September 1982 Print

Modernism is a term with which most Catholics will be familiar, which many will have used from time to time, but one which few could define with any degree of precision. This is hardly surprising as a lack of precision is one of the primary characteristics of this most dangerous of heresies. The reader will probably be aware that the movement was active in a number of European countries at the end of the nineteenth century, that it was eventually condemned by Pope St. Pius X, and that it is at present enjoying a considerable resurgence. (The term "neo-Modernism" is frequently used when referring to contemporary manifestations of this heresy.) Modernism is the most dangerous of all heresies because it destroys any basis for belief in a supernatural world, whereas previous heresies had restricted themselves to denying one or more tenets of the Catholic Faith. St. Pius X described Modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies." It is the ultimate heresy, which, if true, is fatal not simply to Christianity but to any religion postulating belief in a transcendent God. Modernism poses a threat to our faith, and hence to our prospects of salvation and our eternal destiny. It is thus important to us that we should learn to recognize it, particularly in view of its pervasive and insidious nature. Many of us may have already been affected by Modernism, without recognizing it. It affects nuns, priests, bishops, and particularly theologians. It has become the norm in some of the mainstream Protestant denominations, though not in the fundamentalist sects. It will usually be presented to us under the guise of "new insights," "contemporary biblical scholarship." or "the findings of modern theologians." Those who oppose it will be portrayed as ignorant, bigoted, or uncharitable—probably all three.

Before beginning a study of Modernism it is necessary to have a clear understanding of certain Catholic dogmas, and indeed of what dogma is. Unless we are clear about what we believe we will be in no position to defend that belief against those who seek to undermine it. We shall therefore begin this study by examining the nature of dogma, and what Cardinal Newman described as "the dogmatic principle."

What Is Dogma?

Dogma can be explained most simply as a truth which has come to us from heaven, something which God has revealed. These truths are revealed to us immediately by God, and hence demand our total and unconditional assent, even if we cannot understand them. We believe in them as an act of faith because God Himself became Man and revealed them to us Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. We believe that Christ is God Incarnate and hence that whatever He teaches us is true. We know that a particular truth has been revealed to us by Jesus Christ, because the Magisterium (teaching authority) of His Church proposes it to us as such. We can thus define dogma as a "truth immediately revealed by God which has been proposed to us by the teaching authority of the Church to be believed as such."

The Roots Of Rationalism

The definition of dogma which has just been given demands that man submits himself to an authority totally external to himself. God, speaking through His Church, is the arbiter of what man must believe and how he must behave. Such an attitude to life is theocentric, centered on God. From the conversion of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance this theocentric attitude to life permeated society. But with the Renaissance a new attitude began to emerge in which, for all practical purposes, man turned in upon himself and became his own arbiter. The story of humanism from its Renaissance roots to its logical conclusion in atheistic Marxism is of man's self-deification, making himself into a god, and refusing to submit to any authority outside himself. He uses his own reason to decide what is right or wrong for him. Thus rationalism was the inevitable conclusion of humanism. A rationalist is a man who makes his own reason the ultimate arbiter of what he will or will not believe. Protestantism provides a direct link between Renaissance humanism and nineteenth-century rationalism, because the sixteenth-century Protestants and their successors today are, in the final analysis, rationalists. They would deny this on the basis that they make the Bible the authority which regulates their belief and their conduct. But when they make this claim what they really mean is the Bible interpreted by their own reason. Every Protestant is the ultimate arbiter for himself of what the Bible does or does not mean. In other words, like it or not, every Protestant is a rationalist.

 

A God "Out There"

I have already mentioned that Modernism is fatal not simply to Christianity but to any religion postulating belief in a transcendent God. Before beginning a detailed examination of the history of Modernism it is important that the reader have a clear understanding of the terms "transcendence" and "immanence."

When we state that God is transcendent we mean that he exists independently of the universe. If the material universe ceased to exist God would still be there. He is the Creator of the universe. He existed before time began. He not only created everything that exists—spiritual, material, visible and invisible—He keeps it in existence.

Pantheism is a belief which identifies God with the universe, with material creation. He is envisaged as some sort of motivating force which exists with the material universe ("informs" it, to use the technical term). But this immanent God has no existence independently of the material universe. St. Pius X rightly asked, in his Encyclical Pascendi (8 September 1907): "Does or does not this immanence leave God distinct from man?" His answer was: "The doctrine of immanence in the Modernist acceptation holds and professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means Pantheism."

