Robert G. Hunter: Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976.

 

Hunter begins, winningly, by admitting, “This book presents a hypothesis which it does not try to prove.” This turns out to be very much how he understands Shakespeare’s own thoughts about God, except that Shakespeare presents multiple hypotheses. His Shakespeare is Socratic-zetetic.

The unproven hypothesis is that one cause for the Elizabethans’ ability “to write great tragedy was the impact on their minds of some of the more striking ideas of the Protestant Reformation.” If our minds are not free but divinely determined, and if most of us “will spend our eternities in hell,” as ordained by all-mighty God, then Elizabethan England, not Nietzsche’s Germany, is where tragedy begins in the modern world—and much to anti-Christ Nietzsche’s dismay, that would be. Pity and terror as a response to what Montaigne calls the human condition make sense, once the Christian Aristotelianism of the Roman Catholic Church loses its hold on many Christian minds. This “new concept of the human condition and the divine nature…to say the least, takes some thinking about.”

Roman Catholics understood the questions raised by the Biblical teachings of human blameworthiness and divine predestination, but the authors of the miracle and mystery plays tended not to emphasize them. In Robert Le Dyable, produced in 1375 in Paris, the son of the Duke of Normandy goes on a spree of theft, rape and murder. The reason for this seemingly inexplicable run of horrendous crimes becomes clear when his mother confesses that she had conceived her son only after praying to the Devil, having been childless and apparently barren. Robert repents of his sins but must endure a series of humiliating trials. Finally relenting, God intervenes and rewards Robert with the emperor’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Robert shows his gratitude by fighting off God’s enemies, the invading pagans, having gone from being the enemy of Christ to being the fool of Christ to being not solely a type of Christ but “the champion of Christ.”

The unknown author “presents his audience with a traditional Christian vision of the world that makes human life comprehensible and bearable without seriously cheating—without, that is, excluding sin, cruelty, and evil from the elements that go to make the artifact,” the play. As in all miracle plays, God, the Virgin Mary, and the angels watch the play from stage right, intervening when and as they see fit. “The world of that play is for its God a theater of his own creation in which he is both spectator and participant,” ensuring “that his will is done by making that will unmistakably clear to his creatures.” When human wills clash with God’s will, or human wills clash with each other, God eventually, miraculously, sets things right. He must, if his creatures are to be redeemed from the curse of Adam. Even Robert, who suffers “a very severe case of original sin,” can be redeemed, if he willingly invites God’s grace. In that invitation, Robert also wills himself to undertake an imitatio Christi, a “buffeting” that parallels Jesus’ suffering, preparatory to his own worldly ‘ascension’ to the imperial throne.

Robert Le Dyable takes place “in a comprehensible world, a version of our world that has been made to make sense,” a tale told not by an idiot but by a playwright guided by the revelations of an all-wise Creator-God. “But the clarity is of that sort that is achieved by concealing difficulties.” Although “the unaided human intellect” may convince itself that Biblical revelation is true, “it is not possible for the human will to move unaided from that conviction to any sanctifying action, such as that of true contrition.” For that, man needs divine grace; “the heartfelt desire for God’s grace must be preceded by God’s grace,” by prevenient grace. That need “is left out of Robert’s conversion.” To include it, however, would call into question Robert’s, indeed man’s, free will. The audience would become “spectators at a cosmic puppet show in which the human actors were rewarded for responding to a jerk of their strings.” This would point them to a dilemma, as “it is not given to most of us to understand how the human will can be said to be free when it cannot act for its own good unless impelled to do so by a supernatural force.” Yet if the human will is not free, why does God punish those who disobey Him? This is what Hunter calls “the mystery of God’s judgment.”

Several responses have been offered. One is “the heresy, or semiheresy, called semi-Pelagianism,” which “find[s] in human will and nature more health and strength” than the doctrine of prevenient grace admits. [1] This appears to be consistent with Paul’s understanding in First Timothy 2:4: God “wills that all men shall be saved, and come unto the knowledge of the truth.” Augustine denies this, contending that human beings can freely accept God’s offer of grace but cannot initiate their own salvation. “All men” means “all the predestined,” only, “because every type of man is among them.” “All” means “some of each kind.” But the great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, go still further, denying to human beings any genuine free will at all. Yet this “reveals or creates another mystery: how can God be just if he punishes throughout eternity creatures who are without free will?” With this mystery, Christian tragedy becomes possible. Human life is no longer a divine comedy. “Never, before the sixteenth century, so far as I know, are we shown a dramatic protagonist being hauled off to hell, like Dr. Faustus, or Don Juan, because he has not achieved repentance for his sins.” Further, if human beings are rational creatures, they could readily be taught to avoid such a doom. But if “what our minds contain that is not of our conscious minds,” and “may be the voice of internal grace or of the temptings which God permits the powers of evil to visit us with,” where does that leave us, except in a condition of terror and pity, witnesses to the unknowable consequences of our own tragic flaw?

“Robert sins out of passion,” impelled “by the diabolical forces that are a part of his fallen human nature.” In the French poet Rutebeuf’s Théophile, drawing upon the legend of Theophilus of Adana, audiences saw not rejection of God out of passion but “rejection of God through malice, the deliberate, willed choices of the forces of evil over the forces of good,” a “pact with the Devil” anticipating Faustus. Théophile has been unjustly removed from an episcopate by a new bishop and blames God, not the ‘fallen’ nature of the bishop. Tempted by “Salatin” to renounce God and worship the devil, he regains his position and acts tyrannically, ceasing only after he repents, prays to the Virgin Mary, who graciously intervenes on his behalf. Like Robert, the repentant Théophile avails himself of divine grace, but his sin is “far more heinous than Robert’s rapes and murders,” as he has committed “the most terrible of all Christian sins, the sin against the Holy Ghost.” That sin, mentioned but undefined in the New Testament, might mean any number of things; as usual, Thomas Aquinas provides a comprehensive list. It might mean blaspheming against the Holy Spirit; it might mean (as Augustine argues) “final impenitence, when “a man perseveres in mortal sin until death”; or it might mean “a sin committed against that good which is appropriated to the Holy Ghost.” Aquinas explains that power is appropriated to God the Father; to sin against the Father is to sin through weakness. Wisdom is appropriated to God the Son; to sin against the Son is to sin through ignorance (as in “Father, forgive them, for the know not what they do”). But because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Ghost, malice, “the very choosing of evil,” is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Hence John Milton’s Satan: “Evil, be thou my Good.” That is, preeminently, the sin Théophile commits. 

