De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

I. — Now the Christological dogma grew and matured in the Christian consciousness gradually, as by a certain continuous effort of faith towards its own transcendent object, and has not yet reached its ultimate term, although it always follows the same way, setting Jesus always in a higher place, and displaying an ever more comprehensive idea of His mission, according as there opens day by day to the enlightened faith a broader conception of the world and of humanity¹.

« The evangelists summarized the preaching of Jesus at the beginning of His ministry in the words: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. These words could just as well represent in brief the whole teaching of the Saviour in Galilee and in Jerusalem. They express the necessity of a moral conversion, but with a view to the kingdom ready to come, that is to say, with a view to the eschatological perspective... The perspective of the great advent explains why Jesus promulgates no properly disciplinary prescription... But the same perspective helps also to understand why He requires of all those who aspire to the kingdom, not the disposition to sacrifice eventually their goods and their family affections to the higher interest of salvation, but to leave everything immediately in order to follow Him, etc. ». L'Ev. et l'Egl., p. 5-24.

And the first stage of evolution was after the ignominious death of Jesus, when there began faith in Jesus living and seated at the right hand of God until the time of the parousia, that is, of the final advent of the kingdom of heaven. The second stage was in the access of the Gentiles to Christianity, which gave occasion to the Pauline theory of Jesus as saviour of all men, and of the new Adam who by His blood expiated the whole human race, and reconciled to God in one body through the cross the two peoples of the circumcision and of the foreskin. The third stage was after the contact of the Christian faith with Greek philosophy, when in that place, intermediate between God and the world, which Philo had assigned to the Λόγω, Paul placed the immortal and mystical Christ, so that He should be now the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, through whom all things in the physical world were created, all things in the moral world pacified, both those in the heavens and those on the earth. The fourth stage was in the appearance of the fourth Gospel, when Jesus, Son of God and of man, the predestined saviour, was transformed into the Word made flesh, who manifested Himself to men as the fount of eternal light and of eternal life. The fifth stage was afterwards, when faith had to find a means of reconciling with one another the reality of the Gospel history, the theory of Paul and the theory of John, so that there should issue from them a coordinated system².

But in constructing this system, the Christian sense, after many hesitations, affirmed first that the Word and the Spirit are personalities distinct from the Father, the creator. Athanasius then, with the council of Nicaea, asserted that the Word of God, though personally distinct from the Father, is nevertheless God, consubstantial with the same Father. Hence was condemned the opinion of Apollinaris, who said that the Word was in the humanity of Jesus in the place of the intellective soul. Then the opinion of Nestorius, who posited a person of Jesus distinct from the person of the Word. Then the opinion of Eutyches, who would have the human nature incorporated into the divine nature. Finally it was added, in the fifth Council, that the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word substantially, and in the sixth Council, that the unity of person does not carry with it the unity of will. And so the Christological dogma was completed, insofar as that was possible according to the traditional notions and the principles of ancient philosophy³.

But now the problem rises again from the beginning, and the mystery of the hypostatic union needs a new determination, because the traditional formula no longer answers to the state of modern science. For according to theology the notion of person is a metaphysical notion, but in modern philosophy it has become a psychological notion belonging to the order of consciousness. Unless therefore we wish to say that the Church has lost the gifts of faith and of understanding by which she constructed the faith of time past, it is lawful to believe that by the same means she will be able to build the faith of time to come, by explaining her fundamental principle concerning the twofold revelation of God in the world, that is, the religious notion of the living God and of Christ God⁴.

II. — In the same way as the Christological dogma, the theological dogma too was evolved, until it should issue in faith in a threefold God without a multiplication of God. And although this dogma seems to consist of contradictory notions, it is not therefore to be thought that it was less accommodated to the religious sense from which it had its origin. For the defect of logic and of rational consistency which is a principle of ruin in philosophical systems is in theology rather a principle of solidity and of duration, because orthodoxy, when it no longer perceives the connexion and the concordance of its assertions, proclaims a mystery. And so it happened in fact with regard to the Incarnation, when the duality of natures in the unity of the supposit was defined; so too with regard to the Trinity, when the consubstantiality of the three persons definitively prevailed⁵.

