CHAPTER V [p068]
THE BREAKDOWN OF AUTHORITY
1. _God’s Government_
The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much of our current controversy is between those who hope to stay the dissolution and those who would like to hasten it. The prime fact about modernity, as it presents itself to us, is that it not merely denies the central ideas of our forefathers but dissolves the disposition to believe in them. The ancestral tradition still lives in many corners of the world. But it no longer represents for us, as it did for Dante and for St. Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago, the triumphant wisdom of the age. A child born in a modern city may still learn to use the images of the theological drama, but more or less consciously he is made to feel that in using them he is not speaking of things that are literally and exactly true.
Its dogma, as Mr. Santayana once said, is insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its bible pure literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance. The modern man does not take his religion as a real account of the constitution, the government, the history, and the actual destiny of the [p069] universe. With rare exceptions his ancestors did. They believed that all their activities on this earth had a sequel in other activities hereafter, and that they themselves in their own persons would be alive through all the stretches of infinite time to experience this fulfilment. The sense of actuality has gone out of this tremendous conception of life; only the echoes of it persist, and in our memories they create a world apart from the world in which we do our work, a noble world perhaps in which it is refreshing to dwell now and then, and in anxiety to take refuge. But the spaces between the stars are so great; the earth is now so small a planet in the skies; man is so close, as St. Francis said, to his brother the ass, that in the daylight he does not believe that a great cosmic story is being unfolded of which his every thought and act is a significant part. The universe may have a conscious purpose, but he does not believe he knows just what it is; humanity may be acting out a divine drama, but he is not certain that he knows the plot.
There has gone out of modern life a working conviction that we are living under the dominion of one supreme ideal, the attainment of eternal happiness by obedience to God’s will on earth. This conviction found its most perfect expression in the period which begins with St. Augustine’s _City of God_ and culminates in the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante. But the underlying intuitions are to be found in nearly all popular religion; they are the creature’s feeling of dependence upon his creator, a sense that his destiny is fixed by a being greater than himself. At the bottom of it there is a conviction that the universe is governed by superhuman persons, that the daily visible [p070] life of the world is constitutionally subject to the laws and the will of an invisible government. What the thinkers of the Middle Ages did was to work out in elaborate detail and in grandiose style the constitutional system under which supernatural government operates. It is not fanciful, and I hope not irreverent, to suggest that the great debates about the nature of the Trinity and the Godhead were attempts to work out a theory of divine sovereignty; that the debates about election and predestination and grace are attempts to work out a theory of citizenship in a divine society. The essential idea which dominates the whole speculation is man’s relation to a heavenly king.
As this idea was finally worked out by the legists and canonists and scholastics
every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that _Civitas Dei_, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and the earth. Then, on the other hand, the eternal and other-worldly aim and object of every individual man must, in a directer or an indirecter fashion, determine the aim and object of every group into which he enters.
But as there must, of necessity, be connection between the various groups, and as all of them must be connected with the divinely ordered Universe, we come by the further notion of a divinely instituted Harmony which pervades the Universal Whole and every part thereof. To every Being is assigned its place in that whole, and to every link between Beings corresponds a divine decree....
There is no need to suppose that everyone in the Middle Ages understood the theory, as Gierke describes it here, [p071] in all its architectural grandeur. Nevertheless, the theory is implicit in the feeling of simple men. It is the logical elaboration of the fundamental belief that the God who governs the world is no mere abstraction made up of hazy nouns and a vague adoration, but that, as Henry Adams says, he is the feudal seigneur to whom Roland, when he was dying, could proffer “his right-hand glove” as a last act of homage, such as he might have made to Charlemagne, and could pray:
O God the Father who has never lied, Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death, And Daniel from the lions saved, Save my soul from all the perils For the sins that in my life I did!
2. _The Doctrine of the Keys_
The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties to human reason, as we can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided over by the Bishop of Rome or whether it was an ideal and invisible congregation of the saved. But we may be sure that to plainer minds it was necessary to believe that God governs mankind through the agency of the visible church. The unsophisticated man may not be realistic, but he is literal; he would be quite incapable, we may be sure, of understanding what St. Thomas meant when he asked “why should not the same sacred letter ... contain several senses founded on the literal?” He would accept all the senses but he would accept them all literally. And taking them literally he would have to believe that [p072] if God governs the world, he governs it, not in some obscure meaning of the term, but that he actually governs it, as a king who is mightier than Charlemagne, but not essentially unlike Charlemagne.