The New Testament authors leave little doubt that the sin against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable, irredeemable. [2] But Aquinas demurs, claiming that the apostles’ strictures do not “close the way of forgiveness and healing to an all-powerful and merciful God, who, sometimes, by a miracle, so to speak, restores spiritual health to such men.” The sin, he goes on to say, is unpardonable “considered in itself,” without divine intervention, but “God can pardon it”—a “mystery of God’s judgment,” indeed, if a most welcome one. Calvin will have none of this, however. Finding it “easy to identify the sin against the Holy Ghost”—it is apostasy, “the turning away from God by men who know the truth but reject it”—he considers all apostates to be “reprobate” and, moreover, predestined to be such from before they were born. God predestines many human beings to be reprobates so that they may “serve as vessels for his wrath.” But although they serve a useful and indeed divine purpose, “there is no forgiveness” for reprobates “in this world or the next.”

As evidence, Hunter cites Nathaniel Woodes’s play, The Conflict of Conscience. The Conflict “is a thoroughly bad tragedy, but it is a tragedy,” not a miracle play. It begins with Philologus, a Calvinist who, “true to his name, waxes eloquent” about how God “sends tribulations in order to preserve men from complacency, to make them abjure their sins, to prove their constancy, but also, and rather ominously, simply in order to display his power.” Like Job, Philologus himself is wealthy with “many friends and a wife and children of whom he is very fond.” He is also to be tested. Caught by the forces of the Inquisition, he forsakes God, proving (above all) to himself that he is among the reprobate, and therefore can do nothing to avoid damnation. “Man’s will, in the world of [this] Reformation play, far from being of paramount importance, is shown to be absolutely dependent upon God’s will,” against which “there is no arguing and no appeal” because it is “beyond the reach of human reason.” Philologus’s “knuckling under to the papacy is a Calvinist equivalent to signing a pact with the Devil,” inasmuch as “the servants of the pope are in fact the servants of the Devil” and to recant at their demand is to commit “the sin against the Holy Ghost.” Whereas Théophile was “free to revoke his original choice and does so,” Philologus cannot, convinced of the prevenience of divine grace.

“Both Luther,” especially in his polemic against Erasmus, “and Calvin see men not simply as losing free will, but as never possessing it, and Calvin in particular stresses that man’s radical lack of freedom is the result of God’s will—a will that has determined, in eternity, what the eternal fate of every man will be.” While Protestant Reformers concurred with the Roman Catholic teaching that the election of a human soul to the state of grace is entirely unmerited by any supposed virtue that a soul may think it possesses, Catholics do not claim that any soul is “predestined to go to hell.” “It is a terrible decree,” Calvin writes, “yet no man shall be able to deny, but that God foreknew what end man should have ere he created him, and therefore foreknew it because he had so ordained by his decree.” And this is just, since “the pure will of God alone…is the supreme rule of justice.” For his part, Luther readily admits that human beings cannot now but call such decrees unjust by the light of nature and even by the light of grace, but we will “one day” call them just by “the light of glory”—that is, when we enter Heaven and God’s justice, “incomprehensible” to us on earth, will be seen by us as “evident.” In the meantime, Luther and Calvin agree, it is only for us to fear God.

In our fear, one is likely to ask, ‘Am I saved?’ “Nowhere was such uncertainty more likely than in England,” which was no longer Catholic but not Lutheran or Calvinist, either. The Anglican Church kept a careful silence on the matter of the existence of free will, saying only that “God’s prevenient grace makes it possible for us to have a good will.” Under the circumstances, “the fact that you cannot choose to be one of the elect makes it a matter of desperate necessity to convince yourself that you are,” and mere good works don’t tell, one way or the other. In the case of Philologus, a second ending was written for the play in which he repents and is saved, thanks to God’s graceful intervention. “Blessed are the dramatists, for they shall play God.” In Calvinist terms, he must not have been a reprobate, after all; God was only having His way with him, now very much to the relief of audiences.

Turning to a more impressive tragedian, Hunter considers Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Although the Anglican Church’s 39 Articles of Faith “had been devised so carefully that both Calvinists and ‘Augustinians’ could safely subscribe to them”—dealing with the conflict between prevenient grace and free will “by disregarding it,” by the 1590s the Calvinists had become restive, insisting on clarifying the matter by issuing the Lambeth Articles, which would have amended the Articles of Faith by asserting predestination in terms that could not be misunderstood. Queen Elizabeth was not amused; alarmed by “the threat to theological peace and quiet inevitably caused by an insistence upon absolute clarity,” perhaps concerned, with her chief adviser and Lord Privy Seal, Robert Cecil, that those convinced of predestination and their own reprobation might become “desperate in their wickedness,” and quite likely foreseeing the possibility of a civil war of religion in her realm, Elizabeth refused to authorize the amendments. Marlowe, who was trained as a theologian, would have understood the matter at issue. In Dr. Faustus, “playing upon the doubts aroused by religious controversy, he is able to leave his audience confronted with a terrible mystery at the end of a tragic experience whose intensity is increased by the fact that its creator has manufactured it out of the religious beliefs and doubts of the men and women watching it,” “draw[ing] upon the full spectrum of Christian belief in his time.” 

Faustus is bored, “bored with life and bored, above all, with scholarship,” being himself a theologian. Patching together a number of New Testament quotes yet leaving out “Christ’s atonement for the sins of humanity,” he summarizes Christian doctrine as nothing more than “Che sera, sera.” What in the New Testament is a “psychomachy,” a struggle within each human soul between divine and demonic spirits, becomes “sciamachy—a battle of shadows.” All the world is indeed a stage, and we poor players mouth lines dictated to us in advance, “repeat[ing] a script we do not remember having learned.” Marlowe illustrates the shadow-world Faustus has conceived for himself by having him turn to magic, to the unreal. That is, he turns to the desperate wickedness Elizabeth’s counsellor anticipated. Semi-Pelagians in the audience will wonder if Faustus will “find within himself the strength to turn to God”; Augustinians will wonder “if Faustus will be given the grace to accept grace”; Calvinists will become increasingly convinced of his reprobation. Those not firmly attached to any of these doctrines will be hurled into a condition of pity, terror, and doubt, since “the strategy of the play is to terrify its audience, not to comfort it,” as seen in Faustus’ excruciating admission, “I do repent, and yet I do despair.” The play “force[s] the believing Christians of the Elizabethan era to face the full reality—emotional as well as intellectual—of their beliefs,” to “wonder what Faustus’s tragedy reveals about the nature of the God who, according to Christianity, has created and will judge us.” [3] In doing so, “he has forced upon us ‘the coveting of knowledge’—which is precisely Faustus’s kind of madness” and something Calvin explicitly condemns.

