O Bonitas! The Carthusian Order

O Bonitas!

O Beata Solitudo!  O Sola Beatitudo!

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~A History of the Somerset Carthusians, 1895

The foundations of the Carthusian Order were laid in the year 1084. St. Bruno and six friends (one priest among them) were the first Carthusians who bound themselves to perpetual silence. The Carthusian monk was originally known as “the Poor of Christ,” and his favorite occupation was/is the copying of books and manuscripts. The first constitutions (Customs of the Grande Chartreuse) were written down 44 years after the founding of the Order.

Silence is to be broken only in the case of the sudden illness of a brother, or of fire, or of any other unexpected danger, and even then only few words are to be used. They eat neither butcher’s meat, poultry, nor game. Their diet consists of fish, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, bread, pastry, fruit, vegetables. They drink water, but never take tea, coffee, or chocolate because such things were unknown to St. Bruno.

St. Bruno and his spiritual descendants did but literally carry out the command “Watch and pray.” And these faithful watchmen were put to the test in England (under Henry VIII); not even the evil pens of Cromwell’s infamous agents of destruction could write a single bad word against their character, though many indeed were the complaints against their conscientious steadfastness. Sebastian Brant said what was as true of the English as of the foreign Charterhouses: Degener nunquam fuit ordo visus Cartusianus. (“The Carthusian Order was never seen degenerate”).

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The Carthusian holiness was scarcely attainable, the stern loneliness of the Carthusian rule hardly endurable … but from king and subject the Order met with reverence. But it may be asked, what was there in the Carthusians to cause [King] Edward I, the chief feature in whose character was not religious devotion, as well as [King] Henry II, to appeal to their prayers, especially when engaging in an arduous venture?

The answer lies in the frequently quoted sentence of St. Bernard, Otiosum non est vacare Deo, sed negotium negotiorum omnium (to be occupied with God is not idleness, but the business of all businesses) for no other monks so fully carried out the sentiment therein expressed. The slightest acquaintance with mediaeval literature suffices to make manifest the extremely personal worship of those times. The Blessed Trinity was indeed a living reality to men then; the language of their devotional writings, deeply reverential as was the spirit that animated it, was as familiar as if addressed to a well-beloved friend, whom, separated from them by some ordinary circumstance, they would see again. In those days, there was an extraordinary earnestness in all that men thought and did, so that they could easily appreciate and reverence the ardent devotion of the Carthusian, who spent himself in an exclusive service to that adored and Divine Friend. The Carthusian life had nothing, humanly speaking, to show for it; but to the believer in prayer it was not waste of time, being indeed one long form of prayer.

But in many cases the adoption of St. Bruno’s habit was an act of love. It was more; it was a supreme act of love, fulfilling an ideal of self-surrender so awful that it is little wonder if the Order, though winning an acknowledgment of its holiness, could win no place in the heart of the nation. The saints while on earth may be beloved; the saints in heaven are only approached through the awe and mystery of heaven, and these monks, it would seem, were already half-way to the far-off country.

Martyrdom is a high sacrifice; but it is a question whether to give up all that makes life worth having be not a higher, for it is a sacrifice of longer agony, a living death. In common with the monks of other Rules, the Carthusian, in taking the irrevocable vows, literally left house, and brethren and sisters, and father and mother (and even, it is to be feared, wife and children occasionally), and lands for Christ’s sake. Yet he [the Carthusian] gave more than they, for to them the chance was still open to distinguish themselves as preachers, and as teachers through the medium of books, and to gain through the medium of their intellectual gifts a power in the world of letters at least; but even this privilege and solace of the ascetic life he [the Carthusian] laid down on the altar of his solitude; preaching was forbidden to the son of St. Bruno, and learning must be for him strictly a means to the spiritual perfection of himself and his brother recluses.

It was in the spirit of the Magdalene, who poured out the precious ointment on the person of her Lord instead of spending the price of it on the poor, that the Carthusians made, without regard to the possible good they might do for their fellow-men, a free-will offering of themselves for the service of God, the supremely Beloved alone. The purpose that they fulfilled was to inculcate a lesson on the world; their mode of teaching it contained exaggerations; but since man ever perceives most clearly what is presented to him in an exaggerated light, exaggeration may have been useful, especially when the tumults of much war and the perpetual din of arms in the strife of might against right so often led him to forget to listen to the voice of righteousness. 

The lesson that they set forth was that God has the first claim above all human beings to the highest love, and that to give that love rightly must entail sacrifice—no new lesson indeed, but that which beyond all other Orders they realized.

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“Sæculi sordes fugit et prophanat

Et suam vitam, nihil ista curat,

Dulce nil Christo sine, nil amœnam .

Cartusiano.

Veste procedit cito nuptuali,

Obviam sponso manibus intentes,

Lampades gestans, oleo decoras,

Cartusianus.”

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He flees the impurities of the secular world,

and does violence to his own life:

he takes no care for this; nothing is sweet without Christ,

nothing pleasant to the Carthusian.

In the wedding-garment the Carthusian quickly

goes forth to meet the Bridegroom,

with outstretched hands bearing

the lamps properly fed with oil.

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**Women, indeed, are utterly refused to be admitted on any pretext within their bounds, knowing that, as instanced in Holy Writ, no wise man, prophet, or judge, not Samson, David, nor Solomon, not even the very first man formed by God, could resist the attraction of a wily woman.

