6

Ecclesia in St Matthew is unhistorical; Jesus can never have said this' (Matt. xvi, 18). The words about binding and loosing have been transferred from another context.' 'Jesus gave no primacy or privileged position to any of His apostles.' The commission of primacy to Peter is plainly an interpolation.' 'The Gospel of Christ and the Roman World-Church are united by no inner band; a gulf yawns between them.' The Catholicising of Christianity begins immediately after the death of Jesus. The Pentecost is the birthday of the Catholic World-Church; not the man Jesus, but the Kyrios Christos and His Spirit founded the universal Church.'

These are precisely the arguments which lead the Protestant to reject the Catholic position as historically untenable; but to the Catholic Modernist they cause no uneasiness. If you want to establish the identity of an individual,' says Loisy, 'it is not necessary to squeeze him into his cradle.'

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'The system of Catholic dogma has its root in the Pauline myth of the Son of God.' (By a 'myth' Heiler says that he means a fact-like historical picture' or 'symbolical narrative-phrases which he borrows from Baron von Hügel.) St Paul is also the father of Catholic mysticism; through him the Orphic-Platonic piety,' with which the Hellenistic world was saturated,' was permanently amalgamated with Christianity. St Paul 'lived in the higher world of the Spirit, the world of mystical inwardness.' The whole Christ-drama of salvation passes into this mystical inner life'; the whole process of Christ, His death, resurrection, and ascension, must be re-enacted in the personal experience of the Christian. Therewith came a certain indifference to the merely historical aspect of the revelation: though we have known Christ after the flesh, henceforth we know Him so no more' (2 Cor. v, 16).

In the later books of the New Testament, the Pastoral Epistles and the Gospel of Matthew, we find another spirit. The Pastoral Epistles are the first document of narrow and stiff Roman Churchmanship.' The editor of our First Gospel has also done much to turn the announcement of the Kingdom of God into the proclamation of a legal ecclesiastical system. It has been the favourite Gospel of the Roman hierarchy, which finds in it its

most impressive texts. 'The Apocalypse is "the first document of the Catholic popular (vulgar) religion." 'Old Oriental cosmology, Jewish eschatology, Chaldæan astrology, Assyrian number-symbolism, Hellenistic magic and Sibylline prophecy, Persian dualism and Christian belief in redemption, are here thrown together in a chaotic syncretism.' Most of these elements lived on in the popular religion of the Middle Ages.

The Fourth Evangelist is neither a missionary nor an ecclesiastic; he is a mystical theologian, the Origen of primitive Christianity. The Johannine Christ is a figure of unmoved, passionless majesty; the picture makes a strong appeal to Buddhist students. The nameless disciple, who leaned on Jesus' breast, is the mystic, who penetrates furthest into the secrets of the Divine. The piety of this Gospel is Gnostic Mysticism,' if we may use the word Gnostic, as Clement did, as a title of honour. Nevertheless, the Evangelist is a loyal Catholic: the mother of Jesus' is an allegory of the Church, and 'Peter' of Church authority. (Heiler, we think, is mistaken in attributing a half-magical sacramental doctrine to this Evangelist, who, on the contrary, carefully dissociates his sacramental teaching from the rites, and describes only one institution of a sacrament, namely, the feet-washing, which never established itself in the Church as a recognised 'mysterium.') The dogma of the Incarnation is the great creation of this writer.' For the rest, his Gospel of love is the genuine Gospel of Christ; and the Reformers naturally prized 'St John' above all the other Evangelists. The 'native air' of this treatise is of course not Palestine, but the Alexandrian religious world.'

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Heiler next traces the development of Catholicism during its 'campaign on two fronts,' against Marcion and the Gnostics. Gnosticism was a 'hot-house growth,' which the early Church could not incorporate without danger; Marcionism was an attempted return to the primitive Gospel. The Church steered a middle course between them, borrowing something from both, but continually strengthening the hands of authority and checking the 'liberty of prophesying.' In this kind of statesmanship Rome took the lead.

