Catholicism of the present day is more the creation of the Christian Middle Ages than of Christian antiquity.'

This is perhaps the best place to consider Heiler's conception of the essence of Catholicism. It is, he says, essentially a comprehensive religion, a complexio oppositorum. Of the Eastern Church he says, 'the combination of these heterogeneous elements makes it Catholic, and has enabled it to endure during all the centuries.' Again, 'Catholicism has proclaimed the whole gay congeries of religions, which it embraces, as genuinely Christian.' It not only incorporated the whole religious philosophy of the Neoplatonists, but all the popular beliefs of the halfheathen masses. This unlimited hospitality is for Heiler the note of true Catholicism. The power of assimilation has been gradually lost, and so Rome is no longer truly Catholic.

To the present writer, this seems to be a misconception of the part which Catholicism has played in history. The name Catholic indicates universal extension in a geographical sense rather than intellectual comprehensiveness. So far from desiring to include heterogeneous and irreconcilable elements, the Church defined its position mainly by the exclusion of errors, and endeavoured from the first to leave no contradictions unsolved. The 'narrowness' which to our author seems a modern error was in reality present from the first. For example, there never was a time at which the statement that the historical Christ was purely human (idos av@pwtos) was not anathematised. Judaisers, Pagans, Gnostics, Arians, and even Nestorians were condemned. No compromise was made with the popular 'Religionsgemenge,' which was then called theocrasia. If we put aside for the moment the political evolution of Catholicism, on which more must be said presently, and regard it as a religion consisting of a body of beliefs, we find that the Church belongs quite definitely to a particular type of religion and even to a particular type of thought, and does not try to make room for all religion, nor for all philosophy. It is, for example, a system of personal theism, a supernational religion, an other-worldly religion, a religion of brotherly love. It does not deny that there is much which is noble and valuable in Buddhism which denies the first of these, in

Judaism which denies the second, in Positivism which denies the third, and in the creed of self-culture which dispenses with the fourth. But it does not try to include these religions; they are not Christian.

In the same way, Catholicism is not hospitable to every philosophy. It is, as Troeltsch says, the last creative achievement of classical antiquity, the heir of Greek thought. The whole structure of Catholic dogma, apologetic, and philosophy is built upon the foundation of Greek speculation and Greek mental discipline. It is impossible to tear them asunder, because there never was a primitive Church unaffected by Hellenistic ideas. They are apparent in the earliest books of the New Testament. They determined the dogmas and creeds of Christendom. They imposed upon the Church an eschatology which is incompatible with the Jewish beliefs of the first Christians. They introduced into the Church that combination of speculative thought, ascetic discipline, and mystical intuition which belongs essentially to the Platonic tradition. Now this Catholic philosophy, which is a continuation of the thousand years of unfettered debate which the Greek race enjoyed before the closing of the schools of Athens, has a quite definite character of its own. It is rationalistic, and also mystical, like the philosophy of the Neoplatonists. A Platonist need not be a Christian, still less a Catholic; but the main presuppositions on which Christian philosophy has always been based are also his.

Aristotelianism is a more questionable ally of the Christian faith. It is significant that the scholastic semi-Aristotelianism, which was before long accepted by the Church, was at first received with suspicion. Heiler quotes with satisfaction the letter which Pope Gregory IX wrote to the Professors of the University of Paris in 1223, condemning the Modernists of the 13th century as severely as the Encyclical 'Pascendi dominici gregis condemned Loisy and his school. 'Some of you, distended like a bladder with the spirit of vanity, busy themselves in altering the limits laid down by the fathers with profane innovations inclining to the teaching of natural philosophers. Misled by various and strange doctrines, they put the head where the tail ought to be, and force the queen to serve the maid-servant. And while they

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endeavour to buttress the faith by natural reason more than they ought, do they not render it, in a manner, useless and empty?' The Pope exhorts them not to bedizen the spouse of Christ with rouge and extraneous ornaments, but to teach theological purity without the ferment of worldly science, not contaminating the word of God with the figments of philosophers.' The Church distrusted rationalism untempered by mysticism. Like its precursor, Neoplatonism, it neglected the scientific studies to which Aristotle devoted much of his life, and feared that science would end by undermining the supernatural. It was a crisis in Christian thought, and we see that authority, after an unsparing condemnation, admitted the new learning as a bulwark of orthodoxy. But Aristotle the natural philosopher was never really accepted. The Schoolmen were less of Aristotelians than they supposed. Some of the doctrines and treatises which they believed to be Aristotle's really belonged to the later Platonists. The Schoolmen, too, had no desire to make philosophy anything more than an ancilla fidei; they were anything rather than dangerous rebels. They did nothing to prepare the Church for the great decision which it had to make in regard to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. With hardly a qualm, authority then came down on the side of obscurantism, and ever since, the faithful have been condemned to live in a preCopernican universe, from which they can only escape by formal heresy or obvious inconsistency. This, however, is not because the Schoolmen and their successors were rationalists, but because, like the Middle Ages in general, they were timid traditionalists. They did not know that a great Renaissance was dawning.