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~The Antiquary, July 1884 (The Rules of the Carthusian Order)

No monastic Order has stamped its individuality on its buildings so completely as the Carthusian. In the case of the foundations of other Orders, it may be difficult, not unfrequently impossible, to determine from the existing remains to which of the various monastic bodies the building belongs. In spite of marked differences of plan and arrangement, on which there will be an opportunity of speaking hereafter, it is not always possible to distinguish a Benedictine foundation from a Cistercian, or Cistercian from a Cluniac, or any of these from a house of the Austin Canons. But a Carthusian house is unmistakable. It never can be taken for anything but what it is.

All the other chief monastic Orders were by principle cœnobitic - the common life was the rule; privacy was not in any way contemplated. … The exact opposite of this form of religious life was that of the hermit, or solitary, occupying his single cell, apart from other human habitations, cultivating his own small patch of ground alone and unassisted, often with his separate small chapel or oratory for his daily devotions.

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The Carthusian system was a union of these two; the cœnobitic or common life, and the solitary life: the life of the hermit and that of the member of a religious community. St. Bruno's ideal was a combination of the virtues of each mode of life, with an avoidance of the evils which experience had proved each was liable to. He desired, by his rule, to unite the strict austerity of the solitary with the mutual charities of the member of a brotherhood. The severity of his rule (in the words of Archbishop Trench) exceeded that of all which had gone before, while it hardly left room for any that should come after to exceed it.

This object [of the founder] was, first, the eternal salvation of their [monks’] souls, and then the benefit of the world by the books, to the copying of which, by the rule of their founder, they were commanded to devote the chief part of their time, each new copy of a holy book being, in the words of their Consuetudinarium, a new herald of the truth, so that the scribes became preachers with their hands.

The Carthusian Order never became popular in England. The severe discipline its rule enjoined of absolute silence and isolation with meagre diet and insufficient clothing of the coarsest texture, even though modified as it was with us, was as alien from the English character as it was unsuited to the English climate. Founded by St. Bruno, in 1084, the Carthusian rule was first introduced into England by Henry II, in 1181, at Witham, in Somersetshire, of which house the justly famous St. Hugh, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, was the third prior, and the virtual founder. But not even his powerful influence could succeed in popularizing the Order. It was planted as an exotic in a few isolated spots, but it never naturalized itself on English soil.

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Of the nine English Carthusian houses, Mount Grace is the only one which exhibits the arrangements characteristic of the Order. Nearly all the others have entirely perished, not even their ruins remaining. Witham preserves its "Ecclesia Minor," but all the other buildings are gone.

If a brother happened not to be a scribe, which was a very unusual case, he was to be allowed to have with him the implements of his art or trade whatever it might be. They might borrow two books at the same time from the book cupboard, and were to take the utmost care that they were not discoloured with smoke or dust or any other filth.

The object of giving so many different articles to each individual, which, the Consuetudinarium remarks, might provoke a smile, was to take away all excuse for a brother leaving his cell, which he was never permitted to do except to go to the church, or to the cloister for confession.

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~The Founding of the Carthusian Order, 1905

This [Carthusian] Order has formed a glorious exception in the Church, and never needed a reformer nor a reformation; it is today as fervent as when its holy founder died. The life of the Carthusian monk is one of great solitude and is mostly spent in his cell. At least once a week, they are obliged to fast on bread and water. Under no circumstances are they ever allowed to eat meat, and they fast from the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross until Easter.

The cemetery is usually a small square in the great cloister garth. There the fathers and brothers lie side by side. No useless coffin confines their bones, but they lie each in his habit as he lived; taking their rest in death in the dress with which they were clothed when they sought rest in life in the rule which the piety of St. Bruno provided for them more than eight centuries ago.

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Even after death the same rule of seclusion was carried out, for no stranger, whether a religious or not, was to be buried in the cemetery of their convent, unless his own people were unable or neglected to give him burial. The graves of the monks themselves, except in the case of the generals of the Order, were and are marked only by wooden crosses without inscriptions, as if to impress all the more on the living the insignificance of all mortal parts of the human person.

[I]f the Carthusian became master of nothing else, his training must have made him completely master of himself so far as controlling his personal desires and impulses went, for there could not be a more thorough system of self-annihilation, leading to a perfect obedience to rule, personified by the prior and chapter of his convent. No military discipline, not even the famous Jesuit system, could call forth a stricter obedience than was demanded of and shown by the disciples of St. Bruno.

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~History of Religious Orders, 1898

In 1378, the Carthusians felt the effects of the Western Schism by being divided into two parts: one recognized Clement VII and the other Urban VI (the lawful Pope) – union was reestablished at the ascension of Alexander V as Pope. At the time of the dissolution of monasteries in England, the Carthusians distinguished themselves (among all the clergy) in refusing to take oath of supremacy and several of them were horribly martyred for doing so.

In this Order, unlike in many other Orders, the rule, instead of becoming more mitigated, rather increased in severity every time it was compiled: the Office became longer, vigils became more austere, and silence grew more exact. Out of the spirit of penance, they constantly wear a hair-shirt. These men are hidden to the world; their very names are unknown, but the all-seeing eye of Him Who one day will reward penetrates the hidden recesses of their cells, and beholds the virtues of which the world knows nothing, and which it hardly appreciates.

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[A] young Frenchman [Protestant] seemed to think it the height of folly and fanaticism that men should adopt such a life, and thus bury themselves alive. And, undoubtedly, this, at first sight, appears true, when we consider matters from a mere human standpoint, but looking at them in the light of eternity, before which time fades into insignificance, the conduct of these monks is the highest wisdom. The world may laugh and scorn, but, let us remember, that he who laughs last, laughs best.