The Alexandrian philosophy of religion is not much

to Heiler's taste. He begins to talk about 'intellectualism,' that bugbear of modern thought, which it is the custom to attribute to the Greeks. The Platonic school, to which Catholic theology is so much indebted, is certainly not 'intellectualist' in the disparaging sense. The organ of divine knowledge (voûç) is not the logicchopping faculty, but the whole personality unified by a discipline which is at least as much moral as intellectual, for the quest of truth, goodness, and beauty. The rootprinciple of Platonism, as of all Christian mysticism, is that spiritual things are spiritually discerned, so that the soul must commit itself whole-heartedly to the upward path before it can form true conceptions of supersensual reality. Certainly the statement that religion is 'irrational' would seem to Platonists and mystics of all ages nothing less than treason against our highest endowment. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit' are gifts of intellectual enlightenment, and have always been recognised as such by the General Councils, which opened with a special invocation of the Holy Ghost. Heiler's notion that Catholic philosophy lost sight of faith and love in verbal disputations is quite untrue. The Catholic theologians never, in theory at least, forgot the truth. which they learned from Plotinus, that the mind (or spirit) in love can alone reach the full attainment of divine knowledge. Heiler regards Origen as the founder of Scholasticism; but he reserves his strongest censures for St Thomas Aquinas, whose theology is still authoritative in the Church of Rome. The whole of the 'proofs of God's existence,' and the rest of the demonstration which claims to establish by the light of reason the fundamental principles of religion, Heiler regards as a disastrous blunder, an attempt to rationalise the irrational. He reminds us of what of course is true, that the mental state of the philosophic theologian is quite different from that of the saint at prayer. Spiritual experience is not gathered by dialectic; no one ever supposed that it was; but it is difficult to understand how an earnest and candid mind can be content to leave religious convictions entirely uncoordinated with human knowledge, a mere mass of emotions nowhere in contact with external fact. When we remember how Heiler and his school have dealt with the Jesus of history,

we can only read with amazement such a sentence as this: 'The living Christ-piety, the belief in the incarnate Son of God, the following of the poor and meek Jesus, the love of the heavenly Saviour and bridegroom of the soul, the prayers to the eternal Christ as the King of Kings-all this has nothing to do with the Christuspopanz, for which the traditional apologetic strives. As the God of speculative dogmatics is other than the God of devout piety, so the Christ of apologetics and dogmatics is other than the Christ of real piety.' It is plain that 'the object of real piety' is for this school a Being who never existed. It is enough to say that the early Church was quite familiar with cults of non-historical dying and rising Saviour Gods, and suffered persecutions because it refused to have anything to do with them or to recognise any truth in them.

Scholastic theology was, as we all know, the child of an utterly unscientific and half-barbarous age. It attempts to prove some things that cannot be proven, and other things that we now know to be untrue. Some Thomists are justly accused of that abuse of logic which consists in moving counters about as if they were known entities with a fixed connotation. But to condemn their whole method and object is 'misology' of the worst description. Even the famous 'proofs of God's existence' were not killed by Kant; they may all be stated in forms which are still valuable and even cogent.

After the concordat with the State in the reign of Constantine, the Church was rapidly paganised. The whole ancient piety, with its magical Beings, its cult of gods and heroes, its fear of demons and its belief in miracles, clothed itself with a thin Christian dress and so found entrance into the consecrated precincts of the Church.' The expiring heathen temple-liturgies took a new life within the Church, and brought its rites nearer to the old worship of the temples. The priest became a privileged official and mystagogue. Before long, the ancestral religion of the barbarian invaders began to exert its influence. German heathenism, Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, and the mysticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, are the new factors which the mediæval Church took into its bosom.' In Gregory the Great this 'vulgar Catholicism' becomes authoritative. The

Catholicism of the present day is more the creation of the Christian Middle Ages than of Christian antiquity.'

This is perhaps the best place to consider Heiler's conception of the essence of Catholicism. It is, he says, essentially a comprehensive religion, a complexio oppositorum. Of the Eastern Church he says, 'the combination of these heterogeneous elements makes it Catholic, and has enabled it to endure during all the centuries.' Again, 'Catholicism has proclaimed the whole gay congeries of religions, which it embraces, as genuinely Christian.' It not only incorporated the whole religious philosophy of the Neoplatonists, but all the popular beliefs of the halfheathen masses. This unlimited hospitality is for Heiler the note of true Catholicism. The power of assimilation has been gradually lost, and so Rome is no longer truly Catholic.

To the present writer, this seems to be a misconception of the part which Catholicism has played in history. The name Catholic indicates universal extension in a geographical sense rather than intellectual comprehensiveness. So far from desiring to include heterogeneous and irreconcilable elements, the Church defined its position mainly by the exclusion of errors, and endeavoured from the first to leave no contradictions unsolved. The narrowness' which to our author seems a modern error was in reality present from the first. For example, there never was a time at which the statement that the historical Christ was purely human (4λos ǎv0pwоc) was not anathematised. Judaisers, Pagans, Gnostics, Arians, and even Nestorians were condemned. No compromise was made with the popular 'Religionsgemenge,' which was then called theocrasia. If we put aside for the moment the political evolution of Catholicism, on which more must be said presently, and regard it as a religion consisting of a body of beliefs, we find that the Church belongs quite definitely to a particular type of religion and even to a particular type of thought, and does not try to make room for all religion, nor for all philosophy. It is, for example, a system of personal theism, a supernational religion, an other-worldly religion, a religion of brotherly love. It does not deny that there is much which is noble and valuable in Buddhism which denies the first of these, in