CORRESPONDENCE.
ANGLICANISM AND MODERNISM
[To TESEDITOR OF THE " SPEGTATOE."1
Sta,—Many pilgrims to the Oratory at Edgbaston must have waited for Newman, as the present writer did once, in a parlour, or visitors' room, which contained a significant engraving. A panorama of Oxford was hanging over the mantelpiece, displaying the Radcliffe dome with its attendant spires and towers, and under it was the legend from Ezekiel, " Can these bones live ? " As Newman sat between his visitor and the picture, it was impossible to look him in the face without being conscious all the time of Oxford, and of all the momentous and mingled history which associated him with it indissolubly, in spite of a physical separation, and of theological misunderstandings. And as he spoke the application of the text suggested itself continually to his hearer : Does it apply to the man or to the place ? Can it be that the Oxford of Jowett and Mark Pattison, of Thomas Arnold and Church, of Symonds and Froude, of Pater, above all of Matthew Arnold, is nothing but dry bones because Newman and what he represents is withdrawn from it? Can it only revive through scholasticism, and the Syllabus, and Papal infallibility ? Or is Newman himself in a valley of dry bones P If so, how far does he realise it, and whence does he expect the vivifying spirit? The last two questions were by no means impertinent in those critical years, for the visit was made while the Vatican Council was new and its fires were still blazing, and Newman was under a cloud, and Pius IX. was reigning, and Manning was omnipo- tent, and all the world had been told that Newman called the Infallibilists " an aggressive and insolent faction." And a few intimates knew something further,—namely, that Newman had written to a Roman Catholic Peer, like himself a convert, regretting the events of 18I5, and almost repenting of them.
Since the interview described many years have gone by, bringing various changes in their course, and some of them unexpected. Oxford has gone quietly on her way, freed from many theological burdens, but not spiritually or intellectually poorer. Theology has given place very largely to history, and comparative religion is being studied instead of Anglican and Papal controversy. The Oxford Movement is dead intellectually, though it may still galvanise a clerical generation which is passing away, and which will certainly not be recruited by any similar material. in the Papal Church, too, there have been curious and significant changes. Leo XIIL did nothing with his dubious heritage of infallibility, probably realising its tremendous and compromising dangers. But he did great things in diplomacy and politics, raising the Papacy to a height it had never regained since Leo X. ; and he would
probably have achieved things even greater if be had not clung to the vain shadow of his temporal power. In the intellectual sphere he tried to revive scholasticism. If by that he hoped to continue its outward forms, he made a huge mistake ; but if, as it is fair to think, he meant to draw attention to its possibilities and its essential spirit, it was a stroke of genius, and it shows how thoroughly he understood the needs both of his age and of Christendom. For the Samna, the effort and achievement of Aquinas, was nothing less than a synthesis between traditional Christianity and all that was then accepted as philosophy and science. And this, surely, is the most urgent need of our own time. That it cannot be accomplished by scholastic methods is true; but it can only be accomplished in the broad spirit of the school- men ; that is, by acknowledging the claims of reason, the rights of human nature in all its faculties, and the lawfulness of all natural knowledge. It was by this recognition that men like Origen and Clement of Alexandria made peace between Hellenism and Christianity, to the incalculable benefit of the latter, though their mutual understanding came too late. When society bad been reconstituted, and civilisation began to emerge, the reconciliation was attempted again by Abelard ; but he was too early. The Renaissance of the twelfth century failed ; yet, in spite of the Papacy, Aristotle was accepted. The schoolmen carried the day. Knowledge and reason asserted their just claims. Dante may be a Christian, but be is also a great pagan, and it is that side of him which is most alive. The synthesis between learning and religion was effected again. When Greek was recovered, and lived once more, knowledge progressed by leaps and bounds. The face of the earth was changed. The Papacy itself was captured in the person of Leo X. Science, as we understand the word, was born, and was beginning to be applied to every sphere of knowledge. Then came disaster and retrogression. They were caused chiefly, no doubt, by what is known as the Papal Reaction; but they were due also, as we should not forget, to a fatal error, 4:oc at any rate an exaggeration, of the reformers,—namely, that human nature was incurably evil in itself, that everything "natural " was vitiated, both in religion and in learning. Thus a fatal barrier was drawn between sacred and secular. All chance of a syn- thesis between religion and knowledge was lost, and we have not yet recovered it. This error is inherent, logically, in the Lutheran and Calvinistic theories ; and it infected, though to a less degree, the new Romanism, which was a much harder and narrower system than the semi-humanist Christianity of the later Middle Ages. For Roman Catholicism is merely one of the many new sects which were formed in the sixteenth century out of the ruins of Latin Christendom ; it was larger than the others to start with, but, like all the others, it had a new creed, new formularies, a new spirit, and to a large extent a new organisation. That Roman Catholicism is old is one of the strangest popular delusions. As we look back, let us pay a passing tribute to Erasmus, the one man of that battling age who in himself, by his methods and his spirit, could have reconciled theology with progress and with science, who could have carried on that necessary synthesis which the great schoolmen, as we must always remember, had given into the safe keeping of the Humanists, and which might have gone on developing without a check if it had not been for the extremists of both sides. There is little to choose in this tragic episode between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Science for the time being was wrecked by them, and religion in consequence languished through a couple of barren centuries.
