BOOKS.
CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS.*
IN any circumstances, a new volume by George Tyrrell would gain a multitude of readers, because for many years his latest word about the most absorbing of all problems has been awaited with eagerness by those who ponder religious questions. In this volume we have, alas ! not merely his latest, but his last, words about these tangled and baffling speculations. His own position, and the uncompromising attitude of the Papacy, endowed his more recent utterances with a pathetic interest; and this feeling is now deepened by the sordid and lamentable controversy which was raised over his open grave by the Pontifical authorities. In this most interesting book, edited, we may note, with great care and ability by Miss Petre, there is no vulgar controversy. It does not contain a word of recrimination or complaint. The title, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, gives a clear indication of its aim and scope. The present article is merely an endeavour to explain as simply as possible the contents and method of Father Tyrrell's volume. Its one object is to state his pro- cedure and his point of view; to inform readers what they may expect to find, so that they can judge for themselves. Neither the writer nor the Spectator is to be held responsible for the farther process of agreeing or dissenting.
Father Tyrrell seta before himself with unflinching candour a problem which confronts every serious and thinking person in this twentieth century. "The hope of a synthesis between the essentials of Christianity and the assured results of criticism is very widespread nowadays, and those who share it are commonly called Modernists or Liberals." But, he adds, "religion cannot be the criterion of scientific truth, nor science of religious truth. Each must be criticised by its own principles." It is not, however, so easy to separate the two factors in the problem ; but "in these pages I have asked myself frankly what I should consider the essence of Christi- anity if I were not acquainted with the results of criticism,
• Christianity at the Cross-Roads. By George Tyrrell. Edited, with an Introduction. by Miss M. D. Petre. London Longmans and Co. [be. net.]
and how much of 'criticism I should admit if I cared nothing for Christianity." Such is Father Tyrrell's problem, and it is not confined, let us remember, to professed Liberals or Modernists. It confronts every man who thinks, and it reacts more destructively on those theological conservatives who imagine they can isolate their religion. The results of Father Tyrrell's attempted equation are not "very har- monious," but not "hopelessly irreconcilable." "The discord is much leas than I had expected."
The problem, however, confronts not only individuals, but. Churches; and they are all in the same case, in various degrees. The Roman Church is the most hard-pressed of all. She is at the centre of the battle, because her doctrinal positions are more numerous and daring, and so "offer a wider target to the shafts of criticism." She is so compacted of scholastic logic that she can no longer distinguish between her fundamental and her contingent opinions. "They all stand or fall together, for they are all attached to the one root of ecclesiastical inerrancy." Looser systems might survive amputation. "Rome would bleed to death if she sacrificed her little finger. Finally, this system, in its rigid unity, is tied fast, as none other, to certain fundamental pre- suppositions, which are assailed to-day by a philosophy based on the comparative study of religions, past and present." If Rome die in this battle, "other churches may order their coffins," says Father Tyrrell ; but "what Rome does not see is that it cannot kill Modernism without committing suicide ; that, paradox as it appears, Modernism, while the wound which it inflicts upon Catholicism is mortal, is yet the principle in virtue of which Catholicism lives. For life is movement: and where movement is extinct and excluded, death is near." This penetrating judgment is borrowed from a suggestive paper on Modernism by Mr. Alfred Fawkes. To accept or to reject Modernism would thus appear equally fatal to the Roman Church. But "Catholic Christianity," according to Father Tyrrell, "cannot live much longer on the old lines." Its very ideas and categories must submit to criticism and change; for Modernism cuts at the foundations of all Churches, and the credentials of all documents. We are no longer satisfied with traditional beliefs, personal authority, official opinions, or the definitions of Councils. We insist on probing the mentality and the environment which influenced persons, composed books, moulded institutions, and formulated creeds. All Churches are affected by this searching process. Apologists are forced back to the origins, to the roots and sources of their religion ; and behind Christianity, behind every particular religion, is the older and deeper problem of the religious faculty itself, in all the stages of its manifestation. The early Christian apologists accepted the basis of Judaism without suspecting that there might be a farther analysis which would under- mine their whole position. Both Romanist and Protestant. theologians in the sixteenth century accepted the ecclesiastical and mediaeval basis of Christianity. They aimed only at sifting that superficial tradition so far as documents might be manipulated in their own favour. They never dreamed of trying to get at the facts behind the documents, by estimating the origin and value of the records. But these are precisely the things which modern science demands, without which it will not and cannot believe. The Modernist is a man who is alive to all the bearings of this problem. "By a Modernist," Father Tyrrell writes, "I mean a churchman, of any sort, who believes in the possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truth of modernity."
