De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

Up to now, then, you had thought, my good man, that the whole object of our faith is something solidly subsistent in the order of objective reality, made known to us, or attested, by God revealing. But in this you were mistaken, and it is time you knew that this object is nothing else than a certain complex of ideas that the human mind has brought forth and is still elaborating. An idea, Christ God. An idea, Christ risen from the dead. An idea, the mystery of the Trinity. An idea, the real presence under the species of the sacrament. An idea, eternal beatitude with all the promises of the life to come — so that that anchor of your hope must henceforth be fixed, not in the firm earth of the living, but in conceptions subject to indefinite evolution, that anchor which formerly, deceived by an excessive simplicity, you thought to advance even into the interior of the veil, where the forerunner, Jesus, entered for us, that is, the real and historical Christ.

Up to now you had thought that in the aforesaid object of our faith many facts are contained as such. Facts, I say, that are indeed simply historical insofar as they are attested by human historical testimony, but that pertain altogether to divine faith insofar as they are at the same time invested with the higher and firmer testimony of God. And again you were mistaken, because facts as facts neither are nor ever can be part of the object of faith. But if the passion, the crucifixion, and the death of Jesus, for example, are counted among the other articles of faith in the creed, they enter the order of faith only to the extent that they are affirmed by the religious sense and introduced into the construction of an ideal system. Nevertheless, the objective materiality of these facts is the object of historical knowledge alone; it is placed exclusively under the judgment of history alone¹.

Up to now you had thought that the Gospel is a book of absolute inerrancy, where the figure of Jesus Christ our Lord is genuine, whose goodness and kindness has appeared to all men, instructing us that, denying impiety and worldly desires, we should live soberly and justly and piously in this world. But these again are things of the old and antiquated style². John, with his mystical fictions, utterly disfigures the real Christ. The Synoptics, however, have so many spurious elements mixed in that it is extremely difficult for criticism to distinguish the genuine accounts from the non-genuine. Nay more, even in the very undoubted and most authentic words of the Saviour, there will be nothing for you to seek hereafter as a sure rule of truth and holiness. Perhaps you thought that the prayer which the Lord Jesus taught you in the Gospel is good. But now you must know that the Lord's Prayer, in certain of its parts, offers no less occasion for criticism than the prayer to St Anthony of Padua for recovering a lost object, and that, taken in the rigour of its historical and primitive signification, it is subversive of the social economy³.

Up to now you had thought that our religion, the constitution of the Church, the Christian sacrifice and sacraments are of divine law, that is, of God's institution. But again you must renounce this pious credulity too, or at any rate entirely change the notion of divine law that you had previously formed for yourself. For in truth all these things were invented by the community, willed by the community, prescribed by the community, imposed by the community. Since, however, nothing certainly prevents you from considering the community as that in which the spirit of the mystical Christ acts and lives, if in this sense it pleases you to find an institution greater than human, you may do so freely, and console yourself with these words.

Up to now you had believed in the sincerity of Catholics. You thought that the Catholic feels in his heart nothing other than what he professes with his mouth, according to that word of the apostle: With the heart one believes unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. And you were wrong! For while you spontaneously profess the Catholic faith, while you say that you hold it truly, while you promise, vow and swear to retain and confess it whole and immaculate to the last breath of life, in reality you do not adhere to the formula that you pronounce with your mouth. For hear again: « The believer adheres by his intention to the full and absolute truth which the ecclesiastical formula figures. But to adhere to the formula as such, with an assent of divine faith, would be the same as to adhere to its inevitable imperfections, the same as to proclaim it imperfectible and adequate, although it is inadequate and imperfect »⁴. What then? Are you a liar? Are you a perjurer? Are you a hypocrite? And indeed, as regards the past, you will doubtless have as your excuse that you had not yet arrived at the consciousness of this hypocrisy of yours. But you now show yourself anxious about the future. Yet there is nothing for you to fear. For we have already been taught, and not in vain, in the matter of the literary forms of Sacred Scripture, that in the East a lie is not a lie. Extend, then, this doctrine a little from the East to the West, at least as regards the special matter of faith, and you will be secure from every scruple.

Up to now you would have held it a crime to agree with the doctrines of heretics, or of those who in the old style were called such. But now see by what an absurd prejudice you were held. Will not the Lutheran formula too, or the Socinian, or the Arian, or the Mohammedan, by the same right and the same title as the formula of the Roman Catholic Church, be able to figure that absolute and unknown truth, to which alone you always adhere by intention? Therefore it matters very little to what confession you have given your name. Are you a Catholic? Become a Protestant, if you please. Nay more, nothing will stand in the way of your being a Catholic and a Protestant at once, because the simultaneous profession of Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, and so on, will in no way prejudice the Catholic profession. And who, after all, can there be that will not adhere by his intention to the unknown truth alone, which is perhaps to be revealed in the future? Therefore by the communion of faith we are already associated with all the confessions that are in the world, and already the dawn is breaking of that age in which the religion of all humanity will be one, all the divisions being abolished for ever which ancient superstition had brought in.