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~An Ecclesiastical History Ancient and Modern

It was a long time before the tender sex could be engaged to submit to the “savage” rules of this [Carthusian] institution, nor had the Carthusian Order ever reason to boast of a multitude of female members. It was too forbidding to captivate a sex which is of a frame too delicate to support the severities of a rigorous self-denial. Several writers have even gone so far as to maintain that there was not in this Order a single convent of nuns. This is erroneous as there have been several convents of Carthusian virgins, though many have not survived to our times.

Certain it is that the rigorous discipline of the Carthusians is quite inconsistent with the delicacy and tenderness of the female sex, and, therefore, in the few female convents of this Order that still subsist the austerity of the discipline has been diminished, as well as from necessity as from humanity and wisdom; it was more particularly found necessary to abrogate those severe injunctions of silence and solitude that are so little adapted to the known character and genius of the female sex.

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The female branch is less severe and the nuns take their meals in common. The Carthusian nuns have preserved the ancient custom of the consecration of virgins (invested with stole, maniple on the right arm, and black veil) – always celebrated by the Bishop. These are worn on the day of their consecration, on their 50^th anniversary, and they are buried with them. The nuns are never allowed to speak to seculars, not even to their relatives, except with the face covered by a veil, and in the presence of one or two religious of the community.

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Truth and the Saints

Truth and the Saints

Question. I have often been struck in reading the lives of certain saints who accomplished great works, and thus seemed to give proof of their charity and forethought, yet who spoke of themselves as being more vicious and foolish than the people around them.

 

How are such statements compatible with truth, and if not true, how can they be pleasing to God, or be placed before us as something edifying? I wish you would give some practical answer to this question which a doubting friend put to me when I read him a passage from the life of St. Catharine, of Siena, who, whilst she could advise the Pope in affairs of great moment, deemed herself a worthless body.

Response. It is the law of proportions that as we rise to a higher level our circle of vision grows wider, whilst the relative estimate of our own size and power diminishes. Thus the greater a man's knowledge, the greater becomes his sense of limitations in the vast regions of still unexplored science. His view reaches farther for others, but he feels less secure in himself. In like manner it happens that the nearer the exercise of virtue brings a person to God, the more the immeasurable distance of God's perfection becomes clear to his mind.

 

Hence a good man may see good in all around him, yet having by reflection measured his own distance from the point toward which he strives, he realizes his own immense distance from absolute perfection. He sees less of the imperfections of others, the more he is occupied with his own improvement, which, involving concentration and closer introspection, makes him conscious of all the flaws in his own nature. Thus the apparent untruth is simply a disproportion of judgments, owing to different points of view between the man who sees the world around him from above, and the man who sees it close by. The seeming untruth becomes thus the sincerest truthfulness.

As an example of this I am tempted to cite a passage from a popular novel writer, because it shows that this judgment is ratified, even by the world, when it is honest. Dickens, in one of his novels, draws a character, Tom Pinch, who is a very simple, yet quite a gifted fellow, and with a good heart and a good opinion of every person whom he comes in contact with. Martin Chuzzlewit, whom he has met in his master's house, is suddenly cast upon the world a poor student without a penny. Martin is a shrewd lad, selfish, and sure to make his way; but Tom Pinch pities him, and following him on the road thrusts a book into his hand, to the leaves of which he has pinned a half sovereign wrapped in a piece of paper on which are scrawled in pencil the words: “I don't want it, indeed. I should not know what to do with it if I had it.”

 

Upon these words, which could hardly have been true, and yet were not a lie, Dickens remarks: “There are some falsehoods, Tom, on which men mount, as on bright wings, toward Heaven. There are some truths, cold, bitter, taunting truths, wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men down to earth with leaden chains. Who would not rather have to fan him in his dying hour, the lightest feather of a falsehood such as thine, than all the quills that have been plucked from the sharp porcupine, reproachful truth, since time began!” (Martin Chuzzlewit, chap, xiii.).

What is here called falsehood is in truth but the result of that personal view of self which finds itself small in the presence of another's need. Others may not share that view because they do not see the two-fold term of the comparison in the same way; they are on a lower level, and nearer to the earthly, which seems to them accordingly greater than it is when compared with the divine. Like the eye fixed close to the wall, it may see more of the stone, but it sees less of the wall.

 

~THE AMERICAN ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW, VOLUME 16, 1897.

All Souls' Day

Death

By Fr. Eugenio Escribano

(Priestly Meditations, 1954)

 

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A day will arrive -- who will dare to doubt it? -- when I myself shall be the one who is seriously ill, the one past recovery, the one dying, with people around me beginning to worry about preparations for my burial.

 

Do you think these details are somewhat ludicrous, unworthy of the seriousness of a meditation? Apply them to yourself, and perhaps they will have the effect of plunging you into deep thought. If the thought of death does not impress me or deter me from evil, as the Scriptures promise it will, it is because I think of someone else's death, not my own.

 

My God, frankly, I have never really given a thought to my own death, I have hardly believed in it, despite the fact that I see the face of death daily and almost feel its icy breath.

 

When my time comes, everything and everywhere around me will echo that respónsum mortis of which St. Paul speaks. God forbid that I should be the only one deaf to its challenge!

 

Let us picture the scene: The priest comes to hear your last confession; the tinkling bell heralds your Viaticum; then follow the Last Anointings, the prayers for the recommendation of the soul, and the low mumblings, drawn faces, and silent tears of relatives and friends standing round your bed --if indeed there is anyone at all to weep your departure!-- Your whole body is in a cold sweat, there is a gradual stiffening of your features, a twitching of your rigid fingers as if trying to clutch at something, the cold impression of the crucifix on your livid half-open lips; and the shadows of death crowd upon you thicker and thicker, and your eyes acquire that fixed look as if pursuing sights that vanish from you...

