intended by the Council. I should, therefore, prefer not to chronicle the Council nor step by step to go through the contents of the schemata that were accepted. I should like to ask you to allow me to adopt a more subjective attitude, to make marginal comments as it were on the Council’s teaching and decisions.
If, therefore, I am to say something to you as a dogmatic theologian about the themes dealt with by the Council, only the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church enters into consideration, if we omit the schema on Revelation, which has not yet been completed at the moment at which I am speaking. Only these two decrees formed the subject matter of the work of the Theological Commission of the Council, for the celebrated Schema 13 really fell within the competence of the Commission on the Lay Apostolate and the schema on Ecumenism which was passed, its radiance dimmed a little here and there but not substantially affected, belonged to Cardinal Bea’s Secretariat, of which I was not a member. As, however, the schema on the Church will probably be the most important product of the Council, as far as it is yet possible to judge, this restriction on the themes I am in a position to deal with is of no great moment.
The situation of Christians in the future
To promote understanding for some of the most important features of this decree (since it is impossible to deal with it in its entirety, and since most of it is already familiar to you), I may perhaps be permitted a small mental experiment. If it succeeds, well and good; if not, I have nobody but myself to blame, and that is not a bad thing. I want to place myself in the situation of an ordinary Catholic of the future, particularly that of a layman, and ask what will strike him especially in that document. Whether the situation will come about in 20, 30 or 100 years hence, does not matter. I am no prophet, and if I am in fact attempting to describe this situation of a future Catholic, as the necessary presupposition of the experiment, then the description is not a prophecy but a dream. Whether it is a nightmare, a blissful Utopia or nonsense, is a question that need not be raised either.
At that future date there will be Christian or Catholic communities all over the world, though not evenly distributed. Everywhere they will be a little flock, because mankind grows quicker than Christendom and because men will not be Christians by custom and tradition, through institutions and history, or because of the homogeneity of a social milieu and public opinion, but -- leaving out of account the sacred flame of parental example and the intimate sphere of home, family and small groups -- they will be Christians only because of their own act of faith attained in a difficult struggle and perpetually achieved anew. Everywhere will be diaspora and the diaspora will be everywhere. The stage of human history will be even more a single unity than it already is; everyone will be everyone’s neighbour and the action and attitude of each will contribute to determining everyone’s concrete historical situation. And "each" means each nation, civilization, historical reality and, proportionately, each individual. No doubt the field of universal history will be very different in quality from place to place with some parts in contradiction, but it will form a unity in which all will historically interact. And since the Christians will form only a relatively small minority with no independent historical domain of existence of their own, they will all, though in varying degrees, live in the "diaspora of the Gentiles". Nowhere will there be any more "Catholic nations" which put a Christian stamp on men prior to any personal decision. Everywhere the non-Christian and the anti-Christian will have full and equal rights and may perhaps by threat and pressure contribute to give society its character and may perhaps even coalesce in powers and principalities as forerunners and manifestations of Anti-Christ. And wherever in the name of the necessity of uniform education and organization the State or perhaps the future super-State determines on imposing a single ideology with all the means of modern pressure and formation of the enormous mass of men, it will not be a Christian philosophy which is proclaimed as the official ideology of society. The Christians will be the little flock of the Gospel, perhaps esteemed, perhaps persecuted, perhaps bearing witness to the holy message of their Lord with clear and respected voice in the polyphonic or cacophonous chorus of ideological pluralism, perhaps only in an undertone, from heart to heart. They will be gathered round the altar, announcing the death of the Lord and entrusting the darkness of their own lot -- a darkness which no one will be spared even in the super-Welfare State of the future -- to the darkness of the death of their Lord. They will know that they are like brothers and sisters to one another, because there will be few of them any more who have not by their own deliberate decision staked their own heart and life on Jesus the Christ, for there will be no earthly advantage in being a Christian. They will certainly preserve faithfully and unconditionally the structure of their sacred, unworldly community of faith, hope and love, the Church, as it is called, as Christ founded it. They will certainly freely make use of everything that the future offers them in means of organization, mass media, technology etc.
But that Church will have been led by the Lord of history into a new epoch. It will be dependent in everything on faith and on the holy power of the heart, for it will no longer be able to draw any strength at all, or very little, from what is purely institutional. The latter will no longer support men’s hearts but the basis of all that is institutional will be men’s own hearts. And so they will feel themselves to be brothers and sisters because in the edifice of the Church each of them, whether holding office as a service, or not in office, will depend on every other, and those in office will reverently receive all obedience from the others as a wonderful free and loving gift. It will not only be the case but will also be clear and plain to see that all dignity and all office in the Church is uncovenanted service, carrying with it no honour in the world’s eyes, having no significance in secular society. Unburdened any more with any such liability, perhaps (who knows?) it will no longer constitute a profession at all in the social and secular sense. The Church will be a little flock of brothers of the same faith, the same hope and the same love. It will not pride itself on this, and not think itself superior to earlier ages of the Church, but will obediently and thankfully accept its own age as what is apportioned to it by its Lord and his Spirit and not merely what is forced on it by the wicked world.
If a man of that Church of the future reads the Constitution on the Church, what will he underline, what will particularly strike him? What will he read as an almost prophetic voice to him out of the past? What will be quoted in a future Denzinger if only a few passages are to be chosen from a decree which runs to 66 pages?
The Church is the sacrament of the world’s salvation
One of the first things that will come home to our imagined Christian is the statement that the Church is the sacrament of the salvation of the world. That is found in the introduction to the decree, though the final alterations to the text make it less clear than it was in the earlier version.
That future Christian will be living as a member of the little flock in an immeasurably vast world of non-Christians. How in such circumstances is he to think of his Church? How is he to live with the Church’s inalienable consciousness that it is founded by God, by Christ the Lord of all history, that it is the sole eternally valid religion? How is he to do so when the day when all mankind will be Christian will seem to him unimaginably more distant than it is even for us, because no force of a homogeneous society and tradition will operate any longer in favour of the Church? He will be able to do it only if he views the Church as the sacrament of the salvation of the world. This expression will bring enlightenment and consolation, and he will be grateful to find it mentioned for the first time in an official ecclesiastical document of our age. And when he studies the history of this Council which we are living through, he will be astonished that this statement was made at the Council quietly and spontaneously without opposition, without surprise, without anyone’s appearing to notice just what was being said. Sacramentum salutis totius mundi: sign of the salvation of the world.
For Christendom in earlier times the Church was the plank of salvation in the shipwreck of the world, the small barque on which alone men are saved, the small band of those who are saved by the miracle of grace from the massa damnata, and the extra ecclesiam nulla salus was understood in a very exclusive and pessimistic sense. But here in the conciliar text the Church is not the society of those who alone are saved, but the sign of the salvation of those who, as far as its historical and social structure are concerned, do not belong to it. By their profession of faith, their worship and life, the human beings in the Church form as it were the one expression in which the hidden grace promised and offered to the whole world emerges from the abysses of the human soul into the domain of history and society. What is there expressed may fall on deaf ears and obdurate heart in the individual and may bring judgment instead of salvation. But it is the sign of grace which brings what it expresses, and not only in cases where it is heard in such a way that the hearer himself visibly and historically joins the band of those who announce and testify to this word of God to the world. The Church is the sacrament of the salvation of the world even where the latter is still not and perhaps never will be the Church. It is the tangible, historical manifestation of the grace in which God communicates himself as absolutely present, close and forgiving, of the grace which is at work everywhere, omits no one, offers God to each and gives to every reality in the world a secret purposeful orientation towards the intrinsic glory of God.
In the individual’s life a particular sacrament, baptism, penance etc., not only signifies and effects grace at the moment of reception, but also gives grace which roots a man in the eternal life of God even in apparently secular moments and seasons of life. Similarly, the Church is not simply the sign of God’s mercy for those who explicitly belong to it. It is the mighty proclamation of the grace which has already been given for the world, and of the victory of this grace in the world. Of course this grace of the world has an inner dynamic tendency to assume tangible historical form in the Church, just as individual justification by pure faith, conversion and penance has an intrinsic tendency to take on tangible, external, social, ecclesiastical form in the sacraments of rebirth and penance. But in the finite time and limited conditions of the individual, this does not always happen, even though Justification and salvation may be given him. Grace can be present and operative to an immeasurable extent in the world and its history, without everywhere in the course of history finding tangible social expression in the Church. Yet for precisely all this grace the Church is a sign, proclamation, promise of the salvation of this world.
On these grounds our future reader of Denzinger, although he belongs to the small, poor flock of the Church, will have a proud and calm attitude to the non-Christian world around him. He will not have the impression of belonging to a small, unimportant, submerged group of esoterics or fanatics and yet of having to maintain that these few alone are in possession of truth, grace and salvation. This future Christian will regard himself and other professed Christians as only the advance party of those who, on the roads of history, are travelling to God’s salvation and eternity. The Church for him is something like the uniformed units in God’s array, the point at which the inner character of man’s divinized life is manifested in tangible historical and sociological form or, rather, in which it is most clearly manifested because, to the enlightened gaze of faith, grace does not entirely lack visible embodiment even outside the Church. This Christian of the future -- encouraged by this statement of Vatican II in the Constitution of the Church and really authorized by it, in fact officially for the first time -- knows that the morning light on the mountains is the beginning of the day in the valley, not the light of day above condemning the darkness beneath. The Christian will, therefore, go out into the world serenely, without anguish.
New understanding of the mission: anonymous Christianity
The conciliar statement of which we are speaking will also make him understand a quite new and profounder theology of the true nature of the mission. He will not anxiously scan statistics to see whether the Church is really the biggest ideological organization or not, or whether it is growing proportionately quicker or slower than world population. He will indeed go out into the world with missionary zeal and bear witness in the name of Christ. He will wish to give of his grace to others, for he possesses a grace which the others still lack, for the explicit self-awareness of grace in the Church is itself a grace. But he will know that if his zeal is serene and patient it will have a better chance of success. He will know that he can imitate God’s forbearance which, according to St Paul, is of positive significance for salvation, not condemnation. He knows that God willed this world as it is, for otherwise it would not exist, and that even what is merely "permitted" is only permitted as a factor in something divinely willed (and not merely permitted), and that what is willed can and must be hoped for, not only as the revelation of God’s justice but also as the revelation of his infinite loving kindness to man. Consequently, the Christian will meet boldly and hopefully as brothers those who do not wish to be his brothers in his "view of the world". He will see in them persons who do not yet know what in fact they are, who have not yet clearly realized what in the depths of their life they are, it is to be assumed, already accomplishing. (This is so much the case that we are in duty bound hopefully to presume it. It would be uncharitable to assume less. For can I, as a Christian, simply take it for granted that others are not in the grace of God?) He sees, in others, anonymous Christianity at work in innumerable ways. He will not call their kindness, love, fidelity to conscience, "natural" virtues, which are only really found in the abstract. He will no longer say, as Augustine did, that they are certainly only the "specious vices of the heathen". He will rather think that the grace of Christ is at work even in those who have never yet expressly invoked it, but who in their inexpressible nameless longing have nevertheless already desired it. He will see in them persons in whom the unutterable sighs of the Spirit have invoked, requested and accepted the silent mystery which penetrates all human existence, which we Christians know as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When the Christian of the future sees a "pagan" die willingly, when he sees him accept to fall in death into an unfathomable abyss which he has never plumbed (because in order to grasp God he would have to be infinite), confessing by such readiness that the abyss is one of meaningful mystery and not of emptiness and perdition, the Christian will see in him the man nailed at the right hand of Christ on the saving cross of human life. For indeed, alas, it is not impossible for a man to employ the last strength left to him in absolute protest and cynical doubt, whereas the reality which that man is personally accomplishing and accepting in his death cries without words: Lord remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom. Why should that not be so?
The pure transcendence of man’s mind, no longer perverted into a means of asserting man’s earthly life, can after all, if it is accepted and persevered in, be elevated by grace. Then, freed from its downward tendency to the finite, it can effect the dynamism towards the God of eternal life who, in his innermost reality as communicable and as communicated, is the goal and end of man’s supernatural vocation. And this higher and liberating orientation by grace of man’s transcendence as spirit, changing as it does in good Thomistic doctrine the very horizon of spiritual activity (the "formal object"), constitutes by the nature of the case a "revelation", even if it presents no new conceptual object to the mind, and therefore, if accepted, is faith. Why then, in the present order of God’s supernatural salvific will, should it be impossible for a man’s acceptance of the inalienable endlessness of his transcendence -- an acceptance of it not as it is explicitly grasped by us but as beyond any control of ours it comprises us -- to be more than simply and solely the transcendence of the created spiritual nature as such? Why should it not in fact by God’s action in us be the dynamism which carries us into God’s life? And if in fact someone is not given more, not through his own fault but perhaps even the better to ensure his salvation, why should it not be sufficient for him to accept this dynamism by willingly permitting the incomprehensible in its very incomprehensibility to dispose of him? Need we emphasize that in this of course all the requirements of natural and supernatural ethics and religious sentiment are to be thought of as implicitly contained and implicitly accepted ? This will be done in such a way of course that, as the experience of pagans and also of Christians shows, a right orientation towards God can be accomplished in the concrete, "subjectively", even where extremely grave errors are present regarding particular specific maxims of morality and religion.
The Church as the visible form of what is already interiorly binding
In preaching Christianity to "non-Christians", therefore, the future Christian will not so much start with the idea that he is aiming at turning them into something they are not, as trying to bring them to their true selves. Not, of course, in the modernist sense that Christianity is only the full development of a natural religious need, but because God in his grace, in virtue of his universal salvific will, has already long since offered the reality of Christianity to those human beings, so that it is possible and probable that they have already accepted it without explicitly realizing this. The future Christian’s way of looking at the Church will correspond to such perspectives. He will not see it as something rare and exceptional asserting itself with difficulty, as one of the many "sects" into which mankind is split, or as one of the many components of a heterogeneous society and intellectual life. He will see the Church as the visible embodiment of what is already interiorly binding, as the historical concrete form of what is universal and in fact taken for granted as a matter of course (despite the fact that it is something freely posited by God -- but by God and not by some finite being!). The Church for him will represent the nature of man as God planned him to be -- his "historical" nature, to which his supernatural vocation belongs. It will be the sacrament of a grace which, precisely because it is offered to all, even where no sacrament is yet conferred, tends towards its own historical embodiment in the sacraments. And precisely as such, that grace is never simply identical with its own efficacious sign; on the contrary, by the sign which it now posits and by which it is posited (both statements are necessary), it gives promise that it is powerful everywhere.
