De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

I. — You will conclude, therefore, that faith has no permanent dwelling on earth, although it always stands in need of transient tabernacles. You will conclude especially that in vain would they try to retain it in forms now grown antiquated, which, having been accommodated to another mentality, can now be nothing more than venerable monuments of a time that is past¹.

For now the new state of the culture of the human spirit calls on every side for a new evolution. In this new evolution, indeed, the Church will have nothing else to do than what she has done from the beginning. For she has always adapted herself with wondrous flexibility to progress, casting aside the old sense of the dogmas and substituting the new, which was suited to the new times².

Nor does it avail to say that the Catholic Church seems not to acknowledge the existence of this change of hers in past centuries — nay rather, she condemned under anathema in the Vatican Council the opinions that assert it. For this is so because she has not yet arrived at the consciousness of her own evolution, and does not yet have a fixed theory concerning the philosophy of her own history. Wherefore nothing else follows than that one thing still remains to be evolved in the Church, and that is the very idea or notion of evolution³.

II. — You will conclude further that faith and history are altogether disparate things. For history is about facts, whereas faith is only about ideas that are evolved on the occasion of facts, and advance with a continuous motion toward the highest ideal. Disparate, too, are the domains of theology and the domains of criticism. For it belongs to the theologian to define the form of Christian truth that now is; to the critic, to investigate the other form that was at the origin. For it can be said without paradox that there is not even one chapter of Scripture, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Apocalypse, in which is contained a doctrine altogether identical with the Church's present doctrine on the same object. And therefore, too, there is not even one chapter that has the same sense for the critic and for the theologian⁴.

Whence it follows that it is impossible for the critic ever to contradict the theologian, or vice versa, provided each keeps himself within his own sphere; impossible also, and for the same reason, for criticism ever to be in opposition to faith. And the reason is that there is no possible opposition where there is no possible point of junction, as in fact happens at present, the presuppositions being granted. For if faith is not about facts but only about conceptions, and these according to the form of evolution contemporary with them, which is wholly different from the form that the conceptions of earlier times had; if, moreover, criticism judges only of facts or of the forms that faith had in ages past: it is clear that the believer never meets the critic on the same field. The critic will be able to coexist in the same man together with the believer, and whatever the former may opine, the latter will always remain in the peaceful possession of his faith.

And so much the more easily will this happen, because the believer, for his part, never adheres from the heart to any determinate formula, but always adheres by his intention to the absolute and unknown truth which the imperfect and relative formula proposed by the Church figures. For to adhere to the formula as such, by the assent of divine faith, would be the same as to adhere to its inevitable imperfections; the same as to proclaim the formula imperfectible and adequate, although it neither is nor can be absolutely true. The Catholic, then, can believe the Church's authority, and the things that the Church teaches, but he does not for that reason think that the ecclesiastical formulary signifies its object with such perfection that nothing in it is ever to be corrected by way of interpretation⁵.