The disposition to believe in the rule of God depended, therefore, upon the capacity to believe in a visible church upon earth which holds its commission from God. In some form or another all simple people look to a priestly caste who make visible the divine power. Without some such actualization the human imagination falters and becomes vagrant. The Catholic Church by its splendor and its power and its universality during the Middle Ages must have made easily credible the conception of God the Ruler. It was a government exercising jurisdiction over the known world, powerful enough to depose princes, and at its head was the Pope who could prove by the evidence of scripture that he was the successor to Peter and was the Vice-gerent of God. To ask whether this grandiose claim was in fact true is, from the point of view of this argument, to miss the point. It was believed to be true in the Middle Ages. Because it was believed, the Church flourished. Because the Church flourished, it was ever so much easier to be certain that the claim was true. When men said that God ruled the world, they had evidence as convincing as we have when we say that the President is head of the United States Government; they were convinced because they came into daily contact with God’s appointees administering God’s laws.
It is this concrete sense of divine government which modern men have lost, and it may well be that this is where the Reformation has exercised its most revolutionary [p073] effect. What Luther did was to destroy the pretensions not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but of any church and of any priestly class to administer God’s government on earth. The Protestant reformers may not have intended to destroy as deeply as they did; the theocracies established by Calvin and Knox imply as much. But, nevertheless, when Luther succeeded in defying the Holy See by rejecting its claim that it was the exclusive agent of God, he made it impossible for any other church to set up the same claim and sustain it for any length of time.
Now Christ says that not alone in the Church is there forgiveness of sins, but that where two or three are gathered together in His name, they shall have the right and the liberty to proclaim and promise to each other comfort and the forgiveness of sins.... We are not only kings and the freest of all men, but also priests forever, a dignity far higher than kingship, because by that priesthood we are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, and to teach one another mutually the things which are of God.
This denial of the special function of the priesthood did not, of course, originate with Luther. Its historical antecedents go back to the primitive Christians; there is quotable authority for it in St. Augustine. It was anticipated by Wyclif and Huss and by many of the mystics of the Middle Ages. But Luther, possibly because the times were ripe for it, translated the denial of the authority of the priesthood into a political revolution which divided Christendom. When the Reformation was an accomplished fact, men looked out upon the world and no longer saw a single Catholic Apostolic Church as the visible embodiment of God’s government. A large part of [p074] mankind, and that an economically and politically powerful part, no longer believed that Christ gave to Simon Peter and his successors at the Roman See the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise that “whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
3. _The Logic of Toleration_
As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were forced to realize that unless they consented to the policy of toleration they would be ruined. There is no reason to suppose that except among a few idealists toleration has ever been much admired as a principle. It was originally, and in large measure it still is, nothing but a practical necessity. For in its interior life no church can wholly admit that its rivals may provide an equally good vehicle of salvation.
Martin Luther certainly had none of the modern notion that one church is about as good as the next. To be sure he appealed to the right of private judgment, but he made it plain nevertheless that in his opinion “pagans or Turks or Jews or fake Christians” would “remain under eternal wrath and an everlasting damnation.” John Calvin let it be known in no uncertain tone that he did not wish any new sects in Geneva. Milton, writing his beautiful essay on liberty, drew the line at Papists. And in our own day the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ says in the course of an eloquent argument for practical civic toleration that “as the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church of Christ can tolerate no strange churches beside herself, [p075] or, what amounts to the same, she can recognize none as theoretically justified.” This is the ancient dogma that outside the church there is no salvation—_extra ecclesiam nulla salus_. Like many another dogma of the Roman church, it is not even in theory absolutely unbending. Thus it appears from the allocution of Pope Pius IX, _Singulari quadam_ (1854), that “those who are ignorant of the true religion, if their ignorance is invincible (which means, if they have never had a chance to know the true religion) are not, in this matter, guilty of any fault in the sight of God.”