III. — The same mode of evolution is discerned in the dogma of grace and in the dogma of the Church. But these two dogmas sprouted in the West in conformity with the peculiar genius of the Latins; whereas, on the contrary, the theological dogma had had a soft and easy soil for its cultivation in the East, where the Greek mind was more inclined to metaphysical speculations⁶.

In the latter of these two dogmas you will observe in particular that the determinations of the principle of authority in the Church do not rest upon a literal and logical interpretation of the texts (Matth. XVI-18, XVIII-18, Ioan. XXI-15, etc.). because the Church is founded not upon texts but upon a living faith, and through this faith, not through the texts, does she subsist, except insofar as faith uses the texts, interpreting them, and considering in them the express will of its Christ, who is not the historical Christ but the Christ-idea, or the mystical Christ⁷.

For it is certain that Jesus, who was persuaded that the consummation of the world was already at hand, had thought nothing at all of instituting an ecclesiastical government upon earth. But after Him, in response to the exigency born of that supreme law which is social conservation, there was introduced gradually and imperceptibly a hierarchical organization under the primacy of the Roman bishop, and those things were accommodated to the conditions of a world that endures which had been said by Jesus only for a world soon to perish⁸.

Accordingly the present government of the Roman Church, most like to a military government, received its determination under the influence of contingent circumstances only. And since, on the other hand, it easily furnishes an occasion for the gravest inconveniences (of which sort are the oppression of individuals, and the obstruction hindering the scientific movement, and generally all the forms of free examination), it may rightly and deservedly be asked whether that same Church, which has exaggerated the principle of authority up to the furthest limits, is not soon to be placed under the necessity of attenuating the quasi-despotic forms of her government; and that after the manner of human governments, which are compelled to abolish them day by day. Nay, it is a conjecture, and one greatly to be desired, that in the future democracy which is already being prepared, the bishops will not be so great among men, but, losing nothing in the meantime of the rights of their ministry (which will then at last resume the primitive and essential character of duties), they will have a manner of acting with the faithful more conformable to the fundamental equality and to the personal dignity of all Christians⁹.

IV. — The sacramental system too, taken as a whole, keeps the general condition of evolution, and luminously shows the persevering effort of Christianity to pervade with its spirit and, as it were, to imbue the whole life of man, from birth even to death¹⁰.

And the primitive Church indeed had as yet only two sacraments, namely baptism and the Eucharist; in what sense they can be said to have been instituted by Christ, it is necessary to consider¹¹.

Certainly the institution of baptism must be referred to the Christ of faith, not to the Christ of history. For certain things about baptism are contained in the fourth Gospel, as is that word of Ioan. III-5: Unless one be born again, etc., together with those passages where it is read that Jesus was baptizing, Ioan. III 22, IV-1. But it has often already been said that in the fourth Gospel nothing is heard but the voice of Christian consciousness and faith. But concerning the other things that are contained in the Synoptics, as is that word of Matth. XXVIII-19: Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it must be observed that they are reported as spoken by the Christ risen from the dead, who is outside every order of concrete reality as far as we are concerned. Moreover, so categorical and distinct an enumeration of the three persons, which would scarcely be possible in the fourth Gospel, cannot be found in the first, except as a gloss inserted under the influence of Christian usage. Whence the historian rightly and deservedly asserts that the first of the Christian sacraments was born with the Christian community, through the imitation of Jewish customs. Likewise, that it is the community itself which determined the conditions in which baptism must be administered, the community also which made baptism necessary, and annexed to it all the obligations of the Christian profession. Yet even so, from the standpoint of faith, baptism can be said to have been instituted by Christ, because what the community ordained, that was willed by the Spirit who governs the community, and consequently by the immortal Christ who gives the Spirit¹².

The same applies a fortiori to confirmation, which in primitive Christianity was not yet formally distinguished from baptism. Although theology is free to admit a virtual distinction which has been reduced to act according to the need of the community, by the authority of the Church in which Christ lives¹³.