During that period we can see the Papacy developing along the lines which were forced upon the Latin Churches by the Council of Trent. In the interests of the Papacy, by its influence, through its agents, and for the sake of its claims, the New Learning was rejected. Theology perished as a living science. Church history became a conventional presentation of manipulated and selected facts. One science after another was attacked and its experts persecuted : first astronomy, then geology. Neither the heaven nor the earth was free. The Inquisition and the Index were supreme. And so the breach between faith and knowledge grew wider; and
not only science, but modern society itself, with all its ideals and aims, was excluded from the Papal Church. To return whence we started, it might very well have seemed that Newman himself was wandering through a valley of dry bones in the years that followed 1870.
And yet below the surface there was a quickening spirit working irresistibly, leavening the apparently dead mass, rousing it in due time to opposition; destined later on, it may be. to rouse it into a new life, if it be still capable of living. This leaven, this spirit, is Modernism. The name, in one sense, is wholly inappropriate, for the thing is not new. It was attempted successfully by Clement and Origen, unsuc- cessfully by Abelard. It was actually achieved by Aquinas. And let us remember in this connexion that scholasticism was condemned by the Papacy as bitterly as Modernism is now. Yet the Papacy succumbed, and was dominated by what it bad abhorred. The Modernism of the twelfth century was triumphant, and no one can suppose that the Modernism of the twentieth century is feebler. Modernism is nothing but the attempt, periodically necessary, continually renewed, to make a synthesis between religion and knowledge. In the sixteenth century that synthesis was deliberately refused by the Council of Trent. The New Learning was rejected of set purpose for definite and interested reasons. That was a sin against the light ; and now the penalty is being required. The New Learning has returned as Modernism, and is pre- senting once more to the Papal Church the same searching historical questions, the same penetrating criticisms, the same pulverising scholarship which confronted her in the sixteenth century. But it is no longer a battle of scholars in a vast, dumb, listless, illiterate world. Knowledge has spread, and its results are popularised. The majority may not be scholars, but they know the general conclusions of scholarship; and it is the minority now which is illiterate. This is the real gravity of the present situation. Christianity has never yet been confronted in any of its former crises with a science so competent, so highly organised, so variously equipped, and permeating such vast masses of the population.
It may be asked. now: What about Anglicanism in this secular dispute between science and religion ? where does it come in, what has it done, what should be its function ? Let us always remember a profound saying of Bishop Creighton. Anglicanism, he insisted, was founded on sound scholar- ship ; and this undoubtedly is true. Ps leaders, according to their lighf,s, did accept the New Learning. They went behind the Middle Ages, behind the Latin world, back to Greek, back to Hebrew and Syriac, back so far as they could to the foundations and the origins. For this reason, therefore, and for several others which can easily be inferred, Anglicans as a body should have more sympathy than they have appeared to show with the Modernists and their aims. In the first place, the Modernists have been misrepre- sented. They are described as being almost exclusively Biblical critics of the most extreme and destructive temper. This caricature has been circulated in order to prejudice Protestant opinion, and to divert attention from the methods which are being employed against individuals. Their cause is blackened so that they may be persecuted with impunity. For Modernists are not a sect or a school, with definite plans, and a common policy, and sinister aims, as Pius X. has asserted. They are scattered individuals, each with his own interests and pursuits, his own branch of scholarship. All that is common to them is that each is touched by that modern spirit, that intellectual life, by which the existing world lives and moves. They are men of their own time by their culture, their methods of working and thinking, and by their knowledge. They are opposed desperately by those who are striving that the past shall remain the present and become the future. So says Loisy. And so might have said any one of our own Reformers,—Cranmer, Hooker, even Andrewes. The Modernists, in other words, are only claiming for them- selves precisely those intellectual and theological rights which Anglicans took in the sixteenth century, and on which alone the lawfulness of our historical and theological position rests. If there be some extreme Biblical critics among the Modernists, who can deny that there are more critics, and perhaps more extreme, among the Anglicans of to-day ? But we do not persecute them. We know that truth, if un- impeded, will certainly find its level. We acknowledge that free thought and free speaking are necessary for sound
scholarship : that there must be hypotheses, and mistakes, and rectifications, if truth is ever to be attained.
If sound scholarship was our foundation, it has also been our salvation hitherto, and it is our only sure hope in the future. Thanks to scholarship and liberty, as a French observer, M. Mater, has pointed out in his most interesting "Politique Religieuse de la Republique Francaise," the Anglican Church, scattered through the world and centred in Canterbury, is taking over those civilising functions which the moribund Papacy seems to have repudiated. Let us hope that this is true; but the truth can only be realised if we, on our part, repudiate and eschew that mediaevalism, that sacerdotalism, which has compelled Rome to divorce herself from the living world, and by which we are in some danger of being transformed ourselves.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Oi;rcs.
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