Shakespeare takes up Marlowe’s challenge in increasingly subtle ways, beginning with his great villain, Richard III. In Henry VI, Part three and Richard III, Shakespeare shows that “the tragic destruction of Richard is simultaneously the comedy of England’s salvation,” whereby “evil is done but good comes of it.” The last, evil, scion of the Plantagenet dynasty will be followed by the just and beneficent Tudors—according to the Tudors and their historians. But this happy ending cannot thoughtfully be regarded as happy, as the plays “show us that the meaning which has pleased us is, in fact, incomprehensible and terrifying,” a mystery; and the very “knowledge of our ignorance,” the quest to remedy that knowledge, “is a kind of madness.” That is, Socrates wasn’t the only sane man in Athens but only its most impressive lunatic, his erotic quest for wisdom illusory. 

Shakespeare represents the several theological stances of his time in his several characters: Richmond, the first of the Tudor line, “a vacuum in shining armor,” cheerfully asserts that God provides for England, celebrating the existence of “a God in whom it would be pleasant to believe”; Elizabeth (rather like Richard Hooker) maintains “that God must permit evil in order to preserve human freedom”; her enemy, Margaret, embraces not only divine vengeance on the wicked but divine punishment of the innocent—the deaths of the child princes in the Tower of London, at Richard’s direction—as the self-justifying will of God, a God who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children. Hunter remarks, “It will not do to dismiss Margaret’s vision of the God of her play as the ravings of a wicked woman,” as “her God is the inevitable corollary of Richmond’s God.” If Richmond is God’s providential instrument, as Richmond likes to think, then is not Richard equally His instrument? “By slaughtering the innocent he has served the mysterious purposes of Margaret’s ‘upright, just and true-disposing God.” For her, as for Luther, God is unjust, as far as we can now see. 

God is “the first cause of Richard’s nature.” Sensing that his nature must lead to his own destruction, by his own hand, Richard “creates a new self as an alternative to self-destruction,” succeeding only in perfecting himself as “an instrument designed to serve the will of God.” Born with a hunchback, Richard hates his deformation. Defining himself by that deformation and ruined by self-hatred, he is incapable of love or pity. The world is Hell; the only possible redemption is to seize the Crown but, loveless, he can have no heir and can only burn with resentment at all the Plantagenets who stand between him and monarchic power. He won’t achieve it, most immediately because he is “a Machiavel and a Machiavel can be most succinctly defined as an incompetent Machiavellian.” Isolated by his own nature, “I am my self alone” (Machiavelli describes his ‘Prince’ as a man alone); he must destroy his natural “power base,” the House of York. The ‘self’ he ‘creates’ “force[s] the men and women against whom Richard directs his destructive instincts to unite in hatred against him and to destroy him in order to preserve themselves,” men and women Richard cannot understand because they are “moved by [the] love and pity” he cannot summon within himself. He becomes one of God’s “vessels of wrath,” as described in Romans 9, “the fundamental gloss on Richard’s nature and significance.” Hunter points to the theological dilemma: “The creator of the self from which Richard creates himself is God and it is to that first creator’s decision to withhold love from his creature that Richard’s tragedy owes both its beginning and its end”; “a mystery remains in the questions of whether grace may not be offered even to this apparently reprobate creature.” 

It turns out that Richard does have a conscience, but it does him no good because he proudly denies its existence. Following Machiavelli, he avers that “Conscience is a word that Cowards use, / Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe, / Our strong arms be our Conscience, Swords our Laws.” In this, Richard preserves his “psychological self” by “invit[ing] the destruction of his spiritual self.” He “has not found grace before he goes into battle.” But “does Richard avoid grace or does grace refuse to bless him?” “Is the failure to complete the impulse toward contrition the result of Richard’s freely willed avoidance of grace, or of God’s refusal to bless the appeal? The play does not tell us, but it certainly asks us.” Can “justice exist in a world where accident does not”?

Hamlet, altogether more thoughtful, confronts the same mystery: “The will of Hamlet’s God is mysterious and his purposes are incomprehensible.” Hamlet can be sure that something is rotten in Denmark, but was the death of his father the king caused by his mother’s new husband, his uncle? And is the ghost of his father, who tells him to kill the murderer, really the ghost of his father, or a “diabolical illusion,” “the bait on a Satanic hook,” pulling him to damnation? Hamlet has become the most famous example of a person who cannot make up his mind, but his “fears are justifiable and not the rationalizations of a born shilly-shallier.” Hunter observes that the putative ghost’s behavior would raise suspicions, since Renaissance experts on the subject taught that genuine spirits released from Purgatory don’t “go about bellowing for revenge, and refrain from starting like guilty things when they hear a cock crow.” Hamlet’s resolve to test the conscience of the king—no easy task, as no one wears his conscience on his sleeve—evidences not irresolution but prudence. 

If Hamlet establishes Claudius’s guilt, he will be, like Richard, the instrument of God’s justice, “the scourge of heaven.” But “can a man serve as the scourge of heaven without being destroyed morally and spiritually?” Can he “both kill Claudius and save his own soul?” The test Hamlet devises, the play-within-the-play, does indeed catch the king’s conscience but it simultaneously reveals to Claudius that Hamlet is on to him. As it happens, Claudius is “an apparently anomalous but perhaps not uncommon figure: a Machiavellian Christian.” As a Machiavellian fox, he arranges for Hamlet’s banishment from Denmark; as a Christian, he prays to God for forgiveness but ultimately fails to repent, fails to choose confession: the Christian in him wants salvation, the Machiavellian in him wants the crown, “mine own ambition,” and the queen. The Machiavellian wins; it is not conscience that makes cowards of us all. For the audience, however, another question arises: “It is simultaneously and equally possible to interpret Claudius’s failure to repent as evidence that the god of the play in Calvin’s God, who has willed the reprobation of Claudius,” or Augustine’s God, who “has foreseen that Claudius will be unable to yield his consent to God’s summons” but has been given a fair chance to do so, thanks to the device of God’s instrument, Hamlet. Augustine’s God, foreknowing but liberating, presents us with “a terrifying mystery”; Calvin’s God, foreknowing and predetermining, “is less mysterious and more terrifying.” Hunter regards “Claudius’s failure to repent” as “the peripeteia of the play,” similar to that of Dr. Faustus. But Hamlet is in his own way equally guilty, refusing to kill Claudius while Claudius prays because “he wants to damn Claudius as well as kill him,” and “evil and absurd” desire, “for Hamlet is proposing to usurp the powers of God at the Last Judgment” or, perhaps more precisely, manipulate God into using His powers to damn his enemy. “The motives that prevent Hamlet’s committing a damnable act are themselves damnable”; “in the prayer scene Shakespeare is defining the action of the play as the mutual destruction of an elect protagonist and a reprobate antagonist.” The total number of deaths resulting will be seven, the number of days it took God to create the world, to deem it good, and to rest. Denmark too will be ‘recreated,’ purged of its rottenness, but after seven acts of destruction, not of creation. God is indeed working in mysterious but also terrifying ways. 