As a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom the churches find themselves in an anomalous position. Inwardly, to their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the only complete version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic relations with other churches and with the civil power, they preach and practice toleration. The separation of church and state involves more than a mere logical difficulty for the churchman. It involves a deep psychological difficulty for the members of the congregation. As communicants they are expected to believe without reservation that their church is the only true means of salvation; otherwise the multitude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citizens they are expected to maintain a neutral indifference to the claims of all the sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect upon the religious practices of the others. This is the best compromise which human wisdom has as yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence which the superficial advocates of toleration often overlook. It is difficult to remain warmly convinced that the authority [p076] of any one sect is divine, when as a matter of daily experience all sects have to be treated alike.
The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be indifferent in one part of his soul and firmly believing in another. The existence of rival sects, the visible demonstration that none has a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many faiths, so many loyalties, are offered to the modern man that at last none seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in the order of the universe. The existence of many churches in one community weakens the foundation of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.
But when there are many churches in the same community, none can make wholly good the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to discipline the individual which a universal church exercises. For, as Dr. Figgis puts it, when many churches are tolerated, “excommunication has ceased to be tyrannical by becoming futile.”
4. _A Working Compromise_
If the rival churches were not compelled to tolerate each other, they could not, consistently with their own teaching, accept the prevailing theory of the public school. Under that theory the schools are silent about matters of faith, and teachers are supposed to be neutral on the issues of history and science which bear upon religion. The churches permit this because they cannot agree on the dogma they would wish to have taught. The Catholics would rather have no dogma in the schools than [p077] Protestant dogma; the fundamentalists would rather have none than have modernist. This situation is held to be a good one. But that is only because all the alternatives are so much worse. No church can sincerely subscribe to the theory that questions of faith do not enter into the education of children.
Wherever churches are rich enough to establish their own schools, or powerful enough to control the public school, they make short work of the “godless” school. Either they establish religious schools of their own, as the Catholics and Lutherans have done, or they impose their views on the public schools as the fundamentalists have done wherever they have the necessary voting strength. The last fight of Mr. Bryan’s life was made on behalf of the theory that if a majority of voters in Tennessee were fundamentalists then they had the right to make public education in Tennessee fundamentalist too. One of the standing grievances of the Catholic Church in America is that Catholics are taxed to support schools to which they cannot conscientiously send their children.
As a matter of fact non-sectarianism is a useful political phrase rather than an accurate description of what goes on in the schools. If there is teaching of science, that teaching is by implication almost always agnostic. The fundamentalists point this out, and they are quite right. The teaching of history, under a so-called non-sectarian policy, is usually, in this country, a rather diluted Protestant version of history. The Catholics are quite right when they point this out. Occasionally, it may be, a teacher of science appears who has managed to assimilate his science to his theology; now and then a Catholic history teacher [p078] will depart from the standard textbooks to give the Catholic version of disputed events during the last few hundred years. But the chief effect of the non-sectarian policy is to weaken sectarian attachment, to wean the child from the faith of his fathers by making him feel that patriotism somehow demands that he shall not press his convictions too far, that commonsense and good fellowship mean that he must not be too absolute. The leaders of the churches are aware of this peril. Every once in a while they make an effort to combat it. Committees composed of parsons, priests, and rabbis appear before the school boards and petition that a non-sectarian God be worshipped and the non-controversial passages of the Bible be read. They always agree that the present godless system of education diminishes the sanctions of morality and the attendance at their respective churches. But they disagree when they try to agree on the nature of a neutral God, and they have been known to dispute fiercely about a non-controversial text of the Ten Commandments. So, if the sects are evenly balanced, the practical sense of the community turns in the end against the reform.
5. _The Effect of Patriotism_
Modern governments are not merely neutral as between rival churches. They draw to themselves much of the loyalty which once was given to the churches. In fact it has been said with some truth that patriotism has many of the characteristics of an authoritative religion. Certainly it is true that during the last few hundred years there has been transferred to government a considerable [p079] part of the devotion which once sustained the churches.