Obviously, as Catholics we believe that God is immanent as well as transcendent. He is everywhere. He does "inform" the universe, but he is not identified with the universe. The distinction between a transcendent God and a God who is only immanent can be simplified, over-simplified perhaps, by distinguishing between a God "out there" and a God "in here"—a F.I.F. as Monsignor Ronald Knox explained it, a Funny Interior Feeling. G. K. Chesterton was as unimpressed as Msgr. Knox by those whose God was no more than a Funny Interior Feeling. He was not even disposed to be polite to those who worshipped "the god within." Here is what he wrote about them in his book Orthodoxy:

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.

 

From Protestantism To Atheism

I have already referred to the fact that rationalism was the inevitable outcome of Protestantism. St. Pius X stated this explicitly in his Encyclical Pascendi. He warned "by how many roads Modernism leads to atheism and to the annihilation of all religion. The error of Protestantism made the first step on this path—that of Modernism makes the second; Atheism makes the next." There have been and are many conservative Protestants as opposed to Modernism as was St. Pius X. The Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who died in 1968, was among the most effective of all the opponents of Modernism, and the transcendence of God was the foundation of his theology. God is "wholly other" was the way he expressed it. Nor did the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers envisage the direction their break with Rome would ultimately take when they replaced the authority of the living Magisterium of the Church with the Bible. They claimed to be appealing from the authority of the Church to the authority of the inspired Scriptures. But who is to interpret the Scriptures if there is no infallible teacher?

Catholics living in a pluralistic society are bound to be affected by the predominant intellectual ideas of their time. This is particularly true of Catholics involved in academic life who do not wish to be considered second-class scholars by their non-Catholic colleagues. It is not surprising that the rationalist-liberal Protestant critique of Christianity, the "higher criticism" as it was called, made a profound impact upon some Catholic scholars. These men allowed themselves to be convinced that the basic thesis of the higher critics was correct, and that if the Church wished to retain her credibility in the twentieth century she must accept these conclusions, and present the faith in a way that would be found acceptable by contemporary man. These men were the Modernists, and their fundamental error lay in twisting unalterable truth to coincide with contemporary thought. The most influential of all the Modernists, the Abbé Alfred Loisy, wrote that: "The avowed modernists form a fairly definite group of thinking men united in a common desire to adapt Catholicism to the intellectual, moral, and social needs of today." Other heresies had undermined particular dogmas, Modernism endangered all that constituted the Church and was described by St. Pius X as the "synthesis of all heresies." It was a theological hydra, appearing in different countries, and receiving considerable support from Liberal-Protestants and rationalists, despite the fact that the Modernists claimed to repudiate the theories of these movements. Some even insisted that it was their principal concern to defend the Church against these critics. But St. Pius X would have none of this: "They are already known to and praised by the rationalists as fighting under the same banner," he wrote in Pascendi. It would be wrong to imagine that everything in the writing of the Modernists was unorthodox. Much of what they wrote was perfectly sound, and much ambiguous. A statement such as: "Our faith is based upon the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," could mean His physical Resurrection as the Church teaches, or simply a symbolic story devised by His followers to express the fact that His influence lived on after His Crucifixion. St. Pius X warned:

Thus in their books one finds some things which might well be approved by a Catholic, but on turning over the page one is confronted by other things which might well have been dictated by a rationalist.

St. Pius X tells us that the weakness that brought down the Modernists was the sin that caused the fall of Satan, and is the cause of so many sins:

It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption, We are not as the rest of men, and which, lest they should seem as other men, leads them to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind.

The Abbé Alfred Loisy, mentioned above as the most influential of all the Modernists, was born in 1857 and died in 1940. He was remembered at his seminary for his exemplary piety; his private life was irreproachable; he became an oriental linguist of outstanding skill and was capable of brilliant scholarship. But he was also ambitious; three years after his ordination in 1879 he wrote in his notebook that he was suffering from great fevers, the fever for knowledge, the fever for work—but also the fever for glory. His express ambition was to become a Father of the Church; but he ended up as the father of Modernism, one of the most dangerous adversaries the Church has ever encountered.

