Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

The infallibility of the Church directly and primarily embraces the whole revealed word of God, that is, the sole and entire apostolic deposit of faith.

That the Christian revelation will never yield its place to another revealed economy is evident from what we have said concerning the perpetuity of the messianic revelation and the indefectibility of the Church.¹ But just as the revelation begun in the Old Testament and perfected in the New cannot be abrogated, so neither can it be objectively increased, but it remains wholly closed from the death of the last apostle. This indeed Sacred Scripture and patristic Tradition clearly declare.

1. Sacred Scripture. The Gospel, which Christ commands to be preached to all times and to all creatures, is confined to those things which He Himself revealed to the apostles, teaching visibly and sending the Holy Spirit invisibly: "Going... teach all nations... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you ... I have yet many things to say to you: but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth."² Only the truth, therefore, which the apostles received from Christ and the Holy Spirit is the Christian truth to be preached to all nations and times. Besides this truth "there is no other gospel", as St. Paul writes.³ Whence also all the faithful are said to be "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone",⁴ i. e. the doctrinal foundation of the Church is the revelation of the Old Testament through the prophets and the revelation of the New Testament completed through the apostles, whose beginning and end is Christ Jesus. Wherefore the successors of the apostles are everywhere shown forth as witnesses and teachers only of those things which they had received from the apostles. They are admonished to keep the apostolic deposit of faith inviolably: "Hold the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me in faith ... Keep the good deposit through the Holy Spirit."⁵⁶ They are forbidden to receive any new doctrine whatsoever, even if it comes under the name of supernatural revelation: "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema."⁷ Beyond the apostolic deposit, therefore, the Church has no other revelation to hand on to the faithful.

2. Patristic Tradition. Already Tertullian says excellently: "For us there is no need of curiosity after Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry after the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing further to believe. For this we believe first, that there is nothing which we ought to believe beyond ... This trench [boundary] He Himself [Christ] marked out for you, who does not will you to believe anything other than what He instituted, and therefore not even to seek."⁸ Augustine: "That [Cyprian] admonishes us to have recourse to the fountain, that is, to the apostolic tradition, and from there to direct the channel into our times, is best and without hesitation to be done."⁹ Jerome: "Except the apostles, whatever else shall be said afterwards, let it be cut off, let it have no authority."¹⁰ Vincent of Lérins: "To receive and follow new [post-apostolic] expressions was never [the mark] of Catholics, but always of heretics ... It is shown to all with sufficient evidence and clarity that among almost all heresies this is, as it were, a solemn and legitimate practice: that they always delight in profane novelties, disdain the ordinances of antiquity, and through the oppositions of knowledge falsely so called make shipwreck of the faith. But on the contrary, this is truly proper to Catholics: to keep the deposits and trusts of the holy fathers, to condemn profane novelties, and, as the apostle said, 'if anyone shall announce besides what has been received, let him be anathema'."¹¹

Whence it is clear that the revelations which were made after the apostles, are made, or will be made do not belong to the deposit of faith, which has been committed to the Church to be guarded, explained, and proposed. Never, therefore, can the Church pronounce, or does it intend to pronounce, an infallible judgment concerning such private revelations.¹² The deposit of the public revelation (i. e. destined for all men) was sealed by the death of the last apostle in such a way that from then on it suffers no increase in itself. Wherefore this sentence of the modernists was justly condemned: "Revelation constituting the object of the Catholic faith was not completed with the apostles."¹³

But just as ecclesiastical infallibility comprises only the apostolic deposit, so it comprises:

For brighter than light are the words by which Christ promises to the teaching office of the Church His perennial assistance, that it may teach the whole world all days everything whatsoever He Himself commanded,¹ and likewise the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church into all truth,² namely revealed truth. Whatever therefore has been formally revealed is the object of infallibility, whether those things are contained in the deposit explicitly or implicitly.

1. Explicitly revealed are those things which are set forth in the deposit not only as to concept, but as to their proper term, e.g.: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth;"³ "And the Word was made flesh."⁴ These, since they were revealed with such clarity, could never be unknown in the Church, and hence from the very first centuries they had to be proposed to the faithful by an explicit, constant and universal preaching. Concerning these indeed that well-known canon of Vincent of Lérins holds most of all: "In the catholic Church itself great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all."⁵

2. Implicitly revealed are those things which are set forth in the deposit not indeed under their proper term, but nevertheless as to concept or sense, e.g., that in Christ there are two wills; that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. These, since they conduce to a fuller and deeper understanding of revelation, were not immediately understood and preached in the primitive Church, but were believed only by implicit faith. In the course of the centuries, however, as theological science advanced, controversies arose, and the Holy Spirit guided the Church, the implicitly revealed and believed truths could and can be gradually unfolded by the infallible magisterium and at length definitively proposed.⁶

Hence it is clear that the deposit of faith, although it admits of no increase in itself, nevertheless admits of progress with respect to us. On this matter Vincent of Lérins discourses excellently: "But perhaps someone will say: Shall there then be no progress of religion in the Church? Let there certainly be, and the greatest. For who is that man so envious of men, so hateful to God, as to try to forbid it? But yet in such a way that it be a true progress of faith, not a change. For it pertains to progress that each thing be amplified in itself; but to change, that something be turned from one thing into another. Let the understanding, knowledge and wisdom both of individuals and of all, both of one man and of the whole Church, grow therefore and advance much and vehemently through the stages of ages and centuries, but only in its own kind, namely in the same dogma ... Let the religion of souls imitate the manner of bodies, which, although in the process of years they unfold and develop their numbers, yet remain the same as they were."⁷ Therefore the revealed truths entrusted to the infallible magisterium of the Church are not like stones, but like seeds, whose innate powers and virtues must day by day be unfolded and whose fruits set forth. However they are unfolded and set forth, the same apostolic deposit remains, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared by the Church.

Corollary. From what has been said it follows that in the Christian economy there is no place for a history of revelation. The history of revelation obtained until the end of the apostolic age, since throughout the whole Old Testament, from the first beginning of revelation up to Christ and the apostles, new revelations continually accrued to the old; from then on, however, it no longer obtains, since the deposit of revelation remains objectively closed by the death of the last apostle. Since nevertheless the apostolic deposit can and must be more and more unfolded and proposed in the course of time, in the Christian economy there is also a history of dogmas, i.e., a history of the unfolding and proposing of the revealed truths. The dogmas themselves, however, i.e., the truths once definitively proposed by the Church, exclude historical progress or the so-called "evolution" just as revelation itself does. Hence the Vatican Council: "For the doctrine of the faith which God revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention, to human minds to be perfected, but has been handed to the spouse of Christ as a divine deposit, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared. Hence, too, that sense of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which holy Mother Church once declared, nor is it ever to be departed from that sense under the appearance and name of a higher understanding ... If anyone shall say that it is possible that, according to the progress of science, a sense is sometimes to be attributed to the dogmas proposed by the Church other than that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema."⁸ Likewise Pius X rejected the modernists' "fiction of the evolution of dogmas, passing from one sense into another sense, different from that which the Church formerly had".⁹