 

My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who for love of me didst submit to the anguish of dying, do not fail me Thou when everything and everyone else forsakes me!

 

At long last, your soul will quit the body, leaving it a repulsive heap of lifeless matter.

 

The bells you so often heard toll for others will now toll for you. The funeral service that you so often heard chanted for others is now to be chanted for you. And there will be a burial, your very own; and the officiating priest, while your body sinks into the earth, will seal your disappearance from this world with a last supplication wherein you will lose even your name:

 

Anima ejus et ánimæ ómnium fidélium defunctórum, per misericórdiam Dei requiéscant in pace. Amen.

 

And then, what will this world have to offer you? What will become of those material goods that you seemed to have fused with your inmost soul, so deeply had you buried them within your heart's affections?

 

 

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A Prayer for a Good Death

Lord Jesus, God of goodness, and Father of mercy, I prostrate myself before Thee with a contrite and humble heart, and commend to Thee my last hour, and what thereafter awaits me.

When my feet, motionless, shall warn me that my course in this world is approaching its end, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my hands, cold and shaking, shall no longer be able to keep holding the crucifix presented to me, and I shall be obliged to let it drop on my bed of sorrow, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my eyes, cloudy, and turned aside, through dread of imminent death, shall cast upon Thy image languid and dying looks, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my lips, cold and trembling, shall utter for the last time Thy adored name, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my cheeks, pale and livid, shall inspire compassion and grief in the bystanders, and my hair, moistened by the cold sweat of death, shall announce that my end is come, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my ears, ready to be shut for ever to the discourses of men, shall open to listen to Thy voice, uttering the irrevocable sentence that fixes my everlasting doom, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my fancy, disturbed by painful and dreadful imaginations, shall be plunged into sadness, and my spirit, troubled by the sight of my iniquities and by the dread of Thy justice, shall struggle with the spirit of darkness who would turn away my eyes from Thy soothing mercies, and throw me into despair, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my feeble heart, torn by the pangs of illness, shall be assailed by the dread of death, and exhausted by the efforts it shall have made against the enemies of my salvation, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When I shall shed the last tears, symptoms of my imminent dissolution, receive them, O Lord, as a sacrifice of expiation, and grant that I may breathe my last as victim of penance; and in that terrible moment, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my relatives and friends, standing by me, shall sympathize with my miserable state, and pray for me, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When I shall have lost the use of my senses, and the whole world shall disappear from me, and I shall sigh in the anguish of agony and the struggles of death, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When the last sighs of my heart shall compel my soul to leave the body, receive them, O Lord, as signs of a holy longing to fly to Thee; and then, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

When my soul, from the door of my lips shall go out of this world forever, and shall leave my body pale, cold, and lifeless, accept, O Lord, the dissolution of my being as a homage, which I offer to Thy divine majesty; and then, O loving Jesus, have mercy on me.

Lastly, when my soul shall appear before Thee, and shall behold for the first time the immortal splendor of Thy majesty, O Lord, pray, do not reject it from Thee; deign to receive my poor soul in the arms of Thy mercy, that it may sing Thy praises forever.

O God, who, condemning us to death, didst conceal the moment and the hour of it, grant that, walking in the paths of justice and holiness, we may deserve to depart from this world in Thy holy love, through the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.

The Protestant Rebellion (Non serviam)

LUTHER’S FAITH AND REASON

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SINCE the year, 1883, when the Protestant world celebrated the fourth centenary of Martin Luther's birth at Eisleben, scholars who have made a special study of the religious revolt of the sixteenth century have accepted as an undeniable historical conclusion the existence of two Luthers—a Luther of fiction and a Luther of fact. As posterity and historical scholarship have done justice to Luther, by drawing a sharp line of demarcation between the ideal reformer of panegyric and romance and the real founder of Protestantism, so also have theologians, after a thorough and searching study of the spirit and principles underlying the Reformation, discovered that Lutheranism, far from being an unmixed blessing, contained the germs of Evangelicalism and Liberalism, and of that Rationalism which underlies all the aberrations of modern Philosophy and runs through all the developments of the Higher Criticism, until finally it has run to seed in Modernism—that strange conlectum omnium heresion, as Pius X well styled it, which in our own day has succeeded in destroying the very vitals of Protestantism, whose philosophical and theological foundations the sapping of intellect had long since undermined, because of its revolt against their inconsistencies and logical contradictions

 

It is a strange paradox indeed that the religious revolt of the sixteenth century, which set out ostensibly to vindicate the independence of intellect, and to free it from the yoke of all authority, should be declared to be responsible for all the religious indifference of to-day, and even to have contained in germ those philosophical systems which are loudest in their charge of incompetency against the conclusions of reason, and in their denial of any validity to intellectual knowledge, ever since the day that Immanuel Kant became the founder of modern philosophical criticism. And yet this is only what might have been expected from the very beginning. It is the principle of private judgment driven to its logical conclusions. Since all truth has one source, it is not possible to divorce reason from religion; to set up a false religion and then to look to reason to justify such a course, cannot but end disastrously for the new theology, whose conclusions at every turn must be established at the expense of logical consistency. So that the logical course for the reformers, and the one which history shows them to have adopted, since they were too proud to acknowledge their apostasy and go back to the bosom of the true Church, was to set up a perplexing and exasperating antinomy between faith and reason; to say that the former had no foundation in the latter, nay, that the dogmas of the one contradicted the conclusions of the other.