The young Abbé worked in a parish for only a few years before being offered a professorship at the Institut Catholique in Paris, the most prestigious institute of Catholic higher education in France.

He formed the opinion that in order to retain her credibility in the approaching twentieth century, the Church must make a radical revision of her traditional teaching in order to accommodate this teaching to the findings of modern scholarship. His faith in traditional Catholicism had already become severely strained at the age of twenty-eight. He had attended the lectures of Renan from 1882 to 1885, and eventually acknowledged him as "the mentor of French Modernists." Renan's influence was apprarent when Loisy wrote: "My attentive reading of the Gospels immediately destroyed the idea I had been given of them. Faith told me that these writings were wholly divine; reason showed me that they were wholly human, in no way exempt from contradictions."

At this period Loisy still believed himself to be working in the true interests of the Church, and resolved not to leave her but to remain within, striving to preserve her credibility by modernizing her teaching. This was typical of the initial attitude of all the Modernists and there is no reason to suppose that they were not sincere in at least the initial stages of their drift from orthodoxy. But it is clear that the position of men like Loisy who acted as official teachers of the Church in public, while questioning her teaching in private, inevitably led to duplicity and hypocrisy.

Loisy no longer felt conscious of "the supernatural character of religion," but he had faith in the value of his personal theories. While still a professor at the Institut Catholique he founded a review entitled L'Enseignement biblique ("Biblical Teaching"), which was intended to help young priests who wished "to complete the necessarily imperfect introduction to this subject which they have received in the seminaries." As a result of the views expressed in his lectures and in this journal, the superior of one seminary forbade his students to come to the Institut to attend Loisy's lectures. He replied by delivering a lecture on the rights of critical thought. This public controversy caused a sensation in Catholic circles, with the result that Loisy was eventually forbidden to lecture on the Bible, and was restricted to teaching Hebrew, Chaldean, and Assyrian. He replied with an explosive article in L'Enseignement biblique, insisting that the presence of error in the Bible was manifest. He was then asked to resign completely from the Institut Catholique, which he did, taking up a humble post as chaplain to a girls' school conducted by Dominican nuns at Neuilly. He received encouragement from friends with Modernist sympathies in a number of countries, particularly from Baron von Hugel in England. They looked upon him, as he looked upon himself, as a courageous seeker of truth victimized by the forces of obscurantism.

While at this convent he continued his studies, and the results of his research led him ever further from Catholic belief. "How much wiser the bishops would have been if they had kept me at my Hebrew grammar and cuneiform texts!" he wrote later. "During my five years at Neuilly, my mind was in perpetual travail over Catholic doctrine, working to adapt it to the needs of the contemporary mind."

It was in the year 1902 that Loisy came to the forefront of the public eye. He had already begun to unsettle the younger clergy and alarm the bishops with a long series of articles which began to appear in 1898 under half a dozen pseudonymns, but they were so alike in thought and style that no one doubted that they came from the same pen—that of the Abbé Alfred Loisy. Pope Leo XIII himself was disturbed, and in 1899 addressed a firm encyclical (Depuis le jour) to the clergy of France. But Loisy was beyond recall. We know from his memoirs that he had lost all his Catholic convictions by this time, yet he not only determined to remain with the Church but went so far as to seek appointment to two episcopal sees that became vacant!

Then, in 1902, L'Evangile et l'Eglise appeared (The Gospel and the Church). This brought the Abbé to the center of public attention, and made him the focus of an international controversy that involved Catholics, Protestants and rationalists.

Loisy claimed that his book was a reply to the teaching of the German theologian Adolf Harnack (1851-1930). Harnack had claimed, in a book entitled The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1900), that the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus Christ was wholly interior, existing in the heart of the individual believer. It did not involve the existence of a visible Church. According to Harnack, Christ had founded no such Church; this action had been falsely attributed to Him by His followers who had themselves established the Church, and the Church which they had established betrayed the teaching of Christ. As Christ had founded no Church, He obviously had not instituted a sacramental system by which that Church could mediate grace to mankind. Harnack based these claims on what he maintained was the true teaching of the historic Christ, which He had discovered by purging the Gospels of the accretions imposed upon their basic historic core by the first Christians.