Hunter maintains that Hamlet, unlike Claudius, achieves “a state of grace at the end of the play,” but not via the Christian ways of repentance and faith. Instead, he comes “to understand that there is nothing to be done with necessities,” such as the necessity of killing the king in order to purge the kingdom, except “to meet them as necessities.” He sees that “the agonies of his self-reproach and the puzzlement of his will are parts of a process that will bring him inevitably to actions predetermined by a greater will.” He “accepts responsibility for what he has done and will do” but not “ultimate responsibility for it.” Shakespeare shows this in Hamlet’s response to his mistaken-identity killing of the counselor-fool, Polonius, which brings upon him the revenge of Polonius’s son, Laertes. “The two sons kill and forgive each other.” 

But does God forgive them? Hamlet does not know because he cannot. To Faustus’s “What will be, will be,” he answers, “Thy will be done.” “Nothing is easier to say or harder to mean and Hamlet’s ability to mean it is, for me, the final and indeed the only possible proof of what I must clumsily call his election.” As for Shakespeare, “his purpose is to catch the consciences of the guilty creatures who will sit at his play,” catch them in the “knowledge of our ignorance.”

If Richard III asks whether justice can coexist with comprehensive providential determination of human thought, and if Hamlet asks whether human beings can believe or do anything to induce God to save their souls, Othello asks about the status of love, human and divine. Othello thinks of his wife, Desdemona, “when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.” If love holds God’s creation together, then the denial of love will indeed return to chaos whatever portion of that creation that love reaches. “The laws that destroy and damn Othello govern all men and all created things and express, we must assume, the nature of their creator.” If so, then when chaos does come again, “does it do so because God lets it?” “Does our ability to sustain love depend upon God’s grace?”

As in Shakespeare’s other “Christian tragedies,” Othello “asks the question but does not answer it,” presenting its audience instead with “a series of possible answers.” Unlike Richard III and Hamlet, however, in Othello “the only good that comes of the tragic suffering…is the punishment of those who are guilty of inflicting pain upon the innocent.” God “appears to have withdrawn” from the world of Othello, leaving human wills free but incapable of bringing about anything like the triumph of the righteous Tudors or the purgation of Denmark’s corruption. In theological terms, “in Othello the Pelagian possibility replaces the Augustinian possibility which largely directs our conceiving of the worlds of Richard III and Hamlet.” In Othello, Shakespeare shows “his way of thinking about the possibility that the universe is not providentially ordered.” This is neither England nor Denmark in the wake of the Reformation but Venice, a commercial republic at the height of the Renaissance. Both commerce and the revival of humanism lend themselves to assertions of human freedom. But given such freedom, what then?

The villainous Iago or ‘Ego’ represents the spirit of freedom gone malignantly wrong. “To admit internal, supernatural grace as a working component of the psyche is, to the Pelagian, to deny the freedom of the will,” and Iago is a sort of super-Pelagian, a radical denier of divine grace. One might think that liberation from the weighty matter of predestination might result in the (welcome) death of tragedy. But “the implications of man’s freedom turn out to be at least as tragic as the implications of man’s bondage.”

But although Iago is in some sense right, given the metaphysical framework of the play, he is also “in another very basic way, wrong.” He does not know himself, failing to understand that he is “conducted by the blood and baseness of his nature to the most preposterous of conclusions—death by torture.” His hatred for Othello rules him; unlike Machiavelli, who adjures his readers to use the lion and the fox, to deploy one’s natural passions to the end of conquering Fortuna. Iago’s ego conceals itself from itself and allows its ruling passion to ruin it. More, “if Iago is right in his basic apprehension of the Pelagian freedom of his mind and universe, then Othello is right in his sense of what preserves mind and universe from destruction” which is “neither human reason nor divine grace,” neither philosophy nor Christianity, but “human love.” The problem is that “the unaided force of human love” fails to “balance the blood and baseness of our natures.” The Pelagian idea of the cosmic order comports with the Renaissance revival not merely of pre-Christian classicism, of ‘the ancients,’ but of the “pre-Socratic principles of love and strife,” the world of Empedocles. If Christianity is, as Richard III and Hamlet indicate, riddled with imponderables, with apparent contradictions, and the pre-Socratic understanding of nature as a precarious balance between love and strife practically untenable among humans, does this leave Socratic, that is, political, philosophy the last possibility?

Iago’s hatred is not rational, justifiable; one may rationally hate a Richard, a tyrant, but not an Othello. It an irrational necessity of his soul. Iago “must have an object for the destructive force that would otherwise destroy its possessor—and does, nonetheless, destroy its possessor.” Hunter concurs with Freudian critics who identify Iago’s hatred as “a product of the repression of an inadmissible, unconscious homosexual love,” the reverse of the natural love that holds nature together. Iago’s homosexual jealousy of Othello’s love of Desdemona pushes him to exploit the possibility of jealousy in the natural lover to destroy the object of his love and to consummate (in spirit if not in body) the unnatural love of the schemer. “Both characters are thus microcosms of an Empedoclean universe in which love and hate coexist in a dynamic and shifting interrelationship.”

“Desdemona is not such a microcosm.” She is Pelagian pure and simple, a person with “no need a supernatural grace,” having an abundance of the natural kind. “And yet the tragedy occurs despite that grace and innocence” because “the unaided force of human love,” which she embodies, “cannot balance the blood and baseness of our natures, as embodied in Othello,” exposed by Iago’s insinuations. She is Venus to his Mars and, like the ancient divinities, she initially rules him, “Our great Captain’s Captain.” “Harmony is the daughter of Venus and Mars and the sexual union of the god and goddess is a primary image of the principle of discordia concors,” the “union of Empedoclean Love and Empedoclean Strife, the origin of all forms and all order,” as seen most memorably in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This claim about nature, adopted by many thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, “is in some ways diametrically opposed to the Reformation view” that predominates in the other Christian tragedies. While loving Desdemona, “Othello, once a black slave, is now supremely at liberty,” a Pelagian liberated from the comprehensive forms of Christian predestination.

