La evolución homogénea del dogma católico

183. COMPLEMENT BY REVELATION AND COMPLEMENT BY EXPLANATION.—To finish studying the relations between the evolution of dogma and the authority of the Church, the object of this entire long chapter, there only remains for us to study the question of whether the Church, with its definitions, completes or perfects divine revelation. Although this question is as delicate as the preceding one, its solution is but a corollary of it.

To see this, one must recall that a thing is revelation and a very different thing is the explanation of revelation. In the same way, a thing is new revelation and a very different thing is a new explanation of the old revelation. Therefore, a thing is completing or perfecting the revealed deposit through new revelations or through new unrevealed truths, and a very different thing is completing or perfecting it through new explanations of the truths already revealed.

184. NO COMPLETION BY REVELATION IS POSSIBLE.—If the question is one of completing the revealed deposit with new revelations, we have already seen that all theologians teach that the Church cannot do this, and that this doctrine has been consecrated by the condemnation of its opposite in the twenty-first proposition of the Syllabus of Pius X (177). The deposit of Catholic revelation was closed with the Apostles, and since then no public revelation or hagiographic inspiration—which amounts to the same thing—can any longer find a place in the Church, but only mere divine assistance to preserve and explain what has been revealed. Thus the Vatican Council has defined ¹.

If it is also a matter of completing the revealed deposit with truths that are not contained in the deposit either explicitly or implicitly or inclusively, and that, therefore, are not truly revealed, it is evident that neither can the Church complete or perfect the revealed deposit with them by defining them as matters of faith. Nothing can be a dogma of divine faith if it is not truly revealed. That would not be completing or perfecting the deposit, but corrupting it. It would not be homogeneous evolution, but heterogeneous transformationism.

185. EXPLANATORY COMPLEMENT IS POSSIBLE AND EXISTS.—But if by completing or perfecting the revealed deposit one understands, not perfecting it with new revelations or with truths not revealed, but with a greater explanation of those truths that are called implicit virtuality or inclusive conclusions, there is no doubt that the Church can complete and perfect the revealed deposit with it, and she completes and perfects it whenever she defines as dogma one of those inclusive-consequential truths.

Because they are truly inclusive of the revealed deposit, they are implicitly and truly revealed. Because they are truly consequential, the Church does not need new revelation to know them, but rather divine assistance suffices, using human reasoning as a prior condition or as a mere instrument to deduce them, to unfold them, or, as the ancients said, to explain them, for a thing is rightly said to be explained when what was already previously contained or implicit in it is unfolded. Because, finally, they are a true virtuality of the revealed deposit and not mere subjective formulas of the believer, their development is a true development of the revealed deposit, whereby the latter is completed and perfected; just as every living being that does nothing more than develop its latent or implicit potentialities is completed and perfected without corruption or transformationism. This is nothing more than a simple corollary of the doctrine already set forth on the implicit virtuality of the revealed deposit.

Neither let it be said that with the Apostles the revealed deposit was already complete, and that what is complete admits no further complement. The revealed deposit was complete as regards revelation, but it was not closed or complete, but rather open and capable of being complemented as regards the divine explanation of what was already revealed.

186. THE DOCTRINE OF THE VATICAN COUNCIL.—Nor let it be argued that the Vatican Council teaches that the Church cannot perfect the revealed deposit. The Vatican Council does not teach that the Church cannot perfect the revealed deposit, but rather that it cannot perfect it in the manner of a philosophical system resulting from human inventions²

As we have already stated elsewhere, the development of any philosophical or human system entails three things: a) subtraction or expulsion of every datum, however ancient, that reason or experience shows to have been false; b) addition of every new datum that experience or reason proves to be true, even if it was not included in the primitive datum; c) modification of the meaning of the primitive datum when reason or experience shows that the old meaning was inaccurate. Thus all human systems develop, all institutions that are the fruit of man or of nature: removing, adding, modifying unceasingly.

