De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

The Vatican Council, in the Constitution Dei Filius, chap. 4, had declared: « For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human ingenuity as a philosophical invention to be perfected, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared. Hence that understanding of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which holy mother the Church has once declared, and there must never be a recession from that understanding under the appearance and name of a higher intelligence ». Then, in canon 3° on faith and reason: « If anyone shall say that it can come about that dogmas proposed by the Church are at some time, according to the progress of science, to be given a sense other than that which the Church has understood and understands, let him be anathema ».

Nevertheless, there now rises up in opposition a new school, treading the path begun by Günther in the century just past, which asserts a Kantian and plainly rationalistic evolution of our religion; which posits a change of dogma from form to form and from sense to sense, according to the various conditions of the environment and the successive states of intellectual culture; which says that the whole complex of Christian doctrine, as being a kind of offspring and elaboration of human reason under the pressure of the heart and of the religious sense, is in continuous and indefinite motion; which at last, in two famous little books of recent publication, obtaining its crude and full expression, now draws the Fathers. The Doctors. The Pontiffs, and the Church of all ages, by an insolent and proud provocation, as it were into contest, saying: « Faith has not on earth a permanent dwelling, but always needs transitory tabernacles. In vain, moreover, would they try to retain it in forms now grown old, which, accommodated to another mentality, can now be nothing more than venerable monuments of a time gone by. For now, in the present conditions of intellectual culture, it is no longer possible for a man judging according to the criteria of common sense alone to reconcile what he sees and reads in Scripture, with what our theologians seem to affirm concerning the universal and absolute truth of the same Scripture. It is no longer possible to reconcile the history of Christian doctrine with what our theologians seem to assert concerning its perpetual and ever persevering identity. It is no longer possible, to reconcile the natural sense of the gospel texts, even the most authentic, with what our theologians teach or seem to teach concerning the consciousness and the knowledge of Jesus Christ. It is no longer possible to retain, as adequate to the economy of salvation, a theory conceived in ignorance of the history of man upon earth, and of the history of religion in humanity itself, etc. Therefore, at length, the time has come to set in safety the faith wavering on every side concerning the authority of the Scriptures, by showing what the Bible really is, and what kind of truth ought to be attributed to it. The time has come to set in safety the faith wavering concerning redemption and salvation, by seeking beneath the formulas or ideas now dead the principle of incommutable truth which lies deep within them, and finally the intelligible notion of the parts which Christ holds in the moral regeneration of humanity. The time has come to set in safety the faith wavering concerning the resurrection of the Saviour and His eucharistic presence, by penetrating more deeply the mystery of the immortal Christ, living forever in God and in His work, etc. The time has come, finally, for the Catholic Church seriously to reflect that for a long time now she has not been sufficiently afraid of scandalizing the learned; and that Catholicism itself is reserved for a fatal ruin, as long as its preaching shall seem to impose on minds a conception of the world and of history discordant from that which the labour of the centuries just past has restored; and especially, as long as the faithful shall be held in the fear of offending God by thinking and admitting, in the philosophical, scientific and historical order, conclusions and hypotheses which the theologians of the Middle Ages did not foresee ».¹

Assuredly, no more radical denial of all the principles and rules of the Christian Catholic faith could have been devised. For one arrives, not only by logical deduction and ineluctable consequence, but also by the formal and explicit confession of the authors, at the categorical denial of all revelation, that is, of a true and properly so-called utterance of God. But this heresy, if indeed it can still be called a heresy, did not at once put on the complete form under which it now comes forth. It had its first roots in a false concept of Catholic tradition: namely, as if that tradition were placed in a bare and simple human historical fact, whose testimonies could and should be treated according to the same criteria and the same rules, neither more nor less, as all the other monuments of antiquity whatsoever.

Hence came forth the so-called historical method in the studies of positive theology: informed by which method, certain scholars seemed to themselves to detect a manifest opposition between the sense of dogma in the older Fathers, especially the ante-Nicene, and the sense which the Councils and Doctors of a later age embraced. Hence consequently there was reintroduced into dogmatic matters that Güntherian progress already struck down by the Vatican Council, with only a certain appearance of novelty added from the theory of evolution, which after Darwin had obtained so great a favour everywhere; and the notion of a living faith, as they say, began to become common, that is, of a faith which was at first contained in a certain germ, and then, proceeding as it were from an egg, and passing from species to species, after the manner of a Darwinian animal, by way of selection and under the influence of the surrounding environment, ever transforms itself into something better. But lest anyone perchance be anxious about the way of reconciling a theory of this kind with the Catholic principles concerning the infallibility of tradition or of the magisterium of the Church, there was opportunely revived that concept of relative truth which Günther had brought forth. Now they call it relative truth, by opposition to truth simply. To this there has hitherto been, so far as the possibility of circumstances allowed, a greater or lesser approximation, yet one far and ·far distant from the unknown absolute truth, perchance to be revealed in its own time. But since from relative truth an easy descent was now being prepared to the denial of all objective truth, therefore, proceeding further, they dug out from the workshops of Kantian philosophy the idea of moral dogmatism, or of a dogma which is nothing more than a subjective lucubration of the intellect under the determination of the will. At length there was reached the complete system which is expounded in summary in the above-mentioned work L'Évangile et l'Église. In which indeed, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Church, the Sacraments, in short all our dogmas, as and insofar as they are now believed by us, are nothing other than mystical ideas for a certain phase of evolution. In which also, historical criticism and faith are so arranged with respect to one another that they can never contradict each other, inasmuch as faith is concerned with the present form which the Christian idea has put on, while criticism is busied about the altogether different forms which existed at the origin.

It is therefore my settled purpose to treat of these matters in order, and first of that which opened a free way to the whole theory, namely, the erroneous concept of tradition. And because an erroneous concept does not become known except through true principles, our mind's consideration must be turned, at the threshold of the disputation, to these very principles.