If the history of mankind (and of the Church, as the Constitution stresses) is a unity in which all men from Abel to the last human being belong together, and each is significant for every other throughout time and not merely by their immediate contacts in time and space, then the Church is the leaven not only where it can clearly be seen to be a fragment at work in the rest of the meal, but always and for everyone, in every age and even where the meal has not yet, as far as one can see, been visibly permeated by the leaven. To our future Christian the Church will appear as a promise also to the world which is not the Church, and not only to the extent that the world itself has already become Church. The promise is not only that the world will gradually become part of the Church, but that salvation of the world through the Church is possible even where the world has not yet, as far as can be historically ascertained, become part of the Church.
This is so because the Church is the promise of salvation for the world which lived and died before it. Just as Christ in his concrete historical reality (and not only as the eternal Logos of the world) is the salvation of all men, even of those who lived before his time, through hundreds of thousands of years of an immeasurable, toiling history, obscure and unintelligible to itself, the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Church. If we ask: by what is it manifest, by what is it promised with historical clarity and in created, objective form (and not only in the never absolutely certain testimony to grace of the mind in the depth of conscience) to the world of all ages, that it stands under the mercy and not under the judgment of God, the only answer can be: solely through Christ and his Body which is the Church. We accept without special difficulty the idea that the Church was the visible efficacious sign of salvation for past ages anterior to Christ and the Church, when salvation had not yet appeared ecclesiastically although it was salvation from the Church. It will not be found surprising then by those who accept that, if the ages after Christ also fit into the perspective of Christian and ecclesiastical salvation, even though they do not yet belong to the Church in the tangible sociological sense. Moreover, if it is true that the Church will remain until the end a sign that is contradicted, that amounts to saying in different terminology that the Church, viewed sociologically, superficially and as an institution, will always be only one reality within a world that remains one of heterogeneous philosophies. It is in that way that the Church is the sign of the salvation which is offered to all. The Christian works for the "victory" of the Church while remaining aware of that fact, conscious that the Church will never be absolutely victorious in this world. Moreover, he knows that not from calculations but from the word of God. Yet he will not cease to hope that the whole world will be drawn into and consumed in the flame of the love of God, because ultimately speaking it is impelled by the power of God’s love in Christ for it. And so he cannot regard the Church otherwise than as the promise that through the very midst of the world’s contradiction to God its deeper consent to God is nevertheless being accomplished through the predominance of God’s grace. He will not see the Church as an armed camp standing opposed to the camp of the evil one, both on an equal footing and equally powerful and equally absolute, both simply comprised within the unrevealed will of a God who fundamentally has remained silent about the ultimate meaning of this drama. He will regard the Church as the audible Yes of consent which he may hope God has spoken even to the No of the world, and across it, the Yes which remains victorious and has long superseded the world’s No. He will always refuse in the last resort (provisionally it is a different matter) to regard the Church as an affirmation which stands in contradiction to what is really meant in the very depths of the affirmations of others, so that ultimately there has to be a choice. He will often patiently and self-critically (for even the Church’s knowledge has to grow more and more) say No to what others assert, but in order to say Yes to what they really mean. And he will think of the Church in its true nature as the historic audibility of God’s comprehensive Yes to the world, in which God (and that means him outside of whom there is nothing) triumphantly promises himself to the world. He will understand more and more that all that can be really opposed to this Yes of God is an empty No, the nothingness of which becomes more and more evident, for even this No only lives and has force from the partial or total Yes which is in it or behind it, and which belongs with the Yes which is the Church.
Sin reduced to insignificance?
Does this reduce the sin, error, darkness and danger of eternal perdition in the world to insignificance? Certainly not. It is not the case that any such optimism of faith comes easily to modern man -- unlike the optimism of prosperous security or of rationalism. For of course he knows darkness by experience, he suffers from the heterogeneity of the world, which amounts even to a physical threat. Men were probably never so little convinced of their own goodness, so aware of their fragility, so universally conscious of their vulnerability, the possibility and probability that their holiest idealism may be unmasked (and rightly) as fear, as a vital need of security, cowardice, lack of vitality. Man experiences his finiteness, his poverty, his vulnerability, his utter openness to question. If despite all this he is obedient to God’s word and thinks what is noble and holy of men, believes (it is not easy) that he is a child of God, loved by God and worthy of an eternal life which is already operative and growing within him, he will not be haughty and proud, will not-regard what is promised as a matter of course as his inalienable dignity. And if he finds it easier to think optimistically of others than of himself, his pessimism about himself will prevent exaggeration in that optimism. But it is permissible for the man of today to think hopefully about others. And this is almost the only thing that helps him not to despair about himself. It is almost easier for him to think great things about himself because he regards it as a moral duty and the safeguard of his life to think of man in general in that way, and so has to include himself in that evaluation almost in contradiction to his own experience. If, however, he has to think of man in general in that way because it safeguards his own life and is the way in which he can have some hope for himself (which after all is his Christian obligation), then he cannot regard the Church as the exclusive band of those who alone are predestined. He has to view it as a promise for the others, the revelation of what the others are -- and if in regard to those others it is not "certain" what they are, neither is it certain that those who are inside the Church belong to the band of the elect.
And that lessens the temptation represented by the fact that so few people in the world are Christians in the Church. The sign of the mystery of light in darkness can only be modest and almost insignificant. The message of what is to come (and that is what the Church is) cannot itself be what is to come; the Church of time is not as vast as the eternal kingdom of God. It cannot be said that such a view of the Church will inevitably hamper or render ineffective the missionary zeal of the apostolate of clergy and laity. On the contrary, it is easier and less restrictive to be able to say to someone: become what you are, than: destroy what you were until now. If Francis Xavier told his Japanese questioners that their ancestors were in hell, and they answered that they did not aim at any better lot than their ancestors, the story really sums up the whole problem, the progress which has been made in actual awareness of the faith since the sixteenth century, as well as the respective missionary advantages and disadvantages of both attitudes.
What has been said makes no claim to have underlined all those factors of devotion to the Church which are contained in the schema on the Church and which on the one hand are dogmatically enduring features of ecclesiology and on the other are likely to stand out particularly in future devotion to the Church. But it seems to me that those pointed out are the kind we were looking for. They present the Church as the Church of those who as sinners accept in faith the human life of all, with its ordinariness and its burdens, so that we experience our own lot as that of the Church, and ourselves as its members in that way; as the Church which is believed because we believe in God, the Church whose belief is not to be identified with what it experiences; above all as the Church which is the promise of salvation for the world which has not yet expressly recognized itself as part of the Church, the Church as the sacramentum of the world’s salvation.
God’s salvific will includes all who seek him with upright heart
All this already closely concerns the second statement which our future Christian will read with pleasure in the conciliar decree. "God’s salvific will also includes those who (without having received the Gospel) acknowledge the Creator . . . God is not far even from those who seek the unknown God in shadows and figures, for he gives to all life, breath and all things (cf. Acts 17:25-28), and the Redeemer wills all men to be saved (cf. 1Tim 2: 4). For those who through no fault of their own do not know Christ’s Gospel and Church but seek God with upright hearts and so in fact under the influence of grace seek to do his will, made known by the dictates of conscience, can attain eternal salvation."
Now even to people today this statement seems perfectly obvious as a matter of course. But anyone who knows the history of theology and of the Church’s doctrinal pronouncements will be filled with amazement at the fact that it was accepted by the Council without the slightest remark. Ringing in his ears are other affirmations: he who does not believe will be condemned. He thinks of the teaching of the great Augustine about the massa damnata from which God in his incomprehensible grace saves some few, while all who are not baptized remain in it by a just judgment. He remembers that there have been plenty of theologians down to the present day who by subtle doctrines and distinctions have not wanted to admit the meaning of that text from the Letter to Timothy, or who tried to evacuate its clear sense and force by saying that such non-Christians could not believe because they have not got the historical revelation of God’s word and so could not be saved, because without real faith salvation is impossible. He remembers those who argued that such non-Christians, like children dying without baptism, could at most go to Limbo, or who asserted that they were justly not touched by revelation and grace because by their own grievous sin against the natural law they had made themselves unworthy in advance of encountering the revelation of God’s word and divinizing grace. Or there was the supposition that they would need to have gleaned something of the original revelation of the Garden of Eden in order to have some possible object of faith. In this case it is not easy to see how such a primitive revelation could have been handed down during two million years. Of course the passage quoted is not easy to harmonize with the absolute necessity of faith, of revelation, and the necessity of the Church for salvation, which cannot be denied either, even now. In order to show this compatibility a very subtle theology of the possibility and existence of anonymous Christians would first have to be worked out on the basis of that conciliar statement. Yet the statement is there as though it were a matter of course, as though anything else were inconceivable.
Here too we have atheism of the troubled, inquiring, seeking kind comprised within the scope of the grace of God. And who could say with certainty that some other person was not an inquiring and deeply concerned atheist but one rebelling against God in deadly guilt? What perspectives and attitudes of confidence, patience and gentleness are permitted to our future Christian, and indeed imposed on him by all this, amidst the radical heterogeneity of philosophies and ideologies in which his life is set, has already really been indicated.
But it is also clear what tasks await the theology of tomorrow if it takes seriously the passage we have quoted. It will have to show how divine grace is not simply the intermittent chance of salvation of an individualist kind granted to a few only and restricted in time and place, but that it is ultimately the dynamism of all human history everywhere and always, and indeed of the world generally, even though it remains a question put to the free decision of each and every individual. Theology will have to explain how grace understood in this way ipsofacto constitutes revelation and therefore the possibility of faith -- revelation as a determination of the perspective, prior to all particular experience, in which man interprets his existence and accomplishes the work of his freedom; a revelation which radiates its light everywhere even in the midst of error and guilt, a revelation which culminates in the historically revealed word of the Old and New Testaments where it has its pure historical manifestation and eschatological finality. It will have to be shown that the other "revelation" may not be dismissed or denied in favour of this historical, explicit, verbally formulated revelation, and that revelation cannot simply be identified with the latter, any more than the conferring of grace is identical with the sacramental conferring of grace. It is still impossible to foresee all the theological consequences of these simple statements of the Council, which were scarcely debated, and not noticed at all by press and public opinion. But they are there, they will produce their effect and promote the growth of quite new attitudes in Christians.
The collegiality of the bishops and the solidarity of the faithful
A third group of statements from the Constitution De Ecclesia will please our future Christian. Perhaps he will even be rather surprised about the space devoted to it. We refer to the much-talked-of collegiality in the Church, particularly that of the whole body of bishops with the pope. This is not the place to expound once more the precise import of these statements in relation to canon law. I should only like to stress that on this point the declaratio which provoked such discussion in the last week of the third session alters nothing and in fact does not weaken anything of what the Theological Commission and the overwhelming majority of the Council worked out, stated and intended to state in the schema voted on and taught. These texts will be taken very much as a matter of course by the Christian of the future. His bishops, of course, will be men whose episcopal office confers no special social position, power or wealth. It will no longer be an earthly honour to be a bishop in the little flock. Socially the bishop will not look very different from any other official in a small voluntary group effectively dependent on the goodwill of that group. The Christian of the future will not feel himself reduced in stature or oppressed by his bishop. He will take it for granted that in the little flock of those who freely believe there must be a sacred order grounded in the Spirit of Christ. This will be all the clearer to him because of the terrible harshness with which the extremely complicated social structures of the future will have to protect their existence and unity. He will know that even in the community of the faithful there must be those who are responsible for binding decisions and action and that the Spirit of Christ who animates all, will be with such men. And that Christian of course is a Christian voluntarily in faith, not a product of social circumstance and tradition. He will feel the bishops to be those whose existence and activity support his own free obedience of faith. And for the bishop there will be nothing left for him, as in the ancient Church of the martyrs, but continually to invite such voluntary obedience and understanding for his decisions, in love and humility. He will have to carry out his office as a service because at his back there will no longer be any, or hardly any, earthly social power of tradition or the great mass of those who will always obey in any case.
Who can tell, perhaps in the actual details of life as well as in theoretical questions, and in view of the unmanageable complexity and difficulty of action and thought in the future, the official Church in its magisterium and pastoral care will simply no longer be in a position to do anything but leave very many things, or even most things which involve particular concrete decisions, to the conscience of the individual. It may even be that in cases where such official decisions still can and must be taken, they will simply impose by the nature of things prior discussion and deliberation of a very fraternal kind. For on the one hand it will be impossible any longer for decisions to be taken solely from above in paternalist wisdom, and on the other, no one in the Church will any longer have any mind or inclination to exercise in the social forms of earlier ages the right -- which of course will still subsist, and which does not belong to everyone -- of making such binding decisions. It may be that the Church will then observe that in doctrine and practice what is decisive is not an ever subtler casuistry in dogmatic and moral theology, but the preaching of the old fundamental truths in new tongues, in new depth and spiritual power: that the mystery which we call God is close to us, saving, loving and forgiving; that all the apocalyptic abysses of human existence are ultimately those of eternal love; that death is life and Jesus of Nazareth is he in whom God has become absolutely present and close to us in tangible historical form and has initiated the epoch in which alone mankind has found its way quite afresh to its own possibilities and tasks.