But his liberty poses a problem. Othello owes his freedom to his unrivaled ability “to defend Venice from its Moslem enemies, but an Othello in bondage to Eros would not be of much use against the Turk and so Othello protests that he will be able to keep the two scales of his couple nature in balance, enabling Mars to function in spite of Venus.” Without his martial virtues, neither Venice nor the Venus of Venice, neither the commercial republic nor Desdemona, can survive. “But this irony is complicated by the ‘providential’ destruction of the Turkish fleet, by the consequent evaporation of the need to meet strife with strife, and finally by our suspicion that precisely this loss of function leaves the destructive force in Othello free to destroy the love which should control it”—free, but soon trapped in Machiavel Iago’s conspiratorial equivalent of the net Vulcan forged to trap Mars and Venus. There is a difference: in the ancient myth, the netting of Mars and Venus is comical; the gods laugh at their struggles. But “in the Pelagian world of Othello, the emergence of the good must depend entirely upon man’s unaided ability to sustain the good of which he may be momentarily capable,” and here tragedy begins. Othello, “though a more than ordinarily good man, does not have a rational will sufficiently strong to keep his hatred in check without the help of love.” Chaos comes again, in his mind and actions, culminating in “the fall of the great man” into “an epileptic fit.” That is, “in spite of the nobility” of Othello’s “free nature, the horrors occur; because of the freedom of that nature, human nature, even when noble, is revealed as cruel and unjust the source of tragic horror.” Othello fights “not just a battle with the shadows brought into being by Iago’s lies” but “a struggle between the component parts of Othello’s mind and the forces that move him to destruction,” which “derive from the mind itself.” His reason mistakes good for evil, evil for good, but then “he compounds error with crime, because error so upsets the proper balance between love and strife that the mind becomes possessed with a lust for destruction, a desire to destroy love itself.” In a Pelagian world, “man, in his freedom from divine grace, must substitute human love for that grace and that is not possible” because (as Desdemona says) “men are not Gods.” The human Mars is as readily trapped as the divine one was, and the human Venus lacks the divine power to protect herself. Pure love cannot protect itself, but if love allies with strife, “there is the danger that the scales of our life will lose their balance and destruction gain the ascendancy as it does with Othello.” Desdemona’s lord, Othello, is no replacement for the Lord Jesus Christ; Renaissance humanism cannot truly replace Christianity, and neither can Machiavelli, enemy of both Christianity and humanism, with his virtù. Even Hamlet, more prudent than Othello and more just than him, too, no Machiavellian prince and “less free to follow the evil impulses of his nature” thanks to Christianity, can find salvation, if he finds it, not in prudence or goodness but in forgiveness, and then only on a stage littered with corpses.

Macbeth, too, is a play full of “torn bodies.” “Macbeth’s great enemy” is “decent human emotion,” especially the emotion of Pity, the “naked, newborn babe” who bestrides the wind in one of Shakespeare’s most unsettling images. A babe numbers among those torn bodies, as “Lady Macbeth’s imagined infanticide is the most horrible crime it is possible for her to conceive,” a thought of “supreme unnaturalness”; another causes a torn body, the body of Macduff’s mother, killed when her son is from her womb untimely ripped. To the protest, surely the newborn child did not willfully cause his mother’s death, Hunter replies that this only shifts the guilt to God, whose will “ultimately caused” that agonized death. What is more, if Luther and Calvin are right, “any newborn babe is as guilty and as subject to eternal punishment as Lady Macbeth herself.” Not only is Macduff both “guilty and innocent of the death of his mother,” he is “also guilty and innocent of the deaths of his wife and children,” killed because he had the courage to oppose Macbeth and “the stupidity” to leave them unguarded. 

Macbeth differs from Hamlet in one important way: in it, the political tragedy rivals the personal tragedy for prominence. Scotland is in revolt against Duncan, “a lawful monarch and a saintly man.” “Macbeth’s murder of Duncan is not, like Claudius’s fratricide, a personal crime primarily, but rather one which a sizable proportion of the society is trying to commit and for which the entire society will inevitably suffer,” a “hideous blasphemy” likened to the death of Christ and, like it, “attended by storm and darkness.” If Macduff acts as God’s “elect instrument for the destruction of an evil king,” the usurper Macbeth, “in depicting Macduff’s agony for what he sees as his guilt for the deaths of his wife and children, Shakespeare is dramatizing realistically the horrors of life under tyranny,” in which the innocent die and the avenger would kill not only Macbeth but his children, too, if he had any (after all, they might claim inheritance of the throne). “Macduff’s example suggests one meaning for election: the good man will not do the evil that he cannot do.”

As for Macbeth himself, he “fears the contents of his own mind, and well he might.” Hearing the witches’ prophecy of his future ascension to the throne, he senses himself “rapt” by a diabolical force, even as the Apostle Paul was “rapt” by God. “Obsessed with images of evil,” this raptness and obsession could be “the unaided products of Macbeth’s imagination,” natural phenomena, if perverse or unnatural in the moral sense, or “the result of the working of diabolical powers.” “Is Macbeth’s will free to exclude these images of evil from his mind? Again, it seems to me, the play does not give us an answer.” “Macbeth may be criminal, or insane, or self-damned, or reprobate.” Unlike the reprobate Richard, the elect Hamlet, or the freely willing Othello, with Macbeth “Shakespeare keeps the possibilities in suspension.”

To conceive Macbeth as a criminal, as a man who could have resisted the temptations presented to him in his imagination, is supported by the fact of his Machiavellian calculation, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well, / It were done quickly”—a formulation Hunter too-Machiavellianly ascribes to “political reason.” But having so calculated, Macbeth becomes less rational, not more, during the course of his actions, his mind seemingly in the tightening grip of insanity. Yet “by an act of will, he ceases to be mad,” making the image of Banquo’s ghost disappear. From then on, he becomes “a bored thug.” “The triumph of Macbeth’s will is a Pyrrhic victory. In order to destroy the vision of Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth must destroy its source, his imaginative power.” He is left with “a kind of rational madness,” his soul with “neither pity, love, nor fear,” a “damned soul, despairing and brutish, whose life is a horror to be waded through.” By destroying his imagination, “the instrument through which the forces of evil exercise their power over him,” he alters the nature of his will, bringing on his “spiritual self-destruction.” The naked babe who rides the wind is Christ, whose “pity for humanity” will cause men to destroy Macbeth if he murders Duncan. And so it does.