To such a man the merely ecclesiastical solution is unsatis- fying or impossible. The old orthodoxy, based on the im- mutability and identity of belief, looking backwards to a golden age, appealing to the Fathers, rejecting all novelty as heretical, guarding the "deposit" of the faith, has been utterly exploded by what we know about the growth of dogmas and institutions, by criticism of the Bible and especially of the Gospels, by the science of comparative religion. The new orthodoxy tried to parry the assaults of history by a crude theory of development. It invented a notion of "implicit" belief which might cover all discrepan- cies. According to this theory, there could be no heresy, for every one's " implicit " belief was sound, whatever be might actually hold ; and the Church was only infallible in recover- ing what she bad lost. "Snob a weapon simply murders the
system it would defend." Facts are dead against it. "The present ecclesiastical system is no more to be found in the first century than our present civilisation is." Then came Newman's theory of development. He admitted a develop- ment of institutions and formulas, but not of faith, not of the "idea." His "idea" was a spiritual force, not an intellectual concept nor a dialectical conclusion. His system WU bio- logical and organic, not dialectical or architectural. But "so far, and it is now very far, as the Roman system has been created by scholasticism, it can only be maintained and defended by scholasticism." Newman's weapon was "a two- edged sword." "He did as much for unbelief as for belief."
It is absurd to speak of Newman as a Modernist in any degree," and "equally absurd to speak of him as an Ultra- montane." "If he was not an Ultramonta.ne it is because he was more, and not less, conservative than that a priori school which evolves history out of general ideas, and holds docu- ments in abhorrence." And Mr. Fawkes says, ominously, of Newman: "Though he is not named, there can be no doubt that his teaching is aimed at in propositions 25 and 58 of the Syllabus of 1907." Newman will probably be safe so long as he can be used for a decoy; but time and the inevitable tendency of things are rapidly diminishing his influence as a proselytiser. "The doctrine of development ceased to have any value after the definition of infallibility. It was valuable as leading up to the definition, but afterwards it became an excuse for the introduction of novelties." "All the Fathers of the Church were heretics. St. Paul was a heretic. So was St. Augustine. So was St. Francis. So were Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Newman. But it is a pity that the world should know it." "Let us point to the names of our sons, and not to their works." So says Leo XIII. in the wittiest and cleverest of Mr. Manning's Scenes and Portraits.
But Father Tyrrell's analysis goes deeper than the eccle- siastical controversies with which Newman was eaiefly occupied. "The problem of present-day Catholicism is, not to reconcile itself with that of the earlier centuries, to find in both a common 'idea' of ecclesiasticism, but to find eccle- siasticism of any sort in Jesus Christ as He is given to us by historical criticism." Since the days of Newman's activity, however, New Testament criticism has been busy, and it has established results which have transformed the whole problem. Ecclesiasticism matters much less, or not at all; but Christ matters much more. "The difficulty is, not Catholicism, but Christ and Christianity." Of this criticism and its methods Newman was ignorant; but if on one hand it has been a solvent of much traditional ecclesiasticism, as Newman con- ceived it, on the other hand it has, by reconstructing the historical Christ (i.e., Christ as presented in the earliest records), connected His mentality more closely than ever before with the chief underlying principles of Catholicism. Father Tyrrell sees that the "eschatological view," the notion and immanence of "The Kingdom," is the true key to Christ's mind, principles, and teaching. "Nothing is original in. the righteousness preached by Jesus." "Much, however, is coloured by the immediate expectation of the end and is applicable only to such an emergency." The Kingdom, more- over, is transcendental: its principles and precepts and aspirations are concerned solely with a new world and another life. The modernised and rationalised Jesus of Germanic and Protestant liberal theology has been destroyed, as Father Tyrrell argues, by deeper and sounder criticism. He was only constructed by ignoring the most essential factors in the problem. And the real mentality of Christ has been preserved more fully by Catholicism than by any other form of Christianity. This is a bold conception, and a seeming paradox; but it will not be easy to confute Father Tyrrell's argument He faces, quite boldly and frankly, the difficulties of this position. The world as it is, or even as perfected according to modern theories, cannot satisfy human aspira- tions. In a very striking and moving .passage (pp. 120-21) he shows that our existing society and any conceivable material progress are both insufficient and unsatisfying. He owns candidly that the early Christian conception of the universe, and any literal interpretation of the Apocalyptic ideal, are also impossible to us ; but, he says, the ideal is necessary for us ; the Apocalyptic.notion and imagery may be accepted by us as symbolic, as our expression of the ideal. He warns us of the existing danger which is incurred by a