 

There was one way by which a rapprochement could be effected between erroneous religious principles and intellectual integrity, and Protestant theologians have adopted it, when they deny any intellectual basis whatsoever for their doctrines, and make emotionalism alone the bar before which they are forever summoning the religious instinct to justify itself; knowing that before the bar of right reason, their system stands condemned. There are those who would make modern philosophy responsible for the ruin of faith in intellectual circles among the contradictory sects into which Protestantism is dissolving from day to day. But perhaps a truer conception of Reformation theology would go to show that modern philosophical systems themselves are rather a result than a cause of the errors that make religion to-day outside the Catholic Church anything but an obsequium rationabile. The most prominent characteristic of modern philosophy is a doubting scepticism stamped indelibly upon its beginning by its founder, Réné Descartes. The intellectual movement that culminated in the Reformation theology, and developed into Reformation philosophy, began long before October of 1517. It takes its origin, not from Luther, or the Castle Church of Wittenberg, but from the Humanists who came forth from Constantinople after its fall in 1453.

Of course, the movement received a great impetus from the Reformation, whose proud boast was the overthrow of all authority in matters of religious belief, and the enthronement in its stead of the supremacy of individual thought. The systems of Descartes' successors differed not so much in kind as in degree. Immanuel Kant is probably the greatest thinker of modern philosophy. He is certainly the one of whom it is proudest; and yet his greatest contribution to philosophical thought is nothing but a grand act of despair in the capabilities of the human intellect, amounting in fact to a denial of the objective validity of knowledge. Though setting out, like many another reformer, with the best of intentions, it was the author of the Critique of Pure Reason who put the finishing touches to Cartesian doubt and Cartesian rationalism. Modern thought in its origin and development is thus sceptical and agnostic, and Immanuel Kant is its prophet; for he was the one great thinker that has left the deepest impress upon the writers that followed him. He was, in the words of Sabatier, the master mind that makes leaders of lesser calibre proud to boast of the fact that they have received their philosophic initiation and baptism from his Critique. When we speak then of modern thought, we mean systems of philosophy that are preponderantly rationalistic, and, when there is question of the supernatural, altogether agnostic. This is to say that modern thought is dominated and impregnated, colored and tainted, by the philosophy of Kant. Even the philosophical principles underlying the religious sentimentality of Schleiermacher presuppose the Critique of Practical Reason of the professor of Königsberg.  

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Our age is one of sceptical unbelief in every department of knowledge. Rules of human conduct are vicious because they are founded on false principles of destructive philosophies. Leo XIII, looking at the dangers that threatened modern society, civil and religious, saw the root of the evil in the pestilence of perverse opinions built on the shifting foundations of weak and shallow philosophy, and declared that all society would be much more tranquil and much safer if healthier teaching were given in universities and schools. “If anyone will look carefully at the bitterness of our times, and if he considers earnestly the cause of what is done in public and in private life, he will discover with certainty the prolific root of the evils which are now overwhelming us and which we greatly fear. He will find that the cause lies in the evil teaching about things human and divine that has come forth from the schools of philosophers. It has crept into all the orders of the state, and it has been received with the common applause of very many.” Were Leo living to-day, how true and how justified he would think his diagnosis of the maladies that are slowly disrupting the social fabric.

 

It remained for Leo's successor, Pius X, to proscribe in no uncertain terms the attempts that were being made to readjust Christianity to the mentality of the age, and to reinterpret its dogmas in terms of modern thought. As Newman aptly expressed it, “while believing revelation, there is a tendency to fuse and recast it, to tune it, as it were, to a different key, and to reset its harmonies.” The Catholic Church, because it is divine, and the pillar and ground of infallible truth, has come forth triumphant from the open and covert attacks of these insidious and erroneous teachings; but alas, what has become, for those outside its fold, of those doctrines of faith and morality once held sacred even by the reformers themselves! In the absence of any infallible authority in their churches, the influence of modern philosophy has captivated the minds of Protestant theologians, and with them religion has ceased to connote all that it has hitherto stood for in the minds of reasonable men. Not only supernatural religion, but even our natural knowledge of God and the consequences that spring from that knowledge, with regard to His rights and our duties toward Him, has been corrupted and destroyed. We search in vain among the writings of modern philosophers to find a place in their theories of knowledge for the God of Scholasticism.

 

The name is mentioned, indeed, but the orthodox signification is conspicuous by its absence. “The adherents of these various systems like to be called Monists, and they are wont to apply the name of God to their one reality, into which they profess to resolve all existence; but the true name for them is Atheists, and we must protest against the practice of giving to the Name of God a meaning distinct from that which it has hitherto borne, and even opposite to it, in all that gives to the idea of God its special value as the basis of moral conduct and obligation.”.” For if God does not exist, religion and morality are mere meaningless abstractions. Kant's influence then is clearly discernible in the groundwork of modern thought. It is rationalistic, because Kant was a rationalist. It denies the supernatural and poses as agnostic, because Kant was pleased to put the supernatural outside the pale of intellectual knowledge. Because Kant in his Lutheranistic pietism made religion a matter of personal inward experience independent of external authority, modern thought, impatient of the restraints of any control, appeals to the supreme tribunal of the inner consciousness as the sacred fountain whence emanates the pure stream of religion and morality undefiled. The human heart has thus become the Sinai whence is promulgated the new decalogue of sentimental liberalism.