The necessary and salutary reflection of the Church about itself in Vatican II will not be the final stage of theology. Another even more important one will come, for which this Council will be seen to have been simply a forerunner and indirect preparation. The ultimate truth and hope of the Church, God and his Christ, will be expressed anew as though what in fact has always been preached were really understood for the first time. The doctrine of collegiality will endure, it will be meditated upon and, above all, lived. But the page on which it is written will look to the future Christian more like a palimpsest, and when he scrapes it the even more sacred characters will appear: fraternity in Christ. So the Christian of the future will read the second and fourth chapters of the Constitution De Ecclesia frequently and reverently, but with a slight smile at its rather hierarchical and clerical tone, even when it speaks of the people of God and the laity. Yet he will love them because fundamentally they say that we are all one in Christ, that really the ultimate differences only derive from greater love for God and the brethren; that distinctions of office are necessary but entirely secondary and provisional, transitory things lovingly conceded by brother to brother because they are only a burden, a service, a sacred responsibility.
Growth of the new seed
Have I made too little mention of the Council itself? I do not think so, though of course it is true that very little has been chosen out of so much. But that little holds the seed of so much. The most important thing about Vatican II is not the letter of the decrees, which in any case have to be translated by us all into life and action. It is the spirit, the deepest tendencies, perspectives and meaning of what happened that really matter and which will remain operative. They may perhaps be submerged again for the time being by a contrary wave of caution, fear of one’s own courage, terror of false conclusions which people may like to draw. It may seem to some short-lived and short-sighted people that after much talk and fuss everything is much as it was. But the real seeds of a new outlook and strength to understand and endure the imminent future in a Christian way have been sown in the field of the Church. God himself will provide the climate in which this crop will grow -- the future historical situation of the Church which he, as Lord of history, will bring about. The Church entrusts itself to history; it cannot and will not be reconstructed according to the abstract schemes or blueprints of theologians, clerical politicians, journalists and impatient theorists. The Church exists, lives, intends to remain, true to tradition and to the future. The Church has manifold facets and is a perpetual enigma to itself despite all theoretical reflection on its own nature. It does not know its own earthly future but pursues its pilgrim way because, guided by the incomprehensible God, it only seeks to be the guide of humanity into the mystery of its God. Yet the Church knows that it is sacrament and testimony, not for its own salvation, but for that of the world, that it serves the God of the Covenant (which is the Church) by permitting and confessing him to be greater than itself, so that the grace of which the Church is the enduring sign is victoriously offered by God even to those who have not yet found the visible Church and who nevertheless already, without realizing it, live by its Spirit, the Holy Spirit of the love and mercy of God. The Church knows that it is only what it should be if it is a community of brothers and sisters who love one another, knows that the Church too must say: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
According to press reports, the Council is preparing a schema on the "active presence of the Church in the modern world of today". There is no doubt that very many Catholics will expect a declaration of that kind. They regard the Church as the "light of the nations". They believe in a Church which has the courage, not only to proclaim an eternal life as God’s gift and the hope of men, but also to declare that, and how, man has to shape this world of his and its conditions according to the will of God. They believe in a Church which knows of a natural law and which aims at subjecting not only the sentiments of men’s hearts but also the concrete reality of life and history to the law of the Gospel. The Church for them is not only the sacramental intermediary of grace and the teaching authority for the true statement of the hidden mysteries of God, but also has a pastoral power by which it can contribute quite considerably to determining the concrete action of its members in the tangible and sober reality of everyday life. For these and many other reasons, it is understandable that the Church feels itself authorized and indeed obliged to have something to say in the name of Christ in the domains of history, civilization, economics, politics and international relations at the present time. And it is also easy to understand that very many of the faithful expect such a statement from the Church.
In such a situation sobriety is necessary. Neither side, neither the teaching Church nor the faithful "hearers", must over-estimate the possibility of the Church’s taking up a position on the concrete questions and difficulties of the world situation. This often seems to happen, however, and on both sides. There is no question here of discussing the point that within certain limits even the teaching Church in its doctrine does not always and absolutely have to be preserved from the outset from every error. We are only concerned with the possibility that the Church’s official ministry may over-estimate the scope and significance of the correct teaching which it propounds and inculcates. The ministry, or in concrete terms the clergy, has often too easily the impression, not merely that the Church has to proclaim what are certainly correct principles of social, cultural and political life, but that by that very fact it possesses, for everything of the slightest importance? the concrete prescriptions which it is only necessary to follow in order to bring about a condition of universal peace and happiness in the world, as far as such a thing is possible at all.
That is the source of the clerical "triumphalism" which was deplored and opposed at the Council. Though it is often not as great as some people think, and has nothing to do with personal pride and lack of modesty on the part of those who bear office in the Church, though it is often inspired by love of the Church and high esteem for the revealed truth which the Church proclaims, it is nevertheless impossible to deny that clerical triumphalism in the sense we mean here still exists. It often springs, as we have said, from an entirely laudable sentiment. For triumphalists of that kind, the Church is everything, the teacher of the nations, the wise and experienced mother of mankind. How then could it not be that the Church knows everything necessary to the peace and well-being of the nations, that it is sufficient to follow the Church to achieve the best possible in the life of the nations? Such triumphalists will then be inclined to attribute all the world’s ills to failure sufficiently to respect and obey the commandments of God and the Church. They will not of course explicitly contest that even the pious Christian who holds fast unconditionally to the instructions of the Gospel and of the Church can still raise innumerable questions regarding public and private life, of very considerable importance, yet cannot expect to get answers to them directly from the Church. Nor will they deny that a Christian of that kind, absolutely faithful to the Church and its principles, can make the most terrible wrong decisions with catastrophic results in private and public life, without perceiving any contradiction between his decisions and the principles of the Church which he accepts. There may not in fact be any such material contradiction, while any contradiction to certain formal principles can only be discovered with certainty when the misfortune has already happened. But triumphalists do not notice these possibilities or else they underestimate them, and so their language and behaviour assume that false tone of self-assurance and superior knowledge which repels people of the present day and makes them distrustful and obstinate towards representatives of the Church’s ministry.
The same fault, but with the sign reversed, is probably met with just as often among the laity (or among clerics with a lay mentality). They themselves demand from the official Church what the clerical triumphalists in fact think can be offered. They then reproach the Church when the Church’s ministry cannot meet this claim. According to these Christians, the Church ought to have foreseen all the consequences of the Constantinian turning-point and ought not so naïvely to have entered upon that road of symbiosis of State and Church, of Christianity and culture, which involves at least the danger of the betrayal of genuine Christianity. According to them, the official Church had the opportunity of avoiding all the errors and theological rashness which led to the persecutions of heretics, wars of religion, witch-hunting, and all the other dark and lamentable events of Church history. According to these Christians, Pius XII ought to have taken the lead in defending the Jews in quite a different fashion, and naturally in the way they today think could have been recognized even then, with a little good will, as the only right one. In short, these Christians make implicitly and as a matter of course the same claim on the official Church as the clerical triumphalists think they can fulfill. As the actual Church in fact does not fulfill it, does not advocate concrete social demands energetically enough, does not dissociate itself radically or quickly enough from dying social forms, does not stigmatize nuclear warfare profoundly enough (all this according to the opinion of these Christians, which objectively is by no means necessarily false), they experience one disappointment after another in regard to the Church, protest against it, hurt and irritated, and turn into lay defeatists. There are of course some of the latter among the clergy, just as there are also clerical triumphalists among the laity.
Clerical triumphalists and lay defeatists start from the same principle and make the same claim for the Church’s ministry. They differ only in their judgment of the question whether the official Church in fact does justice to this claim. The clerical triumphalists affirm it and attribute in consequence the misery of real human existence to the disobedience of the wicked world. The lay defeatists deny it and attribute the real misery of the world, or a good part of it, to the failure of the official Church.
It may be of some use, therefore, to undertake a short reflection on the limits of the Church’s possibilities of coping with mundane situations, whether of a private or social kind. Though attention is chiefly focused on these limits of the Church’s capacity in the public and social sphere, what is said also applies to the private domain of the individual, and in fact can often be more easily grasped in his case, for the Church’s limitations there are perhaps even plainer and are more indisputably present to ecclesiastical consciousness. The import of our theme must of course emerge from the reflection itself.
Four preliminary considerations
Before the actual thesis regarding the essential limits of the official Church in influencing life in the concrete can be stated, even in respect of the knowledge necessary to such an influence (and not merely in respect of the factual attainment of such knowledge), a number of preliminary considerations are necessary. A little patience is required with them, because their importance for the theme is not always immediately easy to grasp.
1. Principles of action even in the secular sphere can and must be proclaimed by the Church. They must be respected by Christians and are of great importance for the concrete life of men. This proposition is really self-evident for ecclesiastical awareness of the faith and for a real Christian. But it must be stated here at the beginning of our reflections, so that there may be no misunderstanding about the meaning and limits of what we have to say about the limits of the Church in its teaching regarding the concrete life of men. The salvation of men is won or lost in the concrete realities of their earthly existence. For that very reason the Church does not deal in its teaching and precepts only with certain ultimate human attitudes to God in an abstract interior life, but also with the concrete earthly life of man: Thou shalt not steal, not commit adultery, not lie, etc. The Church knows an objective structure of reality which is anterior to and binding on the free decision of man and which as such stands under God’s will and sanction. For that reason the Church teaches moral maxims with specific content to be observed by the faithful in every case where the inner structure of reality to which these principles apply is actually present and where this presence is recognized by the Christian.
Such specific regulative principles, which of themselves exclude any formalist situation ethics, even of a Christian type, have also great practical importance. They cannot be proclaimed and inculcated too often or too clearly, for it is not the case that the will to respect and observe them always and everywhere exists. Even if we were to assume with absurd optimism that all men in all situations of their lives are of good will, so that only offences of an objective but not of a subjectively guilty kind against the objective structures of reality and moral principles occur, even then perpetually renewed preaching and inculcation of these specific maxims would still be of the greatest importance for men’s earthly happiness. For even a purely objective and, from the point of view of salvation, indifferent infringement of these principles produces on the whole disorder and misfortune in the world. This is because transgression of the objective structures of reality, by producing pain, works out as the "revenge" taken by reality, even if the contravention occurred in good faith. Consequently, throughout our reflections there is no depreciation of the importance of preaching all the principles which are of significance for the individual or social life of men, nor is it meant that the Church by such preaching is engaging in a pointless activity, as if there were no difference of opinion about the correctness of principles and as if all the argument were simply about their concrete application. That is not so. The Church has a great, necessary and salutary task in the proclamation of principles. And Christians have the duty of assimilating them more and more profoundly. They cannot assume as a matter of course that they already possess sufficient knowledge of principles and sufficiently serious respect for them.
2. The Church and the Church’s ministry are not the same. When we refer to the Church, make a demand on it or deplore its failure to act, we very often do not mean the Church at all but the official ministry and its representatives. If we make a demand on the Church, we must always examine precisely whether it is really addressed to the hierarchy and its members as such, or to the Church, that is, to all of us Christians, and precisely in the sphere where the official Church does not teach and act authoritatively. It may well be that the Church has a function and obligation which does not belong to its officials as such. Not all the activity of the Church, which is the totality of the baptized united in faith and love, proceeds so plainly from the hierarchy as to be simply the carrying out of official orders. Consequently when we have to determine limits in the function, competence and possibilities of the ministry in the Church, that certainly does not mean that precisely the same limits are found, similarly located, among Christians as members of the one Church and, in this sense, in the Church itself. The obedience of a St Francis of Assisi to his heavenly vocation was obedience to a call which did not come through the intermediary of the Church’s hierarchy, however true it may be to insist that it remained within the limits of the official Church and was tested and approved by the Church’s ministers. Yet it was an event for the Church itself, not merely an action in a private interior life which had nothing to do with the life of the Church. Church and ministry in the Church must be distinguished; the limits of the Church’s possibilities and those of its official hierarchy are not to be regarded from the outset as identical.
3. What cannot entirely be dealt with in didactic propositions is not ipso facto morally indifferent. There is no doubt that some decisions in human life cannot wholly be made available to explicit reflection as regards their moral significance. Probably only in the rarest cases (metaphysically it would be more correct to say, never) is the choice of a profession or of a husband or wife made in such a way that all the decisive and operative motives and impulses are present to the mind expressly, formulated in propositions, with the relevant moral decision determined only by the motives which are present in that wholly explicit and conscious fashion. But it would be false to identify morally important with explicitly conscious factors in a moral decision. Introspective reflection never entirely recovers a more radical and direct free commitment in the depth of the free being. These spontaneous factors of a free decision not articulated in propositions, not explicitly focussed, not recoverable by introspection, can of course ex supposito never be critically judged and elucidated by reflection and theoretical verification, by express confrontation with the explicit precepts of the natural law, the Gospel and the Church. But we cannot on that account adopt an attitude of simple indifference to motives, even to the extent that they are not accessible to reflection. For as well as theoretical reflection on the moral significance of a decision, there are other ways and means by which a human being can either become clear about the rightness and conformity to God’s will of a decision, or at least improve the conditions for its correct formation: the general cultivation of courage, unselfishness, self-denial, the practice of the art of making vital particular decisions which cannot be deduced by purely theoretical consideration as this art is taught by the masters of the spiritual life. These and similar ways of discerning the morally good in the concrete, where it is not simply the individual "case" of a moral universal susceptible of theoretical formulation, imply, however, as their converse that the reality of moral good, the scope of man’s responsibility, extends farther and deeper than the sole domain of theoretical moral reflection and a casuistry which operates with universal maxims.
4. The matter and circumstances of humanly and socially important decisions have become so much more complicated at the present time that the change amounts very nearly to a change of kind. This statement requires more detailed explanation, because it is what will provide the essential basis for our actual reflections here. Human action has an object and occurs in a definite situation. Both must be known (whether expressly or in a direct and global way), if the moral quality of the action is to be perceived and the action performed in a morally responsible way. In former times, however, the object and situation of a free human action were simply ready-made data, presented in fact with almost static fixity and repetitiveness. With a certain simplification of the state of affairs, which however brings out more clearly the decisive factor without falsifying it, we might say that formerly the object and situation of a man’s action were simply data supplied by nature with which he was in contact and by simple human realities which recurred from generation to generation again and again. To the extent, however, that in earlier ages man nevertheless did change his situation and the whole setting of his existence in the long run, these active and not merely passively undergone alterations were so much a matter of "micromutations" -- if we may so use the term -- that they were made entirely without explicit reflection and scarcely involved any real moral decision. Consequently, people knew what, morally, they had to do. If it was said: Honour thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not steal, not lie, not commit adultery, people knew exactly what was involved, they had a precise idea of their obligations as something concrete and experienced as identical countless times over. It was quite simple to know whether they had been fulfilled or broken. And what is decisive, when people fulfilled these definite, easily handled maxims, they had in fact complied with the greater part of their task in life as far as that life was subject to freedom. What did not fall under and was not covered by these simple norms, although falling within the scope of freedom, was so minimal that it did not create any very serious problem, at least in the mind of society as such. The task of the Church was correspondingly simple: to proclaim principles which of themselves could be applied to concrete reality by the individual, because that reality was simple, limited, static, always the same.