haH-way position between literalism and symbolism, reminding us that symbols and visions are not necessarily unrealities. Perhaps the weakest link in his chain of argument is where he says, truly, that Christ's "Messianic consciousness was the main determinant of His action and utterance. Of that con- sciousness, we do not know the source, presumably it was derived from some sort of vision or revelation." "Visions in those days were not hallucinations, but revelations of hidden realities." It may be so, of course ; but it may not, and in any ease visions were no monopoly of Jews and Christians. There were the voice of Socrates, the ideas of Plato, and the great deeps of Oriental myeticism.
It is not possible to follow Father Tyrrell through the whole of his volume, or even to indicate all the points which he discusses. Enough may have been said to show that this is a book which must be read, and pondered, and reckoned with. It might be added that England in our time has not produced his equal for depth, breadth, subtlety, honesty, and courage in theological matters. It might be urged, farther, that in this volume, and in Through Scylla and Charybdis, he has shown himself by far the strongest and most convincing apologist whom modern Catholicism has trained. Only the most suspicious and timid Censor could find in him any serious matter to condemn, and the Papal Church may yet be compelled to regret the expulsion of so redoubtable and indispensable an ally.
Perhaps it may be advisable to say a final word about the very dubious term Catholicism. What Catholicism really is no scientific and impartial historian would venture to say. There never has been, in any literal sense, a Catholic Church. Neither has there ever been any institution which embraces all the lawful claimants to Catholicity. In the popular view, Catholicism, or Roman Catholicism, might be defined as Latin mediaevalism compressed into the autocratic moulds of the sixteenth century, and directed by the methods of the Counter-Reformation, i.e., by the Jesuits. In other words, it is a rigid militarism lubricated by unctuous and casuistical opportunists. That, certainly, is not what Father Tyrrell means by his ideal Catholicism. He distinguishes clearly between Catholicism and Papalism, even between the Roman Primacy and the Bureaucracy which exploits it. The Curia, he says, has ousted from influence first the laity, then the priesthood, and now the episcopate, and so is the chief provocative cause of Modernism. The Papacy, so far as one can see, is busily engaged in killing Roman Catholicism; and thus, of necessity, it is committing suicide by emasculating and sterilising the forces on which alone it depends. But all its foes are not within. "The im- pregnable rock upon which we build." says Leo XIII. in Scenes and Portraits, "is simply the impregnable ignorance of the majority." "The principal hope for religion lies in the fact that the lower classes do not think." Well, they do think and know a little more extensively than they did in the ages of faith and of fanaticism, when the Papal theocracy was constructed. But the reign of these Infallibiliste is over, and nothing short of a catastrophe to civilisation can restore them. "Which of the sciences have they not persecuted ? Much more will they persecute that which deals with religion itself, their peculiar field of exploitation." Expressions of the religious idea must change; but "we may be sure that religion, the deepest and most universal exigency of man's nature, will survive." "The spirit of Christ has again and again saved the Church ; for where that spirit is, there is liberty." "Are we not hastening to an impasse—to one of those extremities which are God's opportunities 1"
Such are the final words in Father Tyrrell's book. In the preface he had added this sentence : "With all its accretions and perversions, Catholicism is, for the Modernist, the only authentic Christianity." Let us leave him for the present with this audacious hope, trusting the issue to the future, and abstaining rigorously from all prophecies.
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