 

It is easy to show that modern philosophy is proximately responsible for the decay of religious teaching in matters of faith and morals, for so Popes and Councils have taught us. But is it possible to prove that modern thought is itself an excrescence of Reformation theology, that darkens our understanding and weakens our will, and leaves in us a strong inclination to flippancy and shallowness when treating of the most sacred truths? Is this a result of the original sin of Martin Luther, what time he nailed his ninety-five theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, on that fateful eve of all Saints, 1517, when the novel doctrines of the Saxon monk put him at the head of that religious unrest which his ready comprehension had shown him to be swaying the contemporary world, as expressed in the unsettled currents of thought then prevalent in its intellectual centres?

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The theology of present-day Protestantism, as championed by men like Dr. McConnell, calls for a complete divorce of religion from objective fact and grounds of intellect, and a founding of the whole edifice upon an emotional consciousness. It has no express intention of turning atheist any more than Kant had; but, like him, it is satisfied with the undogmatic and emotional piety inspired by Luther. Since even God Himself cannot be reached by intellect, and human nature cannot well get on without Him, we must believe in God for reasons of expediency and sentimentalism. Since modern philosophy knows no science of metaphysics, its psychology will not allow the modern theologian to say that God exists, a proposition that savors too much of the medieval science of being. Its credo in unum Deum is revised and modernized and brought abreast of the age into “Man cannot help wishing a God to be.” If to the subjectivism of Kant be added the humanism of Professor James, we have the foundations upon which is built the whole summa of Protestant theology, deducible with mathematical exactness from its primum verum—“Wanted, a God”. Each man's religion is just what he finds it expedient to believe. Man needs religion and creates it for himself accordingly. If it suits his interests to believe in it, it is so far forth good and true.

 

But other men may think otherwise, and so are free to believe otherwise also. Since even the expedient for the same individual is subject to change, so proportionately his beliefs and their object may change too. What was good and true yesterday may be bad and false tomorrow. Thus does dogma progress and regress; and truth, becoming identified with expediency of belief and a vague undefinable sentimentality, the will and emotions, not intellect, are made its judges. Emotional standards are especially the deciding factor in matters of supernatural beliefs; and the only test of experience to which it is legitimate to subject them is—How do they serve the account of the individual who in the security of his foggy and mystified pietism scorns to formulate any system of objective apologetics? Each must decide for himself, his religion, its foundations, origin, and genesis, in the introverted quiet of the sanctuary of his own soul, if he has a soul; and every age is supreme in deciding what are its own peculiar religious needs, and this conglomeration of individual tastes, in a given time, is the universal consciousness, to whose bidding the Church must conform its teachings and its practices, its dogmas and its morals, if it is to remain true to this Christian consciousness. That is the Court of final appeal and last resort for enlightened humanity, emancipated from the yoke of every authority, human and divine. Even the bondage of knowing the truth is forsaken for the freedom of doubt and denial and the inalienable liberty of wandering along the primrose paths of error, out of the beaten way that would make the mind conform itself to fixed and immovable standards of objective realities, in tending to the great goal of truth. Things are good and true because they are expedient, not expedient because they are true and good. This is Kantian subjectivism with a vengeance, for even Professor James owes much to the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.

 

Scholasticism on the contrary would prove the truth of Christianity and all it stands for, by purely objective criteria. Religion, if you like, is a fact of human consciousness. It is a mere phenomenon of the human mind, if you only mean that men have thought about it, and have been elevated and purified for the thought of it. But if you go on to say that, because men have thought of it, and believed in it, and have lived it, they are its creators and its causes, you are assuming what, in the interest of historical and scientific truth, all sensible men must reject, namely, that our own dreaming and theorizing Egos are the creators of nature and the universe, and—pardon me for the blasphemy—the creators likewise of the God of nature and the divine authors of the supernatural itself.

 

The preconceived philosophical dogmas of Neo-Kantian philosophy will not allow the modern Protestant theologian intellectually to recognize things as they are in themselves, apart from the forms and impressions and creations of the human mind. His dogmatic bias makes him the measure of religious truth also, instead of making religious truth a God-given standard to which the human mind in its beliefs must conform itself. Even the great pagan Plato, more than two thousand years ago, taught “that God should be to us the measure of all things, much more than any man.” Religious sentiment and emotion, then, gives us divine realities that do not exist in themselves independently of the person who believes in them. The Deity is not external but immanent in man. We cannot raise our minds and hearts to God any more in the old sense. But we can do better, think our modern Aquinases—we can raise God in our hearts and minds! Revelation and dogma are the products of the vague indefinite cravings of human desires, not objective truths that satisfy the intellect and the heart, that conform themselves to them, but things which are summoned into existence or out of it, by the passing longings of human sentiment and emotions. If God has any objectivity or permanence apart from the modern Protestant theologian's notion of Him, He has it because these ravings about religious values lie latent in the tranquil sub-consciousness of the prospective believer. God is capable of being evolved at any moment, provided the aspirations of humanity are allowed to develop to their highest and their best.

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How these theologians, some holding high ministerial office, in Protestant communions, can call themselves Theists and even Christians, while holding doctrines so contrary to every notion of orthodox religion, natural or revealed, passes ordinary comprehension. We are astonished to find men holding the rank of Dr. McConnell, asking in the pages of the North American Review, “if there is any way by which the religious man and the intelligent man, or rather the religion and the intelligence in man, can get together.” And he solves his difficulty by allowing one and the same individual mind to maintain its intellectual integrity with regard to the essentials of a religion, such as we have described it, and at the same time consistently to profess faith in the venerable creeds of Christianity! Would it not be a more honest position to admit outright that the impetus of the grand and glorious Reformation of the sixteenth century has fizzled out in philosophical infidelity in the twentieth? And now that the Protestant Churches are doing special honor this year to the founder of Protestantism, is it not strange that reflecting minds among them cannot see that it is Luther who is responsible for all this travesty of unreasoned religion, this eviscerated Christianity of modern times? All this liberal theology of to-day is only a revival of Lutheranism, because it was his Lutheranistic pietism that made Kant seek God through the practical reason, after he had dethroned him from his seat in the intellect proper.