Heiler shows a bitter hostility to the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the grounds of his dislike throw much light on the character of Modernist thought. We have to remember that logic had a much larger place in mediæval education than it has in our own day. With us, natural science is more and more the basis of all constructive theories of history and philosophy; but in the Middle Ages, when there was no natural science worthy of the name, right reasoning-recta ratio-was the præambula fidei. The scholastic apologists felt, surely rightly, that a supernatural revelation must have at

least a foundation within the domain of human reason, and it was by logic that they attempted to demonstrate the essentials of the theistic position. Heiler objects that these proofs, even were they more valid than they are, do not lead us to 'the God of living piety.' 'The God of living piety is excluded from all possibility of rational proof, because He is essentially irrational.' Rational proof may demonstrate the existence of the Absolute, but the introduction of proofs of the existence of the Absolute into theology is a dangerous error, which has bitterly revenged itself in later times.' The proofs of God's existence have never brought any one to believe in God, but have torn belief in God out of the hearts of many.' In the same way the philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul are a very poor substitute for the belief in the Kingdom of God. Rational philosophy stands here also in a totally different sphere from irrational faith.'

We naturally ask-while apologising for the absurd form which the question must necessarily take-what reasons there are for believing the irrational? We can imagine two answers, but it is difficult to find any clear explanation in Heiler. It might be said: Since knowledge of things as they are is entirely beyond our capacity, it is our wisdom to believe, or to behave as if we believed, whatever helps us to live as we wish to live. If any belief ceases to help us, we may give it up and try something else. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Whatever helps souls may be called true. This is pragmatism; it goes back to Protagoras, with his maxim, 'Man is the measure of all things.' Some of the Modernists have coquetted with this philosophy, which is popular in America. In that country 'bluff' is so successful that men are not without hope that they may bluff nature and its Author. But it is difficult to imagine any view of life more incompatible with Christianity.

The other possible answer is that we know God by mystical intuition, which makes reason superfluous. Heiler actually appeals to Plotinus in support of this reply: God is beyond thought' (réкeva voù kaì vonσews). There could hardly be a more fundamental misunderstanding of mystical philosophy. The Absolute, whom

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Heiler dislikes so much, is said by the mystics to be 'beyond Being and beyond thought'; he is the ultimate unity, the One, who is presupposed in all distinctions, even in the distinction between thinker and thought. It is not necessary to quote the language in which writers like Plotinus, Dionysius, Erigena, and Eckhart have tried to express the absolute transcendence of the Godhead as He is in Himself. It is also true that the life of the beatified spirit, which can be experienced in a measure by the mystic on earth, is lived in a higher atmosphere than that of discursive reason. The soul that has become spirit,' as some of these writers express it, is in more immediate correspondence with eternal and spiritual reality than can be attained by mere dialectic. This is enough to disprove the charge of 'intellectualism,' but it by no means implies that the mystical quest is 'irrational.' If the mystic were not convinced that the heaven of his desire exists objectively and independently of himself, he would at once cease to be a mystic; and if he did not believe that the quest to which he is committed involves the consecration of the intellectual faculties no less than of the will and affections, he could not believe, as he does, that only the unified personality can come into touch with the Godhead. The dictum of Plotinus that to aspire to rise above intelligence is to fall outside it shows how determined he is to take no short cuts to the beatific vision. The best Catholic theologians reject explicitly the argument of 'ontologism,' the claim that immediate and irrefragable certainty of the being of God is granted to us. The proof of God's existence is for them in the nature of a valid inference. The life of faith is justified to the intellect by this conclusion of the reason; but it remains a venture, without which it would not be faith. The venture is progressively justified by spiritual experience, which at last reaches intuitive certainty. The spiritual ascent gives as it were new data on which a true philosophy can be founded. Our earlier provisional syntheses may have to be discarded in the light of higher and fuller knowledge; but never, even in the highest stage, does faith become irrational.

There seems to be a curious dualism in the mind of the Modernist. In dealing with history, he is an extreme Vol. 240.-No. 476.

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