“In Macbeth the suspicion that the events of the play are preordained is always present and that suspicion is a logical inference from the witches’ knowledge of the contents of future time.” If so, then Macbeth’s “psychomachies are sciamachies, the struggles of a walking shadow,” for whom tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow do indeed creep along at their petty pace, without meaning. While “the beneficence of providence is reasserted strongly at the end,” with Scotland freed of the murderous Macbeths, the play shows that, “experienced from within, by its victim and instrument, the providential pattern signifies nothing.”

King Lear‘s events occur in pre-Christian England, but the last scene, with Lear holding the body of his daughter in his arms and telling witnesses to look at her lips (are they moving?), reminds Hunter of a pieta; the ever-resourceful witness, Edgar, calls the blind Lear a “side-piercing sight,” a crucifixion for those who witness it. “What is the nature of Christ’s presence in King Lear?” And “what is the relationship of nature in this art,” this play, “to the nature outside art”? “Unique among the tragedies, I believe,” King Lear “considers religious questions in a pagan context,” showing nature “by the light of nature.” To Hunter, Edgar’s noble and indeed kindly lie to his father, Gloucester, convincing the elderly man that the powers controlling nature are “not only righteous, but beneficent,” is belied by nature itself, by the very “nihilist pieta” Lear and Cordelia present—the “promis’d end” or “image of that horror,” unredeemed by any providential, Creator-God. “By the light of nature King Lear is either incomprehensible or meaningless, or both.” “In a state of nature, without the knowledge or the grace of God, we are nothing.” At best, human beings can evade natural nihilism by telling one another, or by telling themselves, comforting lies. However, “I cannot discover that the play assigns transcendent value to love and compassion.” Such sentiments are impotent before the great I-Am-Not. 

But in his consideration of this pre-Christian play, is Hunter insufficiently ‘pagan’? When Gloucester tells his son that he might as well give up, that where he is a good enough place in which to rot, the son gives his father fatherly advice: Man must endure his coming and his going, but “ripeness is all.” That isn’t Christianity; it is Aristotle. Aristotle, who writes of tragedy but is no tragedian, and no nihilist. The question then becomes, what if Aristotle, like Edgar, had had his side pierced? (According to one story, he understood that as a danger for philosophers, fleeing Athens in order to prevent it from sinning twice.)

Hunter concludes, rightly, that Shakespeare’s plays present not only a rich variety of human beings but place those persons into many regimes, political and spiritual. He describes this strategy with John Keats’s term, “negative capability”—”when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Perhaps too ‘Romantic’ for Shakespeare, who by Hunter’s own testimony teases us into thought, not out of it?

 

Notes

1. “Semi-Pelagianism is the natural condition of popular theology. The ordinary Christian believes in original sin—in Adam’s fall we sinned all—but he also thinks that it is up to him to be as good as possible and he feels that if he does his best, it will probably be none too good, but God will understand. The medieval miracle plays are designed so as to instruct the layman without contradicting this view of life” by “simply disregard[ing] the comparatively esoteric problems raised by the concept of prevenient grace and its challenge to the freedom of the will, or by the doctrine of election and the doctrine of reprobation which it apparently implies.”
2. All five principal apostles concur: see Matthew 12: 30-32, Mark 3: 25-30; Luke 12: 8-10; Hebrews 6: 4-6 and 1 John 5:16.
3. In Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker was then “attempting to conceive a less monstrous God than the one who rules the world of Dr. Faustus.” For discussion, see “Reason within the Limits of Religion Alone: The Achievement of Richard Hooker,” on this website under Bible Notes.

 

C. S. Lewis: Miracles. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 [1947].

 

If I see something I take to be miraculous, my seeing doesn’t prove that it’s a miracle. “Seeing is not believing,” Lewis writes, inasmuch as “our senses are not infallible.” “What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience”—’philosophy’ here meaning ‘assumptions.’ Lewis uses the word ‘philosophy’ because he wants to interrogate not ordinary beliefs or ‘common sense’ but the kinds of philosophy, especially modern philosophies of naturalism, that preclude the miraculous a priori.

A miracle is “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” Philosophic naturalism maintains that Being is nothing but nature, while supernaturalism maintains that Being is not limited to nature. By the natural, Lewis means “what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord, the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited.” He also implies, but does not exactly state, that natural causation is ‘deterministic,’ that nature cannot include free will, that naturalism holds human beings to have no “power of doing more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.” According to naturalism as Lewis defines it, no “such separate power of originating events” can exist.

This obviously depends on what nature’s nature is. Aristotle, for example, is unquestionably a ‘naturalist,’ but he also upholds the human capacity to reason and to make choices founded upon reasoning. Was Aristotle mistaken, or perhaps prevaricating? Lewis does not ask, and so does not answer. By ‘naturalism’ he evidently means most especially modern naturalism, although he may deny naturalism’s claim to comprehensive validity in all its forms.

Both naturalists and supernaturalists agree that “there must be something that exists in its own right, “some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations.” The controverted point is, what or who this Fact is. Eternal nature or eternal God? This Fact is “the one basic Thing [that] has caused all the other things to be”; “they exist because it exists.” More, “If it ceases to maintain them in existence, they will cease to exist,” and if it is altered, they too will be altered. This is not necessarily true, however. If a First Cause ceases to exist, what it has caused might continue, if the First Cause endowed them with the capacity to endure; a child may survive the deaths of his parents. Only if, say, the energies that generated the things produced by the First Cause also perpetuate those things will they cease to be, or change, if the First Cause disappears.

Lewis further maintains that naturalism “gives us a democratic” picture of reality, supernatural a “monarchical” one. Possibly, although either might also provide an aristocratic view, as in philosophic pluralism or a theology of polytheism. But Lewis is thinking here not so much of metaphysics as of dismissals of metaphysics on political grounds: If naturalists charge that supernaturalism merely reflects assumptions congenial to monarchic regimes, supernaturalists can as easily charge that naturalism tends to appeal to democrats. And neither claim speaks logically to the question of whether the ‘democratic’ or ‘monarchic’ metaphysic itself is true.

 Lewis cautions that the distinction between naturalism and supernatural “is not exactly” the distinction between atheism and theism. “Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process”—the doctrine of pantheism. “Such a God would not stand outside Nature or the total system, would not be existing ‘on his own.'” It would not be a Creator-God. It might be Spinoza’s ‘God’ or Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Conversely, a supernaturalist can admit that the One Cause might not have generated only one nature; it (or He, or She) might have caused other natures not spatially or temporally related to the one we know. Nor does supernaturalism imply that miracles occur; “God (the primary thing) may never in fact interfere with the natural system He has created”—the claim of Deism. Supernaturalism admits the possibility of miracles, whereas naturalism rules them out altogether.