Today things are quite different, though naturally not in every respect. The characteristic features of the present age could of course be detected in former times as faint traces, so to speak, because man was always to some degree the inventor and active manipulator of his own situation and the creator of himself. Conversely, the old situation is still to a considerable extent present even today in the midst of the new. Both these facts can convince those who prefer not to be disturbed that nothing has altered very much in the moral situation of man. Nevertheless the situation is different. In the first place, it is enormously more complicated than in former times. And not only when we compare it with the setting of the life of Stone Age men, but also when we measure it by the framework within which the Church itself lived in those earlier times which constituted the classical periods of the Church’s life and teaching. The sum of the treasures of knowledge and culture has increased to such a degree that the individual in the time available in one lifetime can no longer have any direct contact with the whole of the benefits of civilization available nowadays and which are in fact known and enjoyed by one person or another. Whereas a learned man in the 18th century could still know more or less all the knowledge present and accessible within his own circle, and therefore within the scope of his own action, today we are all becoming less well-informed, in the sense that the proportion between supply and assimilation of available knowledge by the individual is deteriorating, and inevitably must do so. In this connection it must be noticed that this knowledge, which we know is unknown to us, does not stand in the same relation to contemporary man as, for example, the history of the 15th Dynasty in Egypt did to Leibniz. Within the setting of his life, such knowledge was quite unimportant, whereas what we mean by knowledge available but unknown to us actually contributes to determine the conditions of our own lives, and because we know it is not familiar to us, gives them a threatening and sinister character. Furthermore, the present situation is marked by the fact that it is not simply a given datum, but produced by man himself. Man today reacts to nature as an environment available for his free disposal, as material at his command, so that in contradistinction to earlier times he changes it decisively. Consequently, he sees the realities which he directly meets in his daily life as things which not God but another human being has made by his own deliberate planning. Man no longer lives in nature but in a civilization, in a world which is perhaps very inhuman, because made by man, but at all events in a man-made world. And this civilization is no longer what he produces each time from nature by his own work, but is the prior datum which is the starting point of the individual’s life, and without which he cannot live at all.
What is strange about this simple fact is that by it man’s situation does not become easier to comprehend and to calculate, but that the contrary is the case. The greater the extent to which elements which derive from the free decision of man are present in the situation with which freedom is confronted and with which it deals, the more problematic the situation of man’s freedom becomes. He is no longer dealing with realities which are simple, which cannot be otherwise and therefore can be taken as constituting God’s ordinance from which there is no appeal, as the expression of God’s own mighty and loving will. Man is dealing directly and perpetually with himself and the works of his own freedom. His situation thereby assumes a character of arbitrariness, of what may at any time be modified because it has only just come into existence, and also of what is obscure. The world of man in which his action is placed, being man-made, cannot simply be accepted as nature was in former times, even where it was mysterious, for even there its incomprehensibility appeared as something divinely matter of fact. The present day calls for mystery-free clarity, because it is made by men. But it does not fulfill the demand, because even free planning simultaneously creates more and more unforeseen factors, brings about situations with which the planner had not reckoned, simply because even the subtlest planning must always and will always have to reckon with an unplanned and not wholly intelligible material and because the planning itself even in the future will never originate from a single planner but will perpetually come into ever greater conflict with the plans of others which have not been taken into account. Through the rationalization of human existence the irrational does not really diminish. On the contrary, it increases faster than what is rationalized, by the very fact that with each plan the unrationalizable residue, together with the remote effects of the planning, involves more and more consequences. The irrationality of nuclear weapons is greater than that of the old knives and cannon.
To the extent that the man-made setting of man’s life and the setting which was naturally antecedent to human freedom are specifically different, the latter being characteristic of earlier times and the former of the present, we are now living in a setting which almost in its very essence is more complicated and intractable and inaccessible to the understanding of the individual than was ever the case before.
Universal doctrine and individual decision
On these assumptions the following must now be said if the limits of the influence exerted by the Church as ministry are to be clearly recognized. The distance between the moral principles which the Church proclaims and -- leaving aside for the moment the question of the Church’s pastoral office -- which alone can be propounded doctrinally, and the concrete prescriptions by which the individual and the various human communities freely shape their existence, has now increased to an extent that introduces what is practically a difference of nature as compared with earlier times. Of course there has always been a gap between general principles, which state what is fundamental and universal, and concrete prescriptions which aim at something individual here and now. It is the distance between the abstract concept and concrete reality, between reason which as such can grasp expressly only what is universal or the universal in the individual, and freedom which concerns and brings about the individual as such. To that extent there has always been this distance, this anthropological difference. The Church was always only able to proclaim universal moral principles, where the Christian acted as bound by the teaching of the Church, he always had to keep his action within the framework of the principles of natural law and of the Gospel which were taught by the Church. And certainly by that, in a situation which was a ready-made and easily grasped datum, a quite definite concrete action was in fact imposed in innumerable cases which covered the greater part of his life.
But even in those earlier times the difference we are concerned with existed in principle and was quite perceptibly felt in individual and social life. Even in those days the official Church could give the individual no unequivocal concrete information about the choice of a profession or the choice of a wife or husband. In very many instances in actual life the Church had to leave the individual to his own conscience, even though it was neither easy nor sure for the individual to draw from general Christian principles a concrete prescription for a definite course of action at a definite point of space and time in his life. And neither the individual Christian nor the Church regarded this handing over of responsibility to the individual conscience for the concrete decision as exceptional or dangerous. It was probably only in the rarest cases that the Church in earlier times officially adopted a particular attitude to definite practical questions in the field of politics, culture and economics, although these were of great consequence for human societies and could involve much misfortune. For the most part the Church was silent and limited itself quite serenely to proclaiming very general principles of political, cultural and economic life. Even the differences of opinion among moral theologians, sometimes very considerable differences, which were tolerated by the Church for centuries and not settled by a doctrinal pronouncement, especially on points where it was a question of an attempt to give concrete form to general moral principles, show that the difference we are concerned with has always existed to some extent and therefore does not involve an absolutely new situation for the Church today.
Once again, however, this does not exclude but on the contrary includes the fact that in earlier times the difference was considerably smaller, that it made itself much less felt in human and Christian life as a whole. Consequently it scarcely represented a problem that was really experienced as fundamental. At the most it was one when philosophers and theologians disputed about the precise relation between universals and concrete particulars. That controversy over universals had, however, no practical significance for the life of the Church or of the individual Christian.
Today the situation is different. The difference between the general moral principles taught by the Church and concrete reality is everywhere perceptible and constitutes an extraordinarily difficult state of affairs for the Church and the individual Christian. It is not that the general principles are no longer valid, unimportant or should be replaced by a situation ethics because they are of no consequence. Nor are we concerned here with the gap between the principles taught by the Church and the actual respect shown to them. It has already been emphasized that that is not our subject. In fact it could with justice be said that the principles are all the more important as ultimate orientation and guides, the more complicated, obscure and inaccessible to total conscious analysis the reality becomes which man himself creates and in which he must morally subsist. The difference is nevertheless almost so much greater now as to be of a different kind. It is directly tangible everywhere, painful and menacing. The reason has already been indicated. The subject-matter and circumstances of important human and social decisions have increased in complexity to such an extent that the whole context has practically changed its nature.
Reflection on general principles, the further and to a certain extent always possible elaboration of such principles in the direction of greater concreteness cannot in principle keep pace with the increasing complexity of subject-matter and circumstances of individual and social decisions. The gap irresistibly widens. The causes of the inevitability of the growth of this difference cannot be gone into in detail here. We shall only point out that the greater the area of freedom which man actively makes for himself, the more incalculable that area of freedom becomes, because it brings with it new and fluid situations which are only thoroughly analysed when they already belong to the past.
It must not be overlooked that because the Church has to announce a revelation which came to an end with the apostles, it is engaged in a history of reflection on the natural law committed to its care. That history is not at an end and is only accomplished in connection with concrete events. The Church necessarily experiences a gap between the general principles which it transmits from apostolic tradition or which it first has to formulate by express reflection as part of the history of recognition of the natural law, and the new concrete realities which emerge in the history of its members. Only someone who had an absolutely unhistorical conception of the way men come to discover truth could imagine that men can respond immediately to every new situation that arises with a concrete application of their general principles to the situation. Only someone who overlooks the fact that this answer itself has a real history which is a history of the reality reflected on as well as of the reflection itself, can think that the Church with its principles, because they too can be given concrete form, is always able to follow directly on the heels of what is new in the changing course of history and that only by its own fault and failure could the Church lag behind events in its theological reflection on morals. In many respects it was only possible to speak with full theological accuracy about the Constantinian turning-point, the feudal State of the Middle Ages and innumerable other events in the life of the Church, when these events already belonged to the past. In principle there are innumerable realities in regard to which we can only really become wise by experience, and so actually never can. For when the damage is done, the things in question are already past and gone.
But let us leave epistemological considerations of a fundamental kind regarding the inevitability of that gap. Let it suffice to indicate the fact that a difference has become greater and is becoming ever greater, and then try to illustrate it by a few examples. The Church can lay down basic principles for the organization of economic life. The Church does so, and these principles are certainly very important and very fruitful, and to transgress them can have catastrophic consequences. But the Church cannot offer a concrete model of the economy as it might be today and as in certain circumstances it ought to be, in such a way that to realize this model would be a binding moral duty on those in charge of economic life. The general principles of the Church on the abstract theoretical level admit of realization in various concrete models of an economy. Yet in a certain situation one particular model among these models, all of which are legitimate on general principles, may be the only correct one effectively to achieve the humane purpose of an economic order. Or it may be the model which alone is to be chosen in a certain historical decision if an economy is not to be damaged by a chaos of opposing tendencies, even if the model in question were not the only factually and therefore morally correct one objectively imposed by the actual situation itself prior to a free historical decision. Now the Church cannot determine in official pronouncements which of these numerous models is in one or other of these senses the correct one. And yet the answer to such a question can be a matter of life and death for a civilization or for the whole world. Nor can it be said that such a choice is shown to be morally indifferent by the very fact that it cannot definitively be regulated even by a pronouncement of the Church’s magisterium and that it is merely a question of greater or less earthly happiness without moral relevance. Such an opinion would presuppose the false theory that all that is moral is susceptible as such of being brought completely and explicitly before the mind by reflection. No one can deny that the difference between the moral principles of the economic order and the concrete model of an economy which ought to exist today, is becoming greater and greater. It is not that those principles are contradicted by the actual concrete economy -- that is not the question at the moment -- but the formal abstract character of the principles is becoming increasingly evident, and so is the fact that a concrete model and a clear guide for practical action cannot be derived from them.
The case is similar, as probably no one will really deny, in the domains of social policy, culture and education, in the attitude of Christians to thermo-nuclear and other modern weapons and in innumerable similar questions of public life at the present day. Everywhere even earnest Christians, unconditionally devoted to the teaching of the Church, are quite emphatically in disagreement on such matters, as soon as the attempt is made to pass from general principles to a concrete prescription. In most instances the Church is at pains not to adopt a definite attitude. The ultimate reason is not cowardice or unprincipled oscillation between old and new, or mere tactics, but the realization, even if not a fully explicit one, that the Church in principle cannot in most instances adopt a definite attitude. For the difference between concrete and universal is itself impossible to abolish. Moreover, it has almost changed its nature today because in human life it has widened so enormously, whereas the Church, being simply the teacher of the universal natural law and of apostolic tradition, cannot do more than proclaim general principles.
Of course in virtue of its pastoral office the Church can also certainly give concrete instructions which are prescriptions and not merely principles, primarily in the domain of the Church’s own life. Furthermore, the Church, in accordance with its doctrine, can certainly also regulate by prescriptions and not only by principles the conscience of the faithful. For the Church can negatively proscribe definite concrete modes of action, social institutions etc., as incompatible in concreto with its universal maxims. For example, the Church may forbid membership of a particular political party, secret society and so on. But that does not decide the question to what extent such a negative operation of the Church’s pastoral office, which goes beyond its teaching authority, must necessarily be objectively correct in any individual instance. Nor does it tell us whether such a negative concrete instruction can be translated back again into a fundamental principle of a positive kind. And what is the source of this right of the Church to issue negative precepts? What limits has it as a consequence? What special possibility can there remain in such cases for the conscience of an individual who thinks otherwise, and who in our hypothesis cannot help thinking otherwise, without his becoming ipso facto a schismatic? To what extent is such an instruction of the Church, which by the very nature of the case is determined by certain conditions of its time, not rendered obsolete by a change of circumstances, even without an express declaration of the Church?
Above all, such a negative function of the pastoral office does not of itself mean that the Church can, through its pastoral office if not its magisterium, issue always and everywhere positive concrete prescriptions for the concrete life of the individual and of society. The Church not only does not do so, the Church cannot do so, for the Church would be going beyond what is possible to it. The contention that the Church ought to do so, or the complaint that it does not, are both false in principle. That does not mean that these limits can never actually be overstepped either way, by too little or too much official decision and pronouncement by the Church.