 

Liberalism, in following Kant, is thus unconsciously imitating the example set by Luther. As long ago as 1852 the keen mind of Newman saw that it was Luther who had sown the seeds of the terrible religious indifference and widespread unbelief which exists in the modern world, and which has gone on increasing to such an alarming extent to our own day, under the baneful influence of egregious systems of idealistic philosophy. The following passage from the pen of the illustrious Cardinal, in the Idea of a University, fully substantiates our thesis. “In proportion as the Lutheran leaven spread, it became fashionable to say that faith was, not an acceptance of revealed doctrine, not an act of the intellect, but a feeling, an emotion, an affection, an appetency; and, as this view of faith obtained, so was the connection of Faith with Truth and Knowledge more and more either forgotten or denied. At length the identity of this (so-called) spirituality of heart and the virtue of Faith was acknowledged on all hands. Some men indeed disapproved the pietism in question, others admired it; but whether they admired or disapproved, both the one party and the other found themselves in agreement on the main point, viz. in considering that this really was in substance Religion, and nothing else; that Religion was based, not on argument, but on taste and sentiment, that nothing was objective, everything subjective in doctrine. . . . They learned to believe and to take it for granted, that Religion was nothing beyond a supply of the wants of human nature, not an external fact and a work of God.

 

There was, it appeared, a demand for religion, and therefore there was a supply; human nature could not do without religion, any more than it could do without bread; a supply was absolutely necessary, good or bad, and, as in the case of the articles of daily sustenance, an article which was really inferior was better than none at all. Thus religion was useful, venerable, beautiful, the sanction of order, the stay of government, the curb of self-will and self-indulgence, which the laws cannot reach: but, after all, on what was it based ? Why, that was a question delicate to ask, and imprudent to answer; but, if the truth must be spoken, however reluctantly, the long and short of the matter was this, that Religion was based on custom, on prejudice, on law, on education, on habit, on loyalty, on feudalism, on enlightened experience, on many, many things, but not at all on reason; reason was neither its warrant, nor its instrument, and science had as little connection with it as with the fashions of the seasons, or the state of the weather.” Over against this travesty of theology stands the rock-ribbed system of the Catholic Church, which, sinning neither by excess nor defect, holds that “the doctrine of our Saviour is indeed perfect in itself and has need of nothing, for as much as it is the power and the wisdom of God.”

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Yet does it not despise the native dignity of the human intellect, but believes “that a rightly and wisely used system of philosophy is able in a certain measure to pave and to guard the road to the true faith, and is able also to prepare the minds of its followers in a fitting way for the receiving of revelation.” It knows full well that Greek philosophy does not make the faith more powerful, but still it knows that great and glorious truths can be gathered from human reason. It teaches that the philosophy of the schools “is an education leading to the Christian faith,” “a prelude and help to Christianity,” “a schoolmaster for the gospel.” Not confining speculation within the limits of the narrow circle of a mere theory of knowing, it does not make its metaphysics conterminous with psychology, even that caricature of a psychology that ignores or denies the existence of an immortal soul. With a true scientific imagination, it will not divorce knowledge from experience; it scorns to abandon for the mere poetic monistic idealism of the Neo-Kantians its well-balanced science of being, built on that sane and moderate dualism borrowed of Aristotle, which, while it exalts mind infinitely above matter, still has room for a real distinction between intellect and the world which it cognizes, and, being rationally theistic, between God and His creation. The higher unity of pantheism never charmed the true Scholastic. He made indeed the being of the contingent world analogous to the being of God, but infinitely below it.

 

The scholastic mind was ever bent on the bed-rock of being, not wasting its energies on mere forms of thought; but, accepting facts, it made a pronounced objectivity the most characteristic feature of its whole system of philosophy. It accepted as an axiomatic truth the invincible belief that man sees a world, which is no part of his own mind, nor yet a necessary shadow cast by the Creator outside His own infinity. This primary dictum of the philosophy of the Schools kept metaphysics and psychology distinct, a distinction altogether ignored by modern idealism, which confounds consciousness with all reality, making it the object, not the instrument, of its cognition; and thus it ends in a vulgar pantheism. Thus Scholasticism is able to establish triumphantly against all the specious arguments of sophistry the praeambula fidei—the immortality of the human soul, the existence of God. It shows that God excels in His own peculiar excellence, by the sum of all perfections, by an infinite wisdom from which nothing is hidden, and by a supreme justice, which no shadow of evil can touch. It proves that God is not only true, but the truth itself, incapable of deceiving or being deceived; and thus does human reason obtain for the word of God the fullest belief and authority.

 

Thus does this twin alliance of faith and reason, effected in the councils of Scholasticism, reject a separate peace with the foes of truth. Theology was partly divine and partly human. It is divine inasmuch as it came from heaven in revealed truths or principles which human reason developed as it proceeded f1om premise to conclusion, establishing beforehand, by its own unaided powers, the trustworthiness of the sources of knowledge whence came those truths that lay outside its own special sphere of inquiry, namely: those dogmas that belong exclusively to the higher science of theology, those mysteries of our holy faith which the human mind can neither demonstrate nor comprehend.