In the older world the priest was a divinely commissioned agent and the prince a divinely tolerated power. But by the Sixteenth Century Melanchthon, a friend of Luther’s, had denied that the church could make laws binding the conscience. Only the prince, he said, could do that. Out of this view developed the much misunderstood but essentially modern doctrine of the divine right of kings. In its original historic setting this doctrine was a way of asserting that the civil authority, embodied in the king, derived its power not from the Pope, as God’s viceroy on earth, but by direct appointment from God himself. The divine right of kings was a declaration of independence as against the authority of the church. This heresy was challenged not only by the Pope, but by the Presbyterians as well. And it was to combat the Presbyterian preachers who insisted on trying to dictate to the government that King James I wrote his _True Law of Free Monarchy_, asserting the whole doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
In the Religious Peace of Augsburg an even more destructive blow was struck at the ancient claim of the church that it is a universal power. It was agreed that the citizen of a state must adopt the religion of his king. _Cuius regio ejus religio._ This was not religious liberty as we understand it, but it was a supreme assertion of the civil power. Where once the church had administered religion for the multitude, and had exercised the right to depose an heretical king, it now became the prerogative [p080] of the king to determine the religious duties of his subjects. The way was open for the modern absolute state, a conception which would have been entirely incomprehensible to men who lived in the ages of faith.
We must here avoid using words ambiguously. When I speak of the absolute state, I do not refer to the constitutional arrangement of powers within the state. It is of no importance in this connection whether the absolute power of the state is exercised by a king, a landed aristocracy, bankers and manufacturers, professional politicians, soldiers, or a random majority of voters. It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all these powers, and in the matter of theory there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats. There are lingering traces in the American constitutional system of the older theory that there are inalienable rights which government may not absorb. But these rights are really not inalienable because they can be taken away by constitutional amendment. There is no theoretical limit upon the power of the ultimate majorities which create civil government. There are only practical limits. They are restrained by inertia, and by prudence, even by good will. But ultimately [p081] and theoretically they claim absolute authority as against all foreign states, as against all churches, associations, and persons within their jurisdiction.
The victory of the civil power was not achieved everywhere at the same time. Spasmodically, with occasional setbacks, but in the long run irresistibly, the state has attained supremacy. In the feudal age the monarch was at no time sovereign. The Pope was the universal lawgiver, not only in what we should call matters of faith, but in matters of business and politics as well. As late as the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, Pope Paul V insisted that the Doge of the Venetian Republic had no right to arrest a canon of the church on the charge of flagrant immorality. When, nevertheless, the canon was arrested, the Pope laid Venice under an interdict and excommunicated the Doge and the Senate. But the Venetian Government answered that it was founded on Divine Right; its title to govern did not come from the church. In the end the Pope gave way, and “the reign of the Pope,” says Dr. Figgis, “as King of Kings was over.”
It was as a result of the loss of its civil power that the Roman Church evolved the modern doctrine of infallibility. This claim, as Dr. Figgis points out, is not the culmination but the (implicit) surrender of the notions embodied in the famous papal bull, _Unam Sanctam_. The Pope could no longer claim the political sovereignty of the world; he then asserted supreme rights as the religious teacher of the Catholic communion. “The Pope, from being the Lord of Lords, has become the Doctor of Doctors. From being the mother of states, the Curia [p082] has become the authoritative organ of a teaching society.”
6. _The Dissolution of a Sovereignty_
Thus there has gradually been dissolving the conception that the government of human affairs is a subordinate part of a divine government presided over by God the King. In place of one church which is sovereign over all men, there are now many rival churches, rival states, voluntary associations, and detached individuals. God is no longer believed to be a universal king in the full meaning of the word king, and religious obedience is no longer the central loyalty from which all other obligations are derived. Religion has become for most modern men one phase in a varied experience; it no longer regulates their civic duties, their economic activities, their family life, and their opinions. It has ceased to have universal dominion, and is now held to be supreme only within its own domain. But there is much uncertainty as to what that domain is. In actual affairs, the religious obligations of modern men are often weaker than their social interests and generally weaker than the fiercer claims of patriotism. The conduct of the churches and of churchmen during the War demonstrated that fact overwhelmingly. They submitted willingly or unwillingly to the overwhelming force of the civil power. Against this force many men claim the right of revolution, or at least the right of passive resistance and conscientious objection. Sometimes they base their claims upon a religious precept which they hold sacred. But even in their disobedience to Caesar they are forced to acknowledge that loyalty in the modern world is complex, that it has become [p083] divided and uncertain, and that the age of faith which was absolute is gone for them. However reverent they may be when they are in their churches, they no longer feel wholly assured when they listen to the teaching that these are the words of the ministers of a heavenly king.