For the professional theologian a further observation may be added. We know that in what has been said, we have not taken into account all the possible objections to our thesis which could be drawn from the Church’s pastoral office or from certain marginal phenomena of the Church’s doctrinal magisterium. It could be pointed out that the Church’s magisterium can establish what are termed "dogmatic facts", that the Church can infallibly know that a particular human being is in heaven, and so on. It is impossible to go into all these objections here. Only this can be said: The fact that throughout its whole history and in innumerable cases of intrinsically incalculable importance for the well-being of men, the Church has given no concrete binding judgment (who is the unjust aggressor in a particular war; which concrete social tendency is the correct one; what kind of colonialism is permissible, and what precise kind is immoral; what particular mode of education truly forms human beings, which in the long run does not do so sufficiently; what apertura a sinistra is necessary and salutary, which is a deadly danger for a community and so on) shows that the Church in principle cannot do that kind of thing, at least in most cases. For otherwise the Church would have acted against its duty and capacity in a way and to an extent which the theologian cannot ascribe to a Church which as a whole is indefectible in the love of God and not only in its truth. In very many cases what is called the Church’s failure to act is an absence of competence for which the Church cannot be blamed. For example, the Church need not have any greater foresight into the future than is possible to the normal average decent person. And the few more clear-sighted prophets there may also be in the world need not necessarily be found among the Church’s ministers and may perhaps have to preach to that ministry in vain.
It follows from what has been said that the clerical triumphalism and the lay defeatism mentioned at the beginning are equally false. They both spring from an exaggerated view of the possibilities of the Church’s ministry, both in regard to the magisterium and the pastoral office, and particularly in respect of our present historical situation. If a common root is sought for these two false attitudes, the overestimation of the Church’s possibilities of directly shaping the world is founded on an underestimation of the Church’s own proper function. Both the lay defeatists, who lament that the Church pitiably lags behind its present day task, fails to act and time and time again backs the wrong horse, and the clerical triumphalists, who proclaim with ardent enthusiasm the principles of the Church and think that the mondo megliore would radiantly dawn provided these principles were generally accepted, underestimate theoretically and existentially the proper, religious function of the Church. That the Lord’s Supper is celebrated and his death proclaimed until he returns; that in the name of the triune God baptism is administered and God’s justifying Word is preached; that we are the Lord’s in life and in death and therefore in our first and in our last failure; that we believe, hope and love -- to proclaim and mediate that is the proper function of the Church.
Certainly Christian life, which is nothing other than the acceptance of the ineffable mystery of God as love, must be accomplished in the concrete details of earthly life, which is determined by the secular forces of science, of politics, of power and also of guilt. Certainly the Christian life which the Church has to mediate is not a ghetto-like idyll carefully safeguarded and cultivated in the margin of the rest of life, solely in the gentle inwardness of conscience or in the respectable Sunday churchgoing of a family seen as the last oasis in the omnipotence of a pitiless new age. The grey harshness of everyday economic and political life, of the most secular research, of that art which is not addressing explicit hymns to God, in short, the secular world itself is the stage and the material and the genuine objectivation of Christian existence and life. In comparison with it, what is expressly Christian and ecclesiastical in profession of faith, prayer and worship occupies quite justifiably in time and quantity a relatively modest proportion of people’s lives. It is of course true that the expressly Christian and ecclesiastical elements are of irreplaceable importance as objective expressions of a grace which is incarnational in structure, and as a source of strength to endure the secular world as a Christian vocation. But for this Christianity in the world itself, the decisive task of the Church is definitely not a facile preparation of concrete patterns for such a Christian life, of such a kind that it would only be necessary to copy them obediently, conscientiously and comfortably for one to be ipso facto a good Christian. For that life the Church does not offer patterns, but strength to endure it even without patterns, and it offers this strength precisely by fulfilling the religious function which properly belongs to it.
If by the power of God’s grace we are in a position to accept ourselves as pilgrims, as mortal men seeking their way with difficulty through the darkness, as failing again and again and yet bound in duty to an earthly task; if the Church effects that acceptance by celebrating the death of the Lord, and makes us men of prayer who are really conscious of the future judgment of God, if the Church sends its children strengthened with God’s grace out into their own maturity which burdens them but sets them free, then the Church by its official ministry has done what it alone can and must do. If we understand these limits of the Church which at bottom are its strength, because the Church is ultimately the Church of the Gospel and of the liberating and merciful grace of God and not the Church of an ever more detailed and minutely differentiated law, then we shall be more moderate both in praising what the Church’s ministry can directly achieve for the earthly well-being of the world and in blaming it for its manifold failure.
All that has been said about the limits of the Church’s ministry in the concrete shaping of the world must not itself be regarded as a formula with the help of which all problems regarding criticism of the Church can be solved. Even if what has been said is found acceptable, differences of opinion may persist about various particular questions of history and the day to day life of the Church, and in fact remain insoluble, and therefore have to be borne in patience. This is so even in regard to detailed questions of what the Church’s ministry in particular cases could and should have done and what it should not have done. Even someone who is no triumphalist can in certain circumstances lament that at such and such a point even the simplest principles which the Church proclaims were disregarded. Someone else who is no defeatist may be of the opinion that the Church’s ministry has not yet sufficiently thought out afresh these despised principles for them to be likely to be accepted. He can hold that the Church’s ministry has failed because it has not proclaimed the principles loudly enough, or has failed in the appropriate calculation of relative emphasis in proclaiming the many principles which often dialectically neutralize one another, or has made too little courageous use of the possibilities of the pastoral office. In precisely the same instance another Christian may hold the contrary opinion, without necessarily being open to suspicion of being a triumphalist on that account.
Just as the various Catholic "moral systems", as formal rules for resolving a problem which cannot be solved directly on its data, do not offer an easy solution for the individual cases, because they themselves are controverted, so too it is not possible with the help of the reflections we have put forward to settle all conflicts among Catholics. In the complicated situation of the present day, we shall very often have to argue in real earnest and bitterly, and precisely while appealing to Christian principles and the Christian spirit. But this can be done in love and knowing in faith that even we in our arguments possess that ultimate unity, through the Church, in what is the Church’s real nature. But we should not quarrel over points where it would be possible with moderation and love and the help of a few principles to reach agreement or peaceably concede to each other the right to a different choice and decision.
Until now we have spoken about the limits of the Church’s official ministry in regard to the concrete shaping of our world. This must not be misunderstood. It does not mean that the limits of Christians as such in regard to such a shaping influence are located at precisely the same point. While respecting the universal principles of the Church, the Christian by his own conscience and his own inquiry, which is a duty incumbent on him as an individual, has to seek for the concrete prescription by which he will shape his own life and endeavour to contribute to determining the actual form taken by public life. We have in fact already emphasized that Christian and moral responsibility is not at an end by the mere fact that one has not demonstrably come into conflict with the general principles of the Church concerning earthly life.
Just as someone has not made a morally responsible choice of profession or of wife or husband solely by the fact that a confessor does not or cannot oppose the choice, so also, for example, a Catholic at the beginning of the Third Reich had not with certainty done what he had to by the mere fact that by his actions he had not come into conflict with episcopal or papal pronouncements. The reason is not that a moral precept is binding even if it is not proclaimed by the Church with sufficient clarity, although the Church could and should do so. It is because a particular moral action of an individual is not simply and solely identical with the observation of general principles, but as well as this involves something additional and proper to the particular instance, for which the individual as such must take moral responsibility. The same thing of course also holds good of the historical decisions of collective bodies.
It is impossible here to pursue further this difference between the function of the Church in the sense of the official ministry and the function of the Church as the community of Christians, that is, between the Church as a society governed by the binding authority of the Church’s ministry and the Church as forming, as well as this, a community guided by the conscience of the individual and by the Spirit. But there is this which must still be said: when Christians as such act, the Church acts in them. Their action is an activity of the Church, not, it is true, wholly directed by the Church’s hierarchy, but inspired and guided by the Spirit of the Church. This to a certain degree non-official activity of the Church in the human beings of the Church under grace is an historical manifestation of the eschatological unconquerable grace which God has linked inseparably with the historical phenomenon of the Church as the primal sacrament of grace. It is a manifestation of the Catholic truth that to the Church as such there belongs not only the institutional ministry, but all the baptized, and the Spirit of God himself, that Spirit who blows where he wills.
It may sometimes happen that a fundamental difference of opinion on matters of principle may persist in theory, and retain real importance, while the circumstances of life and action change so much that the difference of opinion is of less moment for life and action than it previously was. It is possible, for example, that the fundamental Catholic theoretical doctrine of the primacy may continue to exist as ground for division between Christian denominations but that at the same time the historical situation will impose on the Catholic Church, with the quiet inevitability of an inescapable environment, an actual practice of the primacy to which non-Catholics themselves will scarcely be able to raise objection. Change in the historical situation may give to an enduring theoretical doctrine a mode of real existence and features which can render pointless the effective objections to it, which were directed against the actual reality rather than the abstract proposition. If on one or both sides in the dispute about a doctrine or an "idea" the historical imaginative model, the "imagery" people use to make the idea clear to themselves, remains unchanged, the ecumenical dialogue advances less far than it would if the new "imagery" of the old idea in dispute were candidly taken for granted. I consider that in ecumenical discussion in the future more regard should be shown for this simple fact.
What we are proposing to deal with here may perhaps serve as an example of what we have just said. There does perhaps exist a radical situation ethics which, because it derives from a purely secular existentialism, is rejected by all Christians as moral libertinism. We are not concerned with it here. But there also exists perhaps an attitude to general moral norms, universal in scope and specific in content, which will be affirmed by many Protestants as constituting the specifically evangelical freedom of the Christian man, whereas the Catholic will regard it as an unacceptable variety of situation ethics. The names given to the attitude in question by one side or another do not matter. The Protestant will regard specific norms, in the moral sphere, even in the form in which they appear in scripture, rather as a sort of sign-post pointing out the way to meet and endure the ever new situations of the personal life of faith, with a critical attitude towards oneself and one’s hidden sinfulness. He will mistrust or reject, however, specific moral maxims which, by their universality and eternally permanent character, claim to bind men in every situation without exception, on the sole condition that the universal norm, expressing an essence, is relevant to the particular human being in this or that definite situation, precisely because of the presence there of what the maxim in question designates and applies to. The Protestant will not tend to a state in which he is enabled by grace to fulfill the law from within, to accomplish the law by the spirit of love and in that way to be free of it. He will rather tend to a state in which he is freed from the obligation of the content of the various moral norms and precepts themselves because he can grasp the saving forgiveness of God even as a sinner and while remaining one. The Catholic, on the contrary, will say that there do exist universal moral precepts explicative of an essence, binding in their universality always and everywhere. He will also reject a situation ethics given a Christian interpretation, as being the denial of a genuine philosophy of essential natures and even more as being unbiblical. He will of course recognize an ethics founded on the philosophical analysis of man in his concrete existence, providing it acknowledges calls from God which apply to the individual not merely in a situation presumed each time to be utterly unique, but in a situation to the constitution of which the universal essence also contributes. But he will not admit that the uniqueness of the moral and Christian human being stands outside a structure of specific universal moral principles founded on essences. He will admit and acknowledge that even the sinner can find his way to God through the grace of God. But he will interpret this turning to God as God’s gift, in which God gives man the fundamental capacity and unconditional willingness to fulfill God’s commandments and does not justify him without regard to an at least inchoatively active will to obey the law.
Our intention here is not to settle this controversy on the meaning and function of specific moral precepts as between a Catholic universal ethics based on essential natures and a situation ethics given a Protestant interpretation. Too many questions would be involved. There would, of course, be preliminary questions, for example the ontological and epistemological question of the relation between universal and individual. There would be questions of biblical theology about the nature of Christian freedom, the relation between law and Gospel, the meaning of the law for those justified by faith. There would be questions of systematic theology, for example those concerning the nature of justification, the validity, and knowledge, of the natural law within Christian morality, the possibility and recognition of an individual call coming directly from God to the conscience in a concrete situation, and the question of the relation of such: a call to universal moral principles, as well as many other questions with which the ecumenical dialogue will have to concern itself.
As we said at the beginning, we must pass over this whole knot of fundamental theoretical questions and direct our attention to changes in the concrete situation which affect every kind of Christian morality. They do not, of course, reduce the above-mentioned controversy to insignificance but considerably lessen its importance in practice. What I have in mind is this. The real situation in which the Christian of today has to make his moral decisions is in any case such that in very many and very important instances, the decision can no longer be the simple and obvious application of the principles concerning essences, even if he respects these as absolutely and universally valid. Even on this basis the Catholic nowadays is himself very often, and in the most important questions, in a situation which in practice resembles the one assumed to be always and necessarily present by those who advocate a Christian situation ethics.
Of course Catholic moral theology has always known that there are concrete moral situations in which the application of universal principles leads to no certain, generally accepted and theoretically unambiguous results. This is shown by its treatises on casuistry, its many Quaestiones disputatae and the principles it has elaborated for the indirect solution of cases of conscience by Probabilism etc. Moreover, it is aware that there are also many disputed theoretical questions and opinions, so that not even all general maxims meet with agreement from all moral theologians. This simple fact shows that for Catholic moral theology it cannot cause any difficulty in principle to assert that there are cases of moral decision in which moral theology based on universal essences, and therefore the Church’s magisterium, are not in a position to offer the Christian unmistakable precepts in the concrete case. Whether such instances are more or less frequent at any particular place or time makes no difference to the fact, which is taken so much as a matter of course, that traditional moral theology is scarcely really aware of the problem of principle which is in fact raised by it.
What is decisive in the present connection, however, is that the number of such cases has increased in a way that we might almost say involved a change of kind. As a result, the scope for freedom and responsibility which the moral principles of the Church and of Catholic moral theology, based on essences, must concede to the moral conscience of the individual (even if they did not in fact wish to do so) has become considerably greater. Even for the Catholic the road from the general principles of Christian ethics to concrete decision has become considerably longer than formerly, even when he is determined unconditionally to respect all those principles, and for a good part of the way, in the last decisive stages of the formation of the concrete moral imperative, he is therefore inevitably left by the Church’s teaching and pastoral authority more than formerly to his own conscience, to form the concrete decision independently on his own responsibility. The confessional in particular will therefore be concerned more than formerly with fundamental formation of the conscience, which will then be committed to its own responsibility for the actual decision. It will not be so much a source of information about what here and now is the only correct and legitimate course of action. When here and there in draft decrees of the Council stress was laid on this role of conscience as irreplaceable even in practice, anxious voices could be heard in the aula, pointing out in alarm that in earlier days the Church used to lay down clear and unmistakable norms, whereas now even at the Council appeal was being made to the individual conscience, so running the risk of slipping down into an arbitrary, subjective situation ethics. Those who gave these anxious warnings obviously could not see that today, even if all genuinely universal principles are preserved and observed, the scope for the solitary conscientious decision has inevitably become greater. They did not realize that this fact cannot be met by attempting an even subtler casuistry, which after all would only supply more complicated general norms, but only by forming the conscience. Then the expansion of the field of personal responsibility will be met by a growth of stronger Christian readiness to assume responsibility and greater moral earnestness, even, and especially, where the conscience can receive from the Church and the written Gospel no immediately applicable prescription for the concrete decision.