Loisy's answer to Harnack soon became known, due to its format, as "the little red book." He explained that: "It is not designed to demonstrate the truth either of the Gospel or of Catholic Christianity, but simply to analyze and define the bonds that unite the two in history." The English historian, Maisie Ward, has remarked that these words were literally true, as the author did not believe in either the Gospel or Catholic Christianity! Loisy had already decided that "A recasting of the whole Catholic system was essential." Applying his critical methods to the Gospel, his purported refutation of Liberal-Protestantism was more destructive of Christianity than Harnack's attack. Harnack was at least concerned with historic truth. He claimed correctly that objective truth mattered; but added, incorrectly, that the traditional interpretation of the Bible was not in accordance with objective truth. Truth consists in the conformity of the judgment to its object. Thus when I see before me what I believe to be a tree, it is in fact a tree, then my judgment conforms to objective reality. I have attained truth. When I believe that Columbus arrived in America in 1492, and it is a historical fact that he did do so, then once again my judgment and reality correspond; I have attained truth.

The Common Consciousness

Loisy and his fellow Modernists made a distinction between faith and history, and between the Christ of faith and the Christ of history. Once this distinction is appreciated it will be clear that the "little red book" of Loisy presented a greater danger to the Church than the teaching of Harnack which it was intended to refute.

True Catholic teaching is that Christ founded the Church by consecrating His Apostles as bishops, and commanding them to teach the truths that He had taught them. Only those prepared to accept these truths could be baptized, and their "faith" meant their acceptance of these dogmas as objective historical facts. The Modernist explanation was totally incompatible with the traditional Catholic position. They claimed that the early Christians did not believe certain things to be true because they had been taught them by the successors of the Apostles, but that the successors of the Apostles taught these things because they were what the people believed. In other words, they were no more than spokesmen who articulated popular opinion. Dogma, they claimed, evolved as follows: the early Christians reflected upon the life of Christ and a consensus arose among them as to who Christ was, what He taught, and what our response to His teaching would be.

This consensus of belief is often referred to as the "common consciousness" of the believers, or as their "collective conscience." Prompted by this "common consciousness," the believers came together in a society to formulate, defend, and propagate their beliefs. Thus the Church originated not as a visible hierarchical society founded by Christ, but simply as a product of the collective conscience of His followers.

Every society needs a directing authority to guide its members towards their common end, and to formulate and systematize its beliefs. This, according to the Modernists, is how the Magisterium, the Teaching Authority, of the Church arose. Like the Church itself, it originated in the collective conscience, it is a response to a need of the collective conscience, and hence subservient to the collective conscience. Its function is to interpret and formulate whatever is found by the collective conscience to be helpful to the life of the Church at any given period. Thus the Church, the Magisterium, and faith itself all originate in the people. Their collective conscience is the ultimate authority for what Christians should believe. St. Pius X correctly warned that as under this system the Magisterium derives its mandate from the people, it must be subservient to them, and made to bow to popular ideals. The people do not submit themselves to the Magisterium, the Magisterium submits itself to the people.

 

Development Of Dogma

St. Pius X stated that the principal doctrine of the Modernists was that of evolution (the term as used here does not refer in any way to the theory of the biological evolution of the species). "To the laws of evolution," the Pope wrote, "everything is subject under penalty of death—dogma, Church, worship, the books we revere as sacred, even faith itself." The Modernist theory went as follows: once customs, beliefs, and traditions become established in a society those in authority will attempt to preserve them as they are, to uphold the status quo. In the Church this conserving force is found in tradition. But there will invariably arise a movement favoring change, and this is referred to as the progressive force. "The progressive force," writes St. Pius X, "which responds to the inner needs, lies in the individual consciences and works in them—especially in such of them as are in more close and intimate contact with life." These two forces will be in perpetual conflict and eventually a new synthesis will emerge—a new dogma will be evolved. "Hence," writes St. Pius X, "by those who study more closely the ideas of the Modernists, evolution is described as resultant from the conflict of two forces, one of them tending towards progress, the other towards conservation."

St. Pius also noted that the Modernists wished to subject the Church's worship to this law of evolution: "The chief stimulus of the evolution of worship consists in the need of accommodation to the manners and customs of peoples, as well as the need of availing itself of the value which certain acts have acquired by usage." The Pope added that: "Evolution in the Church itself is fed by the need of adapting itself to historical conditions and of harmonizing itself with existing forms of society."

To be continued