 

Distinct though the two sciences of philosophy and theology are in their formal objects, still are their conclusions ever in complete harmony, because since both spring from the same fountain of knowledge, it is essentially impossible for the God of nature and the supernatural ever to contradict Himself. Faith never contradicts reason, because it does not at all follow that because a mystery is incomprehensible to human reason, it must therefore be labeled a contradiction. Revelation enlarges the horizon of knowledge, and, accepting the limitations of human thought to lie within the bounds of the natural order of things, faith strengthens and supplements and becomes a complement of reason. Beyond the confines where human knowledge terminates, modern agnostic philosophy places the region of nescience, where no human thing can dwell; while the Scholastic, with the light of faith upon his soul and the word of God for a lamp to his feet, enters a new world, a land of promise made known by a higher knowledge revealed by God, to which assent is reasonably given, since the authority of its source has already been demonstrated—the authority of the infallible Godhead. Knowledge, for the Scholastic, is co-extensive with reality. As reality is the twofold realm of science and faith, the latter continuous with the former, assent to its dogmas is still radically reasonable; for belief must rest ultimately on the authority of God, and it is the unaided light of human reason which primarily must tell us that God cannot deceive or be deceived.

 

If our faith then is not to degenerate into a blind superstition, reason must furnish unaided the motives of credibility and establish beyond prudent doubt the preambles of supernatural faith. Scholasticism, unlike later systems of philosophy, then, does not seek refuge in any insoluble enigmas, any irreconcilable antinomies between faith and reason, but recognizes that revelation is eminently reasonable, and that reason is in a manner divine. This is the greatest triumph of the philosophy of the Schools, this constructive synthesis that clearly defines the provinces of philosophy and theology, while it shows perfect harmony between faith and science, between the human reason and the divine. Catholicity is the true champion of the claims of intellect, for even God Himself or His Church does not ask us to accept the truths of faith blindly, but, as a preliminary thereto, He wishes us to make full use of our reason. All He demands of us is that we trust those to whom He has given the requisite credentials.

 

Scholastic theology at all times has consequently insisted on the necessity of objective apologetics, and Catholics are the most rational of believers, because they will not rest their beliefs on merely subjective feelings, but only on the rock of objective and infallible criteria. Even the most profound mysteries of the faith, though anything but objectively evident, are not accepted until they have become evidently credible, by the application of standards of assent which are themselves objectively evident in their certainty, which is the ultimate criterion of certitude.

 

Liberal Protestantism on the contrary rejects reason for the sake of the religious sense. Their faith is only a blind groping after the unknowable that cannot be scientifically justified by reason, according to their own premises. For Catholics, as Pascal truly remarked, “faith is the highest act of reason,” and the Vatican Council itself teaches us that right reason demonstrates the foundations of faith. “If any person says that divine revelation cannot become credible by external signs, and that by internal experience alone or by private inspiration men are moved to faith, let him be anathema.” Relative immanence has its place in Catholic theology, we admit, and some modern Catholic apologists lay great stress on internal feelings and desires; but it is questionable whether this method is practical in scientific apologetics. Hence, Catholic theologians are extremely cautious about the emphasis placed on these methods as against the traditional and recognized proofs. As motives of belief, they must not receive undue prominence, especially if this is done at the expense of keeping external motives in the background. Without borrowing from Protestant apologetics, subjective states of mind cannot receive too much value in a scientific analysis of the motives of credibility. These should be at all times severely tested in the light of objective facts. It was fear of the light that cannot injure the truth, which made Luther take refuge in subjectivism.

 

Kant's subjective idealism, when applied to religion, we have seen develop into pantheism in the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; while Schleiermacher did not hesitate to make a mere subjective sentiment the very essence of religion, and the great and penetrating, but unscholastically trained, mind of Newman himself, while still a Protestant, thought it sound criticism to teach that popular feeling and moral instinct was sufficient ground for the reformers of the sixteenth century, in giving their assent to the belief that the Bible was truly the word of God. Psychological voluntarism and credulity may lead into any extravagance in religious states, apart from the restraint of constitutional checks and balances administered under the dry light and before the cold scientific cross-examination of the bar of intellect.

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It must not be inferred from our thesis, however, that the assent of supernatural faith is no stronger than the natural motives of credibility warrant. For an act of supernatural faith there is need of divine grace to enlighten the understanding and strengthen the will. We are not dealing explicitly, however, with the act of faith in itself, so much as with the reasons that make the faith that is in us a reasonable service. Our quarrel is with liberal Protestantism, which after it broke with authority went on to ridicule the supernatural, and, calling itself rational, rejected the reasonable credentials demanded of orthodox Christianity; the while appealing to reason, and still inconsistently presuming to pass judgment on revelation and the supernatural and declaring unknowable everything that transcends the limits of reason, and gratuitously confining the limits of reason itself to knowledge of the phenomena of sensible things only.

 

The Catholic on the contrary examines the documents of his faith, and tests the value of the motives of his belief. Accepting the primary conceptions of the understanding, which are known immediately by the light of reason, such as first principles, he is certain he can acquire the knowledge of God. His reason, too, can establish God's holiness and veracity, and consequently the grounds for the reasonableness of faith in divine revelation, which is ultimately based on the infallible authority of God. This mode of procedure is eminently reasonable, and thus Catholicism is the real apotheosis of intellect; and Protestantism, while boastfully asserting the contrary, stands convicted in principle and in theory of being avowedly hostile to the independent rights of reason, preferring in the name of a false liberty, which is in reality license, the degrading freedom of being in error to the glorious bondage of knowing the truth.

 

~J. C. HARRINGTON., St. Paul, Minnesota.

 

Taken from The American Ecclesiastical Review, Volume 57; 1917.