What is the origin of this extension of the field of freedom and responsibility left to the conscience of the individual ? The world in which we live, as history has made it. The world in which and in regard to which moral decisions have to be arrived at is no longer a world which remains unchanged during the short lifetime of the individual, but a world in movement planned and made by men. Formerly the facts were there by the nature of things, solid and manageable, and, simply as facts, were the expression of a divine order and therefore in themselves presented no moral problem. And what had to be done in their regard, how men were to act in them in order to do justice to them as constituting a moral situation, had already been practised and repeated innumerable times and its correctness tested, with the exception of a few rare cases of small consequence. People could deliberate whether or not they wanted to obey the norms which had already taken concrete form in fixed custom, but did not need in general to inquire what the immediately relevant maxims themselves were. The way from principle to imperative was mostly very short and clear. Today the world, the environment and the human milieu which the individual finds himself confronted with, has become fluid, because it is planned and made by man himself. Man is changing himself, his environment, his social milieu; he can manipulate himself; he can, and indeed must, think of birth-control; he can, and indeed must, shape by active planning, social orders of greater complexity. Way of life, profession, forms of recreation, possibilities of education are no longer in most cases inescapable facts determined by social and economic conditions, but have been transformed into questions and problems requiring moral decision. The society which dominates the individual is in a certain sense more powerful than ever, yet at the same time it permits domains of decision, and of private life without restriction, which formerly were not available to men. Thus, for example, human beings today are no longer supported, as regards the stability of marriage, by social and economic conditions, but must themselves maintain its stability by their own free decision. New and exacting matters of the greatest complexity, mobility and incalculability in their remote consequences for moral decision have come into existence for men with the management of technology and automation, the direction of human beings by mass-media, the planning of international relations, the adventure of space travel etc. There are not available for any of these things directly and immediately applicable principles of a kind which could serve at once as clear practical prescriptions. The way from general norm to clear concrete prescription has become long and difficult to discern. The official Church can and must of course see how it can cope with this unwieldy world. To the best of its ability the Church will seek for relevant Christian principles but will need time, and it would be pointless to resent this. The Church will endeavour to convey to men more clearly than ever before the great fundamental Christian motives. But as it does so, the Church cannot overlook the fact that the road from universal principle to concrete prescription is even longer than it ever was, and that in practice the Church, by official teaching and guidance, can accompany the individual to the end of this road much less often than formerly. Instead, however, and as the best substitute, the Church would need to give the individual Christian three things: a more living ardour of Christian inspiration as a basis of individual life; an absolute conviction that the moral responsibility of the individual is not at an end because he does not come in conflict with any concrete instruction of the official Church; an initiation into the holy art of finding the concrete prescription for his own decision in the personal call of God, in other words, the logic of concrete particular decision which of course does justice to universal regulative principles but cannot wholly be deduced from them solely by explicit casuistry.
With this new situation, Catholics and Protestants approach one another very considerably. The latter in fact are always inclined by their historical origins to protest against legalism and an over-simplified fixing of the content of direct norms of action, whereas the former defend the validity of general moral principles with specific content always and everywhere. The new situation does not of course simply put an end to the dispute over theory. But this becomes milder, first of all in practice, for the simple reason that now both parties are clearly faced with the same historical task. They have both to answer the question how the individual Christian in the concrete is to be equipped with the insight and strength which he needs to withstand a situation which sets him a moral problem but the correct solution of which can no longer in fact so directly be supplied him by the official Church. It may be noted in passing that the Protestant position described at the beginning has not ipso facto been proved correct. For the question which now urgently confronts all could, of course, even now receive two theoretically different solutions. Since only one could be correct, dispute would remain as to which it is. It is also possible that difficulties are now emerging from the present situation for the Protestant answer which were not previously noticed. Life in the concrete was then so simple and sociologically fixed that on the whole it imposed the objectively correct actions, even if the theory perhaps had its defects which were not noticed in practice. If, however, the Catholic now sees that despite, and in addition to, his ethics based on essential natures, he must develop an individual ethics of concrete moral decision which goes beyond mere casuistry, and if the Protestant ethical theorist perhaps realizes that in the new and dangerous situation he must perhaps be less carefree in simply leaving the Christian to his "conscience", then perhaps the new situation will bring about a new climate in which, even theoretically, people will be compelled more readily to think towards one another rather than away from one another, and in which people will understand one another more easily and even gradually unite.
I do not know whether the example was well chosen and illuminating. But it seems to me that in ecumenical discussion we ought to pay less heed to historical theological traditions and more to the real intellectual situation and its stress which is common to both sides at the present day. We ought to think ahead and sense the questions and their urgency, which the age and our non-Christian contemporaries set us both. This age, however (to keep to the example we have chosen), will not be content solely with a Catholic universal ethics of essence which in itself does not touch the moral difficulties of the present time, nor with a purely Protestant situation ethics which is always in danger of degenerating into an empty formal ethics of mere subjectivity of an existentialist kind. Probably the same holds good of many other questions with which the ecumenical dialogue is concerned.
There is no doubt that the Second Vatican Council, its proceedings and debates, the differences of opinion that became apparent, the press reports that retailed and exaggerated them, the existence of tendencies and parties thus reveals, the struggle for decisions this way and that the alterations in liturgy and law decided upon -- all these experiences caused profound astonishment, disquiet and consternation in many Catholic circles, even to a considerable extent among the clergy. The remark, falsely attributed to a conservative cardinal, that he would like to die a Catholic, is merely a slight, odd symptom. Other Catholics greeted the Council and its work enthusiastically as the long-awaited and already really overdue apertura, throwing open the Church’s windows to let in some fresh air, and as a rebuilding of the old fortress with its narrow loopholes into a house, equally strong but with broad glass walls and the world shining in through them, and at most thought the tempo and results still too modest. But the first had an inescapable impression of profound alarm.
Their previous experience had shown them the Church as an unshakeable tower in the seething waves of time -- stat crux dum volvitur orbis -- as the only authority with the courage to hold unalterable principles, as the herald of eternal granite-firm dogma, of enduring natural law, of venerable tradition unquestioningly accepted and lived, of clear-cut Yes and No, of plain principles which are always known from the start and only need fearlessly to be put into practice, whether the world approves or not. To them precisely the unshakable immutability of the Church’s doctrine and life seemed a decisive characteristic of the Catholic Church in contrast both to other Christian denominations and to the spirit of the age generally. And now they have the impression that people are discussing anything and everything, questioning everything, that everything is collapsing, that their own perhaps hard-earned and dearly-bought rigid adherence to the doctrine, and above all the traditional practice, of the Church even to the slightest concrete detail of the style of religious and secular life, is disavowed and almost despised by the Church and its leading representatives. The bitter feeling of being left in the lurch by the Church, of standing as an object of reproach before the eyes of the world of non-Catholics "who always knew it", temptations against faith, mistrust of the reliability and trustworthiness of ecclesiastical authorities, such are the consequences of "Council experiences" of this kind which in fact -- there is no doubt about this -- have rightly or wrongly been undergone by many Catholics.
It is not necessary to illustrate this situation here at the beginning of our reflections with particular examples of the questions or proceedings which gave rise to disquiet, since we shall have to go into the matter, as far as is necessary and possible, when forming a judgment on it.
The situation in question should be clear enough already. It is the state of those who ecclesiastically are conservative in face of the experience of profound changes in the Church. And in this context the word "conservative" means in principle something quite positive, for it also includes the courage to affirm continuity, clear principles, detachment from ephemeral fashions, fidelity to the Word of God which endures for ever, respect for tradition, for what has organically developed, for the wisdom and experience of our ancestors.
What is to be said of this state of affairs? What has the Council taught, decided, done in this respect, and what has it not taught, decided, done? What is to be said regarding mutability and immutability in the Church’s doctrine and in Christian morals and life? That is the question with which we shall be concerned here. We are not concerned with the manifold changes in the Church which form the main theme of Church history, in other words changes which are simply imposed on the Church as an inevitable consequence of the Church’s insertion in a total pattern of historically operative forces (State, civilization etc.). We are concerned with the change which the Church itself actively undertakes in its law and doctrine, and in which the Church changes itself, and is not merely subjected to change, though of course both sets of changes mutually affect one another.
In order to make some advance in the obscurity and complexity of the question, and to provide a guiding line for our reflections, a distinction must first be drawn, even though we cannot but realize that the two poles of the distinction are linked by manifold connections of the most complicated kind. We refer to the distinction between ecclesiastically binding and, in the strictest case, dogmatically defined teaching of the Church on the one hand, and Church law and the actual living practice of the Church on the other. Let us assume for the moment this distinction as valid and important and its meaning as understood. It will follow as a matter of course from what we are about to say, and will be seen to be necessary and profoundly justified.
Changes in the law of the Church
That distinction being presupposed, let us first ask what is to be said on the question of mutability or immutability of canon law and the Catholic style of life bound up with it, if we may so describe all the practices, rules, modes of behaviour in a Catholic’s church life and his secular life lived on Christian lines, which hold good or previously held good through education, church precept etc. On occasion these go beyond the strict rules of law, but to a certain extent constitute their expression in everyday concrete terms, their practical realization. What we mean by canon law in relation to the present problem is plain, but merely for the sake of clarity, and making an arbitrary choice, I list a few examples without system or order of importance: Friday abstinence, the law of fasting, the rules for the eucharistic fast, the law regarding the form of contracting marriage which alone is valid in normal circumstances for the Catholic, his duty of yearly confession and Easter Communion, the precept of burying the dead in the earth, the prohibition in certain circumstances from joining certain political parties, the rules of the Index of prohibited books, the regulations concerning church collections (cf. the Church tax in Germany), ecclesiastical procedure in matrimonial causes etc. There are very many laws of that kind and they deeply affect the life of the layman.
What is to be said of them in relation to the mutability and immutability of the Church?
In the first place, the difference and the connection between divine law and positive Church law must be considered. The first is unchangeable, either because it is law which flows from the absolutely immutable nature of God and man, or because it is law which promulgates God’s revelation as the divine will for the whole Christian era of grace and Church. Positive Church law is in principle subject to alteration and has to be changed by the Church if a new historical situation requires this. Perhaps this difference has not always been very clear to the average Christian without special theological formation, but it has always been clear to the theologian, and consequently the Christian need not be surprised that it plays a part in the Church’s practice. It is of course impossible here to demonstrate with full grounds the fact that such and such a provision of canon law belongs to immutable divine law, whereas others belong merely to mutable Church law.
The general principle is, however, easy to grasp. Examples of one or other of the two kinds of divine and unchangeable law would be, that a marriage between brother and sister is now invalid independently of the will of the Church; that a validly consummated marriage between baptized persons is indissoluble and that the Church has no power to alter the fact; that the Church cannot abolish the fact that there are seven sacraments, nor alter the ultimate features of the Church’s own constitution. No bishop at the Council ever called that in question. In a particular individual case it may be doubtful whether a concrete norm belongs to unchangeable divine law or to changeable human law; for example, whether, "in itself", apart from the Church’s law, it would be possible, after the death of his father, for a step-son to marry his father’s second wife. But that makes no difference to the principle. There is immutable divine law in the Church and the Church in its clear unclouded awareness of the faith has always been conscious of the fact in regard to such fundamental laws as a whole. And it would be simply faulty theological formation, and rashness, if a Christian were to assert that because the Church can change or has changed a mutable positive Church law, it is also in a position, or obliged, to alter a law which it knows is divine and unchangeable, simply because it has a certain material affinity with mutable canon law. Though the Church can, for example, abolish certain existing prohibiting impediments to marriage, of purely ecclesiastical law, if it considers this advisable in the changed situation of today, it by no means follows that it would be equally possible for the Church to revalidate and sanction any invalid marriage whatever, if the Church were only rather more liberal and understanding.
But there is also mutable positive ecclesiastical law. It probably in fact constitutes quantitatively the greater part of the rules of law binding on a Catholic. We cannot of course go more closely here into the question why the Church has the right and duty, not only to promulgate and inculcate the precepts of immutable divine law and to supervise its observance, but on its own initiative to go beyond this and lay down positive legal prescriptions, and impose obedience to them as a Christian’s duty, although they are enacted with full consciousness that they are not necessarily eternally valid but can be changed and even abolished. On this point we will only remark that Christ gave his Church such a plenary power and duty because without it a common life in the Church and concrete pastoral care by the Church for the salvation of the individual would be quite impossible. And it should at once be noted also that as long as such a Church law is in existence, the character of its obligation, the possibility of being excused or dispensed from it, the possibility of discussing its expediency or the need to change it, the possibility of knowing oneself not bound by it in a particular concrete case etc., are of quite a different kind from any case in which an immutable divine commandment is involved. At all events there are such changeable ecclesiastical laws; the Church’s theology was always aware of it and has always successfully endeavoured to draw a clear distinction between divine laws and Church laws and to keep it clearly in mind. That normally a Catholic’s marriage has to be contracted in the presence of the priest if it is to be valid, that cremation is not usually permitted, that Communion must ordinarily be received fasting, that in a mixed marriage the non-Catholic partner too must promise that the children will be brought up as Catholics, that in the case of serious sin the sacrament of penance must be received within the year, that we must assist at Mass every Sunday, that without special permission it is forbidden to read a book on the Index, even when there is no danger to one’s own faith or morals, that flesh meat may not be eaten on Fridays, that it is not permitted without special dispensation to contract marriage with a non-baptized person or with a relative within the third degree etc. --all these are, or were, not only precepts differing greatly in importance and therefore entailing very different degrees of obligation, very different possibilities of exemption and dispensation, but they all belong to positive ecclesiastical law and, as such, are susceptible of change. The Church was always clear about that. It makes no difference if some individual Christian does not know it, but regards such precepts as immutable principles of his life and then is surprised when the Church makes changes in them.