But of the other sacrament which the primitive Church had, that is, of the Eucharist, one must judge as of baptism. For in Paul's narrative of the last supper (1 Cor. XI), which is the most complete of all, it is difficult to distinguish what may be from the primitive tradition from what belongs to the theological and moral commentary of the apostle. For Paul is the theologian of the redemptive death, and it is manifest that he interprets, according to his own theory of universal expiation, the supper that commemorates the death. Further, it seems clear enough that those words: This is my blood of the new testament which shall be shed for many, were added by the redactor of the second Gospel to a simpler narrative which previously ran thus: And while they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessing it broke it, and gave it to them, and said: Take it, this is my body. And taking the chalice, giving thanks, He gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And He said to them: Amen I say to you, that I will drink no more of this fruit of the vine until that day when I shall drink it new in the kingdom of God. And this narrative agrees with the narrative of Luke, without the additions which were afterwards imported from the first to the Corinthians. In which shorter narrative indeed the idea of a death near at hand is suggested, but not the idea of expiation, and there is nothing that hints at a renewal of the supper outside the messianic banquet at the coming of the heavenly kingdom. Accordingly the origin of the Eucharist is presented to the historian in the same conditions as the origin of baptism, with only a twofold difference preserved. The first is that it is connected with the memory of a determinate and precise circumstance, the last supper of Jesus with His disciples. The second is that the circumstances are better discerned in which the memory of the last supper in some way became incarnate in the supper of the apostolic community, that is, in the sacrament of the Eucharist¹⁴.

Besides, faith in the real presence developed together with faith in the Christ risen from the dead, in the immortal Christ, in the Christ-Spirit, and had its root in large part in those visions in which Jesus appeared alive again, breaking and giving bread to His friends¹⁵.

Now, however, the word of the Johannine Christ concerning the remission of sins (Ioann. XX-23) does not directly regard the sacrament of penance. The theory which places the matter in the three acts of the penitent, and the form of the sacrament in the absolution, has no apostolic origin. The confession of sins committed after baptism was not formally prescribed by Christ. The first Christian age did not acknowledge as a sacrament the private confession made to the priest alone. Ecclesiastical absolution was not originally regarded as a judicial sentence¹⁶.

For in very truth, the Church of the earlier age did not have the idea of a Christian sinner and one reconciled, but only little by little was this notion introduced, and together with it the notion of a second plank after shipwreck. Yet nevertheless, although the Gospel texts concerning the power of the keys regard principally baptism, they still suppose in the Church a consciousness of an unlimited power of remitting, which in the course of time gave origin to a duplication of baptism in the sacrament of penance, And this origin is legitimate from the standpoint of faith, because it presents a certain aspect of the Christ who lives, and of the Spirit who acts in the Church from the beginning. Wherefore, in this sense, the historian can admit that there is nothing in the present discipline of penance that is foreign to the institution of Christ¹⁷.

Likewise, since Jesus seems to have prescribed, or at least permitted, that anointings of oil joined with certain prayers be made for the sick, for their relief or healing, this usage, persisting after Jesus, at length issued in the sacrament of extreme unction¹⁸.

Nor is the origin of the sacrament of Orders dissimilar, because insofar as the supper gradually assumed the character of a liturgical act, those who were wont to preside over it acquired the character of priests. Further, the elders (whence the name presbyteri), who in the Christian assemblies discharged the office of watching over (whence the name episcopi), were instituted by the apostles that the need of organization in the Christian communities might be satisfied, but by no means for the perpetuity of the apostolic mission and power. Their ministry coexisted with the ministry of the apostleship, and afterwards, as need required, it was in fact substituted in its place. But the distinction between bishop and presbyter came later. And all these things are the work of the Spirit in the Church; but the institution of Christ, for him who believes in Christ¹⁹.

From the first, therefore, to the last, nothing is more evident than that the general idea of sacramental institution, as it is enunciated in the decrees of Trent, is not a historical representation of what Jesus did and the apostolic Church felt, but a mere interpretation of the traditional fact, which has authority and value for faith alone²⁰.

Hence it is also evident that the epoch in which the Church determined the sevenfold number of the sacraments (about the twelfth century) was only a certain particular phase of sacramental evolution, and that this evolution has by no means reached its last term, because it will not be able to receive an end except with the Church herself²¹.

Now, sacramental symbols will henceforth be able to be held as not unworthy of the majesty of God, insofar as it is well understood that they are not interposed between God and man as instruments of sanctification, but only as recalling to the mind of man the perpetually beneficent presence of his Creator²².