“Our first choice, then, must be between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.” True, although naturalism may amount to more than Lewis, evidently following the definition provided by modern philosophers, is said to be. Lewis remarks that if there is a thing that cannot be explained in general within a naturalist system, then the system itself must be flawed. “If any one thing exists which is of such a kind that we see in advance the impossibility of even giving it that kind of explanation,” as distinguished from making an adjustment to the system itself, then that kind of explanation cannot be comprehensive of Being.

Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Lewis begins his explanation of explanations by observing that everything we know beyond our immediate sensation we infer from those sensations. “Since I am presented with colors, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behavior appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic.” The “therefore” thought I have is an inference, an act of reasoning or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The inference I draw from my sensations, that there is a world out there, does not contradict itself. I proceed accordingly, albeit with caution, testing my evident knowledge of what’s out there against my sensations, or more accurately against my interpretations of my sensations. A given interpretation may prove illogical, and therefore false. But “unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true,” inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge.

More, “no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight”; any theory that denied this “would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.” Lewis then makes his crucial claim: that naturalism “involve[s] the same difficulty” because it “discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.” To show this, he distinguishes two types of logic; cause-effect logic and ground-consequent logic. His example of cause-effect logic is, ‘X is ill because he ate Y.’ His example of ground-consequent logic is, ‘X must be ill because he is behaving out of character.’ Ground-consequent logic appeals to evidence of X’s condition; cause-effect logic identifies the cause of that condition. 

The question of causation’s relation to logic is unavoidable for Lewis because he wants to show that some causes can be miracles, supernatural.

His next point is that one cannot get to cause-effect logic without first ascertaining the accuracy of our ground-consequent logic. Before saying what caused X’s illness one must first establish that X is ill. Otherwise, my cause-effect syllogism will be based on a false premise. Once I have established a reasonable ground-consequent observation, one free of contradiction, I can then perform a different logical exercise, namely, discovering the cause of the effect I have established. “To be caused is not to be proved.” That is, my thought may be caused by any number of things: “wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness.” These are caused but “they are ungrounded”; I wishfully (perhaps in this case maliciously), prejudicially, or crazily suppose that you are ill. Naturalism supposes that “causes fully account for a belief” (emphasis added), that “the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not.” 

The problem with this ironclad naturalistic determinism, Lewis argues, is that while acts of thinking are events, “they are a very special sort of events.” Most events “are not ‘about’ anything and cannot be true or false.” To say that an event alleged to have happened never did happen is to say the allegation is false. ‘Fake news’ is a false account of an event. Acts of inference are indeed “subjective events, items in somebody’s psychological history,” but they are also “insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves.” It is one thing to say, “B followed A in my thoughts,” quite another to say “B follows from A.” We cannot infer the latter, logical inference from the former subjective event “without discrediting all human knowledge, including the knowledge-claim that our subjective sensations do not open us to knowledge of anything beyond ourselves. To say, instead, that our inferences from our sensations do open us to knowledge about things beyond ourselves is to say that the content of our knowledge is to some important degree determined by those things, that world. If knowledge of the world were determined in no way by the world itself, “it would cease to be knowledge.”

“Any thing which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning.” What Lewis calls naturalism does exactly that, offering “what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior” as entirely determined by non-rational causes, “leav[ing] no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.” No matter how our sensations were improved, they would never be “anything more than responses,” never insights or even perceptions. ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ but only “when you have discovered what smoke is” can you make a genuine logical inference, basing your causal claim on your knowledge of what smoke is, and what fire is—have a true thought about cause and effect. When Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, infers equal natural right from the equal humanity of all human beings, that all men are created equal, he isn’t basing the latter claim on the fact that he’s never seen a person ‘morph’ into an owl. He is “see[ing] that it ‘must’ be so,” as a matter of logic. The ground of his logical consequence is an observation about the nature of human beings; it can be falsified only if someone could show that human beings do not exist. It must be said that this leaves open the meaning of “created” in the sentence.

Modern naturalism entails evolutionism. It offers “an account, in Cause and Effect terms, of how people came to think the way they do.” This doesn’t answer “the quite different question of how they could possibly be justified in so thinking.” How can human beings, the effect of a series of causes, attain the power of logical insight? If you can’t prove that there are no proofs, then neither can you prove that there are proofs. “Reason is our starting point”; treated as “a mere phenomenon,” it makes every ‘phenomenology,’ including naturalism, evaporate.

A theist entangles himself in no such dilemma. If God is the Creator of nature, and God is rational, then reason is older than nature. For a theist, “the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine nature,” free “in the measure required” for arriving at truths, “from the huge nexus of non-rational causation.”  The human act of knowing “must break sufficiently free from that universal chain” of natural causation “in order to be determined by what it knows.” Our very “concept of Nature” depends upon reasoning. We find ‘reasons for,’ causes that have effects, by virtue of reasoning about those causes, initially by ascertaining effects registered by our sensations. “This is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests.”

“Knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense [emphasis added] something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” Fair enough, but what is nature operating in some other sense? Reasoning appears to be a natural capacity of human beings. It may have been caused by forces other natural entities, but the thoughts it generates are caused by itself and experienced as an ineluctable way of understanding entities and events outside of myself. That understanding must be tolerably accurate; if it were not, I would not survive for very long—just as sensory handicaps (blindness, deafness) reduce my chances of survival. Although Lewis maintains that nature is powerless to produce natural thought, that is true only if nature is either entirely irrational or irrational but capable of producing, by some chance combination of its elements, including its energies, of producing a being that can perceive it by reasoning about it. It is of course true to say that divine Creation more readily explains this capacity than evolution or some other natural process does, but that is true of everything. Child: “Mother, why is the sky blue?” Mother: “Because God made it that way.” 

Moreover, while (according to naturalists) nature may be irrational in the sense that reason has not produced it (although of course the Bible says that Logos has done exactly that, but I am following the naturalist premise, here), it cannot be shown to be irrational in itself. That is, if human reason is indeed ‘about’ nature, and it finds that nature and the objects and forces that form its parts or aspects are definable in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction—that black is not white, round is not square—then there must be some connection between human knowledge and the things it knows. If nature were entirely chaotic, then there could be no knowledge of that, and human beings, beings that know by reasoning, could not exist.