In the development of the revealed deposit, which is not the fruit of man or of nature, but of God, and of a supernatural God, neither the Church nor true theology can do, nor do they do, any of these three things. In the process of development through lesser reasons inclusive, nothing old is taken away, nothing foreign is added, nothing is modified. The inclusive lesser reasons are not intended to take away, add, or modify anything in the greater truths of faith, but simply to unfold, develop, explain the inexhaustible fecundity enclosed in those greater truths revealed by God, and which, as divine, are pregnant and overflowing with divine truth, with dogmatic sap.

Let no reader, then, be scandalized if he hears us say that the Church perfects the deposit. She does not perfect it in the manner of a philosophical system, but she does perfect it, because she increases the explanation of the deposit, and that authentic explanation given by the Church enters into forming part of the deposit itself and comes to be preserved as a true and legitimate integral part of the revealed deposit.

Although we all know from traditional theology, and Vatican Council has already defined it, that the Church has the divine mission not only of preserving but also of explaining the deposit, there are some whom excessive fear of modernism or the reading of certain theological manuals has made so timid or of such narrow criteria, that they imagine that this action of explaining which the Church exercises is an action, not upon the revealed deposit, which they consider as completely immutable and intangible, but exclusively upon the subjective intelligence of the faithful.

In our judgment, they are very much mistaken. One thing is those to whom it is explained and another what is explained. Those to whom the Church explains the deposit are surely the faithful; but what the Church explains or unfolds is not the faithful, but the deposit.

The action of the Church is, then, not only upon the faithful, but also upon the very revealed deposit itself. With every action or dogmatic definition of the Church, a degree of development or growth is verified in the deposit itself, although always in relation to us. Growth not by something that comes from outside, but by something that comes from within, as everything vital or homogeneous always proceeds. Growth not of new substance, but of explanation or greater unfolding of the substance; yet true and proper growth, true and proper evolution, though never transformism³.

187. THE DOCTRINE OF VINCENT OF LÉRINS.—Vincent of Lérins, whose authority on this matter everyone acknowledges, has well expressed both what the Church cannot do and what it can do with regard to dogma or the revealed deposit.

What the Church cannot do and does not do is expressed by Lirinensis in the following phrases: a) it changes nothing; b) it diminishes nothing; c) it adds nothing; d) it does not cut off what is necessary; e) it does not append what is superfluous; f) it does not lose what is its own; g) it does not usurp what belongs to others. None of this does the Church do with regard to the deposit; as for that manner of acting, the deposit is sacred, it is immutable, it is intangible.

What the Church can do, and does, with regard to the deposit itself (and not only with regard to the faithful), it expresses with the following formulas: a) excolatur; b) floreat; c) maturescat; d) proficiat; e) PERFICIATUR.

Let our objector note those last two terms of the Lirinensian. Under the action of the Church, which is none other than the action of the Holy Spirit, the deposit itself grows (proficiat); the deposit itself is perfected (perficiatur).

And so in the primitive deposit not all dogmas were found for us in a formal manner, but some were found in an unformed manner; not all were found in a finished manner, but some were only begun. To the Church, whose instrument is theology, God has entrusted the mission not only of preserving what was already in a formal or finished manner, but also of explaining, that is, of developing, maturing, and completing what was for us only unformed and sketched out. "Si qua sunt illa antiquitus informata et inchoata, accuret et poliat; si qua iam firmata et definita, custodiat"⁴

Under the action, then, of the Church, the revealed deposit is not perfected in the manner of a philosophical or human system, but it is perfected. It is not perfected as to its substance, but it is perfected as to its explanation. It is not perfected by means of a new divine revelation, but it is perfected by means of a perpetual divine assistance. Because that authority or assistance is divine, the growth is dogmatic. Because it is assistance and not revelation, it must use and does use all human means; and the human means most connatural to our weak intellect for developing or explaining the content or inner fecundity of an intellectual deposit, such as the revealed deposit is, has been and always will be inclusive reasoning. By another name, the way of theological conclusion; the way "from one thing to another according to reason, which is not another thing according to reality." (ST. THOMAS.)