If the Church alters laws of that kind and to that extent itself changes, it does so only within the immutability of a fundamental principle, namely, that the Church has the right and duty to make changeable regulations for the spiritual good of its members. Of course the Church does not enact and alter such changing laws arbitrarily and capriciously. Moreover, the justification, expediency or inopportuneness of such change is very different from law to law. The Church ought, for example, long ago to have abolished genuflection before the Blessed Sacrament in Japan in favour of a deep bow, in deference to Japanese feelings, or to have ceased using spittle at baptism, as has now been done. But the Church is scarcely likely to abolish the obligation of confession within the year in the case of grave sin, even though this obligation only dates from 1215, for positive Church enactments of that kind, for all their alterability in principle are, after all, ultimately the concrete embodiment of the changeless precepts of the Gospel, determinate ways of carrying them out, means of making them clear. Church laws on the plane of positive human law very definitely stand in closer or remoter relation to the precepts of divine law. Consequently the possibility and tempo of their alteration are rightly different.
Change of that kind, however legitimate, and however much it was allowed for from the start in the Church’s legislation, can of course lead to unrest and uncertainty in the practice of Church life, especially among the laity. Behind even a law of the Church there stands the holy authority of God, to the extent that he empowered the Church to make laws. But it validates such laws quite differently from the commandments of God which follow directly and imperatively from the essence of the natural or supernatural realities created by God himself, and which therefore were posited by the very fact of God’s directly positing those realities. But in the average practice of life, the Christian is often not clearly conscious of this radical distinction. He therefore reacts to an alteration in such Church precepts almost as if God or the enduring nature of the Church had altered, and as if, as a consequence, neither of them were to be trusted any more. He becomes uncertain. He can be very disillusioned if he has observed such a law (that of burial of the dead in the earth, for example), perhaps at the cost of considerable moral efforts and personal sacrifices, and now suddenly has to see that things -- if we may so express it -- are all at once much easier. The only help here is patience and understanding of the fact that even the Church necessarily and in accordance with its duty has to bow to the law of history by which what was good yesterday is not good today. New epochs, the emergence and character of which are not under the Church’s control, require from the Church action different from that of the past.
Such adaptations are necessary. They cannot simply always be left to the various individual and smaller units of the Church. Yet it may be that an alteration that has to be imposed universally, is urgently needed or even overdue in one place, but in another is less necessary and may even lead to disturbing or destroying still useful and well-tried institutions belonging to a traditional manner of life. Evening Mass, for example, can be an imperative requirement of attentive pastoral care in a large town, whereas in a village it may tend rather to have an adverse influence on piety of a genuinely traditional kind. Yet it may well be that a general regulation has to be laid down. It must not be overlooked either that, even in the Church, human strata coexist chronologically which sociologically, intellectually and culturally belong to quite different epochs. Yet the same law has to be laid down for all. In a new industrial district, for example, only a single church can be built for all, yet it has to be used by people of the most heterogeneous artistic taste, so that to one a crucifix may seem blasphemous which others find a most genuine expression of their religious feelings.
In earlier periods of the Church such changes in canon law and the style of Christian life could take place so slowly that the individual scarcely noticed them, his own span of life being so short, or at least they did not come as a shock to him. Nowadays the tempo of all domains of secular history is so accelerated, and the scale of intellectual, cultural and social changes has so increased, that the Church can scarcely fulfill its obligation to meet the demands of every age in any other way than by hastening and increasing the tempo and scale of its own changes in what can be changed.
When a Council sets itself a task of that kind, it is inevitable that there will be surprises, that what is dear and well-tried will be sacrificed, that experiments will be risked and innovations introduced, the ultimate consequence of which no one can foresee with certainty. In comparison with the breadth and depth of the intellectual, economic, cultural, social changes of today and tomorrow in the secular sphere, however, which also contribute to determine the task of the Church, it must even be said that the Church in its aggiornamento proceeds very slowly and cautiously, so that there is more reason to ask whether it is reacting sufficiently quickly, courageously and confidently to the future which has already begun, than to fear that it is sacrificing too quickly and in too "modernistic" a way what is old and well-tried and has stood the test. Of course such an alteration involves for hierarchy and rank and file an uncomfortable period of transition: the old and well-tried is no longer there; the new has not yet got into its stride, has not yet become something that is taken for granted without discussion; the intellectual and religious attitudes necessarily required if the new institutions are to succeed have first slowly to develop. Consequently it may seem as if the old were better than the new. An apparently "laxer" law regarding mixed marriages, for example, can only bear genuine fruit of a positive kind when a personal, religious, responsible mentality has grown up among Catholics in this matter. It may be that the ecumenical attitude and mentality now officially adopted by the Church will lead to a decrease in the number of conversions, at least temporarily, or lead in some cases to indifference in regard to the denominational question. And yet such ecumenism is a sacred imperative of our age.
Such periods of transition have to be endured with patience and courage and without morbid nervousness. It must be calmly realized that every reconstruction, even the most necessary, produces discomfort and raises a lot of dust. It must be soberly realized that no human enactment, whether old or new, has advantages only and no disadvantages; that the old days were good only for those who enjoyed the benefits of them, but not for all without distinction and that for the most part they only begin to look splendid when they are past and gone; that even the new age will produce tribulation, inadequacies and defects, and that the reform of the Church is never at an end. Nor is it the case that every well-meant alteration in the human law of the Church or in its para-canonical mode of life (which is often even more important than canon law itself) necessarily achieves the sole correct solution by the mere fact that it is well-considered and well-meant. It is still possible to remain divided in opinion, for example, about the right age for Confirmation or first Confession, even if the Church has laid down some definite practice with greater or less binding force. In short, anyone who appreciates the rapid change in historical circumstances and does not flee from this into a ghetto; anyone who knows that there is and always has been a mutable, human law of the Church, and that this kind of change has always been practised; anyone, moreover, who reflects that the Church not only has the right but the duty of shaping its canon law in accordance with changes in the times, will not be surprised at the change in many legal regulations which he is living through at the present time, but will recognize and accept this as a sign of the vitality of the Church and its pastoral care. He will recognize in the change itself the immutable which would itself be betrayed by rigid immutability: fidelity to the eternal Gospel and obedience to the Lord of history, which both go to produce the change in the Church’s legislation.
We said at the beginning of our reflections that we must distinguish between ecclesiastically binding (and in the strictest case dogmatically defined) doctrine on the one hand, and canon law and the living practice of the Church on the other. We also stressed that despite this necessary distinction, there are close relations between the two. This affirmation can now be grasped more precisely. To the extent that in canon law there are maxims which belong to divine, immutable law and derive from the essence of natural or supernatural realities, they also belong to the Church’s doctrine of faith, to its dogma. Consequently what will have to be said in a moment regarding the mutability and immutability of the Church’s doctrine of faith applies to them. Yet to the extent that canon law contains mutable human positive law enacted by the Church itself, it forms an object in itself distinct even materially from the Church’s doctrine, and which as such is not directly the object of the Church’s teaching authority and of faith, but of the Church’s jurisdiction, of obedience, of considerations of expediency etc. It follows that the principles of change and permanence for this kind of ecclesiastical law are different from those which govern the Church’s doctrine of faith.
The mutable element in the doctrine of faith
This brings us to the question of change and immutability in the Church’s doctrine. In this connection it must be clearly realized from the start that the belief of the Church, the object of its teaching office, contains both statements about divine realities such as the blessed Trinity, the Incarnation of the Logos, grace, redemption etc., and equally clear and equally obligatory statements about man’s correct moral principles. "Murder is a sin" is just as much a proposition of faith as "there are three persons in God". It must not be overlooked that the most disturbing question regarding the immutability of the Church’s doctrine of faith has been raised very recently by a real or supposed change in the Church’s moral teaching, in moral theology, especially in regard to sexuality. What is to be said of the immutability and mutability of the Church’s doctrine?
In the first place it can be taken as axiomatic in the Catholic view of faith that where the Church’s magisterium has once unambiguously required at any time an absolute, ultimate and unconditional assent of faith to a definite doctrine as revealed by God, the doctrine in question is no longer subject to revision and is irrevocable. This is so even if previously, in earlier times, it had not been taught with the same absolute requirement of belief. It may even have been controverted, though this does not of course mean that the Church ever taught the contrary as absolutely binding. Such a dogma of the Church is truly unchangeable, i.e., it can never cease, even by an act of the Church, to be binding on the conscience of the Catholic. Only journalists very badly instructed in theology could therefore suppose that Vatican II might cancel the doctrine defined by Vatican I regarding the papal primacy of jurisdiction and teaching authority, or out of ecumenical spirit and desire to please, might revoke the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nothing of the kind ever entered the head of a single bishop at Vatican II, even among the most progressive. There was never a discussion in the Theological Commission or in the full assembly of the Council which implied any such supposition. But the immutability of the Church’s dogma does not exclude, on the contrary it implies, that there is a history of dogmas. Such a history does not only exist because a very great deal of time and theological development and clarification was needed in some cases before the Church’s awareness of its belief had finally fought its way to a clear realization that such and such a definite doctrine of the Church is really contained in divine revelation, is a genuine expression of what has always been globally believed or an obligatory defence against heretical misinterpretation of what has been handed down.
There is a legitimate history of dogma also where a dogma is already unmistakably present and expressed. For even the meaning of a dogma of this kind can be thought out still further, more profoundly clarified; freed from misunderstandings which spontaneously accompany it and which earlier times cannot have been conscious of; brought into more explicit connection with other truths of faith. And by all this the meaning and limits, scope and significance of the dogma become clearer. It can be expressed in new formulations which the spirit of a new age suggests and which place it in quite different perspectives which make it intellectually more assimilable to men of a new age. In ecumenical discussion with non-Catholics it can be expressed in a new way so that these Christians may more readily recognize its compatibility with those Christian truths which they hold as the core of their own position as Christians.
In these and other respects even the Church’s unchangeable dogma can have a history and can change even in spite of its immutability. It cannot change back, it cannot be abolished (like a positive ecclesiastical law). But it can change forwards in the direction of the fullness of its own meaning and unity with the one faith in its totality and its ultimate grounds. In that case it resembles a man who remains true to himself and his nature and the law according to which he has first begun, who becomes identified more and more completely with his origin, expresses his enduring nature more and more, and in that way changes and yet remains precisely the same man. There is no doubt that in this sense there was a development of dogma at the Second Vatican Council. But no old dogma was abrogated or even obscured. Undoubtedly a certain insight was promoted in regard to such questions as how the papal primacy and the episcopacy founded by Christ can exist and work together in the Church, how the necessity of the Church for salvation is compatible with the possibility of salvation of a human being who does not belong to it, how in the realm of grace each of the regenerate can depend on every other and so above all on Mary, while there is nevertheless only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. Development of dogma took place in these matters without prejudice to existing dogma.
Of course this can involve quite considerable changes in the individual’s understanding of the faith. Anyone who previously had unthinkingly understood the dogma of the primacy of the pope as meaning that the bishops were only subordinate, provincial papal officials, was given a fundamental lesson by Vatican II. But his previous conception of the dogma of the primacy was a misunderstanding, not a dogma that had to be annulled. Naturally such a change can also have incalculable ecumenical importance because even Catholic theology cannot foresee all that is still possible in this sense and in this direction. Otherwise this part of the history of dogma would already be over. And no one should say beforehand that future change of this kind (the validity of existing Catholic dogma remaining unaltered) would not be sufficient to restore unity of belief among all Christians. For such change within the unchanging identity of the one enduring dogma can be very extensive indeed. It can exhibit the "old" dogma from quite a different angle, and profoundly alter the concrete form in which it appears in the thought and especially in the life of the Church. We profess, for example, the dogma of original sin to this day, with Augustine; it was defined as a dogma in his time. Yet what an alteration this enduring dogma has undergone in regard to its more precise formulation, its more exact theological interpretation, its perspectives, the consequences that are to be drawn from it, the weight it has in religious life. That would have to be demonstrated in detail in order to give those untrained in theology some idea of what development even an actually defined dogma can still undergo, without being abrogated and without its original sense ceasing to be guaranteed. This sort of thing can be seen retrospectively from a later point in history but can at the most be guessed at from an earlier one. God’s truth remains the same, yet it is living and has always a history which will only come to an end in the vision of God. Until then even the enduring, permanently valid truth is only partial, spoken in images and parables, wandering and therefore changing on the pilgrim road of unpredictable history.
For life within the Catholic Church, the stumbling-block as regards change in the Church’s doctrine is not so much the question of defined dogmas as other doctrines of the Church in dogmatic and moral theology which are taught authoritatively but which in principle cannot count as defined doctrines of faith or as irreformable dogma.
Non-defined doctrines
In the first place it should be recalled that there is and must be doctrine of that kind. Even the concrete knowledge of truth which a human being possesses cannot be confronted with the alternative either of affirming a proposition with ultimate unconditional certainty and determination or of abandoning it as absolutely uncertain and without obligation. In their life and reflection, human beings possess various items of knowledge which, though they lack the ultimate degree of clarity, certainty and obligation of a theoretical and moral kind, yet are and must be valid for them, at least until they attain better insight. So it is with the Church. Its teaching is not, of course, the small sum-total of a few isolated, ready-made propositions which simply stand side by side like the ultimate axioms of geometry. Its doctrine expresses the one unfathomable mystery of God, of his presence in Christ, of grace and of the permeation of the immensity of human existence by this absolute communication of God. Such a doctrine is necessarily of incalculable multiplicity. It is always present in its entirety as an unanalysed whole of inexhaustible depth and breadth. At the same time it is involved in the history of the Church’s faith. It possesses in its elements and their interrelations innumerable cross-links, connections, aspects. It presents ever-new facets when in the course of the intellectual history of mankind it is confronted with ever-new human experiences, because it points to the infinite mystery of God as the centre of our own existence.
Such a doctrine cannot be presented with the alternative either of enunciating on all occasions what is absolutely binding or of saying nothing at all. It is not possible to state the propositions of actual dogmas themselves without expounding them, elucidating the terms employed in them, establishing connections, offering aids to their understanding etc. Without all that, which is not itself dogma, the dogmas themselves would be unintelligible and as regards faith no longer assimilable by the hearer. But if that is done by the Church’s magisterium, it can only be through propositions which are not themselves absolute dogma but serious and valid items of knowledge (in varying degrees, of course, and of very many different kinds), but knowledge which in principle is subject to revision and capable of improvement, and which can be deepened, clarified, given greater discrimination, improved in this or that respect, or even abandoned. If such propositions are put forward by the magisterium itself, they require respect and assent from the individual believer. He must regard them as the at present available and binding ways of access, as elucidation, as props to understanding the dogma of the Church relating to salvation. He can and must do so, even if he is neither entitled nor obliged to give the same kind and degree of assent to such doctrine as to actual dogmas, because genuine internal assent and the irrevocable assent of faith are not the same thing.
Such propositions of the Church’s magisterium and of theology (derived from the former or preparing them) exist above all in the sphere of moral theology. For here it is a matter of the application of the ultimate fundamental attitudes and doctrines of the Gospel to the unimaginable multiplicity of situations in human life which, moreover, are involved in a perpetual historical flux and change. What is to be done when money slowly comes to represent productive goods, which was not always the case? Is interest then allowed, which it was not before ? What morally is to be done when nuclear weapons are invented ? What is morally permissible when technical physiological possibilities of birth control appear which did not exist previously? How is the danger of a possible over-population to be avoided, something which in former times was quite outside men’s field of vision? How can the legal and social position of women in public life and in the Church be rightly assured as God wills it, in circumstances which 200 years ago were quite unthinkable? To such questions and many others the answer cannot simply be drawn ready-made and plain from the Gospel or from traditional teaching, because it is just not already contained there in that way and cannot be. On the other hand the Church cannot in all cases leave the individual human being to seek the answer on his own account and at his own risk. The Church in many cases (I do not say in all) must first find such an answer. The Church has to seek an answer and that requires a development, a history of reflection, time.
At such a time obscurities, oscillations, essays, a certain onesidedness, are unavoidable. That is easily observed for example in the period of transition from a feudal authoritative state and a society with a closed mental outlook, to a democratic, pluralist social order. From Gregory XVI to the Declaration of Vatican II on toleration, the Church traveled a long way before it could formulate its position in regard to modern society in a many-sided and to some extent mature form. That long process was needed because the reality to which the Church had to adopt an attitude was itself in movement and still is. It would be childish and unjust to think, on account of the historical character of its doctrine in such questions, that the Church says one thing one day and the opposite the next. Even where the Church is still only on the way with its own doctrine, it draws its formulas each time out of its own enduring basic convictions, which always recognizably and unchangeably shine through the attitudes and concrete formulations, which at first sight by their merely literal tenor appear different or contradictory. When, for example, at first in the 19th century down to Pius XII the Church adopted a very reserved attitude to any inclusion of the human bios in the idea of evolution, that was motivated, and rightly so, by a fundamental conception of the nature of man which for good reasons required to be defended. That fundamental view is still that of the Church now, but it has been recognized that the previous reserve can be abandoned. To affirm that in this way a necessary, unavoidable, historical process of development on a large scale in the doctrines which are not defined dogma is legitimate and a matter of course, is not to say that this history does not also contain mistakes, over-hasty (though only provisional and revocable) decisions, cases of short-sightedness and lack of understanding. Such things can and will happen. They too belong to the Church’s figure as a servant and a pilgrim, which must be patiently borne by its members.
There exists, therefore, and must exist, a teaching of the Church which possesses an importance and binding force for the faith and moral conscience of the individual Catholic, although in what it directly states it cannot and does not intend to make any claim to the absolute assent of faith, and although it is not irreformable but is still involved in the elucidatory development of the Church’s consciousness of its belief. Even what in itself is mutable can be binding on us if in the Church’s judgment it is here and now the safest, what presents least danger of coming into conflict with the unchanging spirit of the Gospel. Conversely, what is now really binding need not necessarily on that account be absolutely immutable and definitive. A mother, for example, who has to support her children and is faced with an operation which in the considered opinion of all the specialists is necessary, has the absolute moral duty of permitting the operation although she knows that the doctors’ judgment may be wrong and is subject to revision, and is therefore not itself unconditional. The Christian must normally adopt an analogous attitude in theory and practice in regard to teachings and moral precepts of the Church which are put forward authoritatively by the Church, even if not as irrevocable dogma. Otherwise in theory or in practice he would be acting irresponsibly, and unjustifiably hazarding his conviction as a believer or his subjective morality. Normally in such cases he can only change with the Church’s whole consciousness of its belief, if such a change really takes place in respect of a more precise discernment of the fundamental moral guiding principles or of certain applications of these to new situations.
As such advance in the Church’s knowledge must be made in the first place by individuals, in the minds of individuals, the case is of course conceivable that someone, even while exercising due self-critical caution about his own possible shortsightedness and the opacity of his own judgment, may, after thorough evaluation of the grounds for the attitude of the Church’s magisterium at the moment, and after serious examination of his conscience before God and in view of his eventual responsibility before the judgment-seat of the incorruptible God, come to the conclusion that in this or that individual case a doctrine of the Church which has not been defined as a dogma and is therefore in itself a reformable doctrine of the Church, is in fact in certain details in need of reform. Then in the circumstances we have presupposed, he is also justified in his private judgment and in his private practice in diverging even now from this reformable teaching of the Church’s magisterium. That does not mean that such a case often happens in the concrete. But Catholic theology frankly admits in principle such a possibility, which follows from the temporal, historical character of the non-defined doctrine of the Church. Twenty years before Pius XII’s pronouncement, a scientist and theologian who was thoroughly conversant with paleontology could in certain circumstances have formed conscientiously as regards his faith a judgment that an evolutionary theory of man is compatible with the dogmatic doctrine of man, even though at that time the Church’s magisterium still prevented within Catholic theology, by use of the Index, the affirmation of such compatibility. Such cases are also possible in the domain of moral theology.
Naturally it cannot be the task of these general reflections about principles to discuss here such concrete instances of moral theology and to verify in detail whether and why there is concrete need of reform in regard to this or that doctrinal pronouncement of the Church on moral theology in the last few decades. Such a task would have to be the theme of new reflections of its own. Finally, it must be observed that it is not easy and simple in every case to indicate whether some particular teaching of the ordinary magisterium is already a dogma or merely authentic but in itself reformable teaching. This difficulty, which ultimately can only be settled by the solemn declaration of the extraordinary magisterium in a definition pronounced by the Pope or a General Council, makes the practical application of the principles referred to even more difficult.
Development in the direction of leaving matters open
Another observation may be made in reference to "change", whether of doctrine or of law. It is possible, and in fact it already clearly seems probable, that the teaching Church in many moral questions which concern the concrete applications of first principles, will leave the Christian of today and tomorrow more to himself than was formerly the case, and must leave him to his conscience, his own power of moral discrimination. Not that the Church will be cowardly or more "cautious" or would not acknowledge in principle its own full authority to lay down specific moral norms. But because the situations of concrete human existence, in contradistinction to the simpler structures of human living conditions in earlier times, are so innumerable and complex, the "cases" are becoming so different, that a uniform regulation of an authoritative, direct and concrete kind will in many respects no longer be possible, even though a decision in such a situation is still morally relevant.
Just as earlier the official Church could not and would not give any authoritative answer to someone about their choice of a profession, even though it could be a moral question of importance for salvation, so today and tomorrow the Church in many questions, even those of public interest and far-reaching importance, will not, even ratione peccati, be able to give a specific answer officially and directly. May nuclear weapons be manufactured ? What moral obligation in the concrete binds some nations to give aid to developing countries ? How in the world as a whole and in the individual family is birth control to take place? (This remains an obscure question even on the assumption of all the Church’s existing or future pronouncements.) How precisely is a genuine relation to be attained in society between authority and freedom? On questions of this kind and innumerable others, instruction on the part of the official Church is undoubtedly more likely to be more sparing in the future than in former times, although the questions, even in concrete terms, are moral ones.
Something similar can occur in the future even in regard to dogmatic questions in the narrower sense. The differentiation of the philosophical and conceptual presuppositions of theological statements is perpetually increasing, and consequently the general intelligibility of such presuppositions and the description of individual positions with the help of a ready-made terminology continually decreases. The questions of a doctrinal and historical kind which are raised become more and more complicated and more difficult of access for a simple, universally intelligible official statement of the Church. Quite recent examples are well-known. The most recent declarations of the Biblical Commission or of the Second Vatican Council on modern exegetical problems may be welcome indications and useful broad delimitations of frontiers. But the possibility of expressing them "officially", in a generally intelligible and binding form, has been paid for by a caution and generality which may give the impression that the actual concrete problems are not really "solved" by them.
On that basis it is conceivable that genuine "progress" in dogmatic development in the future will move, not so much in the direction of a wider, more exact unfolding and precise definition of traditional dogma, but simply in that of a more living, radical grasp and statement of the ultimate fundamental dogmas themselves. A unified, universally valid statement of this kind could be accompanied by quite a number of theologies juxtaposed in a pluralist way, not contradicting each other of course, but not susceptible of being positively incorporated into a higher synthesis. In short, it is conceivable that the "change" in the Church’s teaching on dogma and morals may move in the direction of quite considerable "decontrol" and a general tendency to leave questions open. That does not mean leaving people to do what they like, but imposes a greater burden of responsibility on the individual. The same applies to the practice of Christian life and consequently, retroactively, to the importance of canon law in the life of the individual and of society.
There is no doubt that a non-sacred sphere, a secular world, has grown up, which can no longer be so directly and uniformly permeated by universal Christian custom. There is no definite Christian ethos ready-made in the old obvious way with plainly defined guiding lines and patterns of conduct. Similarly, canon law leaves this secular world to its freedom much more than in former times. Here too "change" for the future probably to a large extent will consist in transferring responsibility from direct regulation by the official Church to the individual and his conscience.
Courage to change
In life, law and doctrine, a change is therefore taking place even in the Church. The Church is not a finished, solidly built and furnished house, in which all that changes is the successive generations who live in it. The Church is a living reality which has had a history of its own and still has one. There really is change in the Church, therefore, change which is different in nature and magnitude according to whether it concerns style of life, law, dogma or non-defined but authentic doctrine. Whatever the change, however, one thing endures: the nature of the Church as the presence in social form of God’s grace in Christ, in doctrine, worship and life. The history of what is enduring in the Church is the history of the reality which alone among social realities has God’s promise that it will not lose its identity or die if it descends into the stream of history. The Church is always in the flux of history, not on the motionless bank, but in this movement God’s eternity is present with it, his life, his truth and his fidelity. Consequently the Church has less reason than any other historical reality to fear its historical character. For the current of history does not carry it to the shore of death but to eternal life. The Church can and must, therefore, have the courage to change by adapting the eternal which it possesses ever anew and more and more to its own needs. For it is the Church of a world which has increased the tempo of its history to a gigantic extent; it is the Church which is to bear credible testimony, before that world, to God’s truth, mediate the grace of God to that world, be the sacrament of salvation for that world. In that situation the danger of too slow an advance is greater than the danger of courageous involvement in change. Its dogma is clear and firm and sufficiently explicit, and the wisdom, experience and foresight of its leaders great enough, to meet the dangers of making changes in itself. God addresses to the Church the question whether it has the courage to undertake an apostolic offensive into such a future and consequently the necessary courage to show itself to the world sincerely, in such a form that no one can have the impression that the Church only exists as a mere survival from earlier times because it has not yet had time to die. But even if it has the courage to change, time is needed, and time must be taken. Not too much and not too long, but time nevertheless. For the Church cannot change into something or other at will, arbitrarily, but only into a new presence of its old reality, into the presence and future of its past, of the Gospel, of the grace and truth of God himself.
Consequently the individual Christian himself must bear the courage and patience of the Church. He must rejoice when he sees that the Church is re-thinking the old, abiding Gospel and is not simply repeating monotonously the old, though true and valid, formulas of its understanding of that Gospel. Even if he must abandon what has become dear and familiar to him, he must rejoice if the Church within the framework of divine law changes its human law and adapts itself to the new situation. He should feel that he has a share in responsibility for ensuring that change in the letter does not come to nothing through the rigidity of his own mentality. Of course change of that kind demands sacrifices from the Christian, too. He must give up what has long been dear to him and do what is new and unaccustomed. Especially if he is a priest, or has otherwise received a good and coherent religious formation in youth, he has to go on thinking and not rigidly repeat the formulas he once learnt or simply defend the old positions. He must strive to feel the impact of new questions, to understand the mentality of the human beings who raise these questions out of the distress of their own personal life. He is not entitled to think that everything is perfectly clear already, or that something is false by the very fact that it is new. He can have confidence that even a new solution in the concrete only brings home more vividly the old truth on the basis of which he has always thought and lived, if he has really been thinking and living as a Christian. He must have confidence that even nowadays serious questions are asked and inquiry conscientiously made, and that people who are not entirely satisfied with yesterday’s answers are not always either impertinent people or miscreants who want to obscure what has long been clear. He must really risk mutual discussion with the world, must take for granted that he will not only teach but learn thereby, that the whole truth is always richer and more mysterious than what he has already explicitly grasped, that between the real truth of yesterday, today and tomorrow there exists a deeper hidden agreement than is realized either by insensitive innovators or diehard defenders of the old at any price. He will make the experience that what endures is alive, and the ultimate depth of what is changing is the eternal, that what endures is what has the strength to change. The Church is something enduring of just that kind. We grasp what is enduring in it if we trust to the changes which its own Spirit gives to the Church throughout history by leading it more and more into all truth and into the plenitude of God’s life.