Lewis does address something along these lines by considering philosophic claims of an “emergent” God, a “cosmic consciousness” not present at the origin of nature but which somehow develops over time. Hegelian historicism exemplifies this sort of doctrine. Lewis replies that “the cosmic mind will help us only if we put it at the beginning, if we suppose it to be, not the product of the total system, but the basic, self-originating Fact which exists in its own right.” Having already denied immanentist doctrines, Lewis therefore rejects cosmic consciousness as a product of nature rather than its origin. “Reason saves and strengthens the whole system,” even as God not only creates but saves His creation, “whereas the whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason and itself.” It is surely true that an utterly irrational cosmos would not be a cosmos at all but a chaos. But again, is to what extent is ‘the irrational’ thoroughly irrational? [1]

For example, anger is irrational in one sense. If sufficiently powerful in a human soul, it will result in the rage of Achilles, destroying others and finally careening to its own demise—Achilles being only half-superhuman, with a human mother by nature incapable of dipping him into immortalizing water without gripping his body and preventing the water from touching his heel. But human reason can nonetheless see that anger has a definable nature. Anger is tumultuous; tumult is the opposite of calm; a soul cannot be at the same time in tumult and calm. The human soul obeys the law of noncontradiction even when it is ruled by irrational passion. It is part of a system that, by being rationally discernible, its parts partaking of rational order even if they themselves do not think. One might claim that human reason is illusory, that it imagines order where there is none, but that cannot be the case, for the reasons Lewis has already given. As Lewis writes, “Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible,” apparently obeying “the laws of rational thought,” in particular the law of non-contradiction. 

In this, and following from all his preceding arguments, Lewis finds evidence for God, a reasoning being Who, unlike His merely human creations, can and has created nature. “I do not maintain that God’s creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God’s existence, but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable.” And the Biblical story of creation, even if told in the manner of a folk tale (as St. Jerome said), makes a lot more sense than the “delightful absurdities” of competing ‘creation narratives’ in other religions. No argument, there!

Turning to moral arguments, Lewis admits that “you can if you wish regard all human ideals as illusions and all human loves as biological by-products” without “running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense.” Lewis does doubt that many people really believe that that is so. “I believe that the primary moral principles on which others depend are rationally conceived.” But naturalists (in theory if not in practice) take moral judgments to be “statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else.” Practice—there’s the rub. No one can get by without making choices about what is better or worse to do. No one is entirely impulsive. If my apparently reasonable choices are driven by passions, they can, will, and must be judged by myself and by others, however ‘non-judgmental’ I or they claim to be. (And the adjuration thou-shalt-not-judge itself implies a moral judgment about good and bad.) And again, generally, “Reason is something more than cerebral biochemistry,” and once one understands that to think that it is, is to engage in that is not a “merely natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists,” one acknowledges the existence of the Supernatural.” “The Supernatural,” therefore, “is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.” This must be so, if “Nature” means only the collection of such physical phenomena as biochemical reactions. Lewis avers, on the contrary, that “Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural; God created her.” And if so, He might well be able to intervene in His Creation, performing acts that are miraculous, that is, not in conformity with the usual run of the Laws of Nature He established.

Can nature be known “to be of such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible”? Lewis lists three definitions of natural law: natural laws “are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them”; natural laws are “applications of the law of averages”; natural laws are similar to “the truths of mathematics”—logically necessary. Neither the first nor the second definition precludes the possibility of miracles. (For example, as some rabbis teach, God does indeed play dice with the universe, but the dice are ‘loaded’.) The third definition would seem to convict the believer in miracles of self-contradiction. But this charge assumes that no interferences can occur between cause A and effect B. If so (and it is obviously so in the physical world), the only question “is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors.” The Bible clearly teaches that it does: God comes like a thief in the night, Lewis quotes. “If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not break any laws. The laws at once take over,” as pregnancy and childbirth follow. “The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern” and by so doing indicating “the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level,” a reality that as it were frames nature but also intervenes in it.

This raises the question of why, if God does indeed intervene in the ordinary course of events, He does not do so more often, alleviating the sometimes-horrendous suffering of His creatures. Or indeed, why has He permitted nature to feature suffering in the first place? Lewis replies that “Nature is a creature, a created thing,” a being “partly good and partly evil,” as indeed are such fascinating creatures as ourselves. “It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than that the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband.” Nature isn’t God. “She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her.” Like humanity, someday she will be redeemed, but in God’s own time, not ours.

Lewis next invites us not only to meet nature but to meet the Bible, and on its own terms. He recapitulates three “guiding principles”: thought is distinct from “the imagination which accompanies it”; a thought “may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones”; to speak about things that cannot be perceived sensually “must inevitably talk as if they could be” so perceived. By this latter claim he means that even abstract language has sensual content, as when one speaks of the ‘growth’ of institutions. Turning to the Bible, one finds many images, “crude mental pictures which so horrify the skeptic,” as when Christ is described as the “Son” of the “Father.” Those who seek to rid religion of such anthropomorphic images, however, “merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds”—talking, for example of “spiritual force,” thereby invoking images of “winds and tides and electricity and gravitation,” or, rejecting the idea of a personal God, tells us of one all-pervading Being, thereby “exchang[ing] the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.” And so, in considering the Trinity, Lewis reminds his readers that the “Son” is also called the Logos, meaning reason and word, eternally with God and indeed being God. “He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion of cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion.” That, Lewis says, is it means to call Christ the “Son” of the Father God. “The reason why the modern literalist is puzzled is that he is trying to get out of the old writers something which is not there,” namely, the strict separation of literal and metaphorical meanings. “The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science.” One might intervene, quite unmiraculously, to question Lewis’s selection of the term “even” in that sentence, but the point is nonetheless well taken. The Bible describes the “uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be” by means of “the doctrine of the Trinity,” showing that “this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce,” bring about “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.”

Returning to the political dispute among theologians concerning monarchy and democracy, “with Hegel” pantheism, a democratic notion of God, “became almost the agreed philosophy of highly educated people.” Pantheism in some form “is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” Only “Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both) have proved…capable of resisting it.” The Monarch who brings Himself to our attention in the Bible says, in contradiction to pantheism, not only that He is but that He is the LORD (the capital letters used in the written version of His Word being quite appropriate to His status). Democratic man thinks what the college freshman said out loud: “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” Here is where revelation puts its limit on reasoning. If you restrict your reasoning to nature, you will find yourself tending toward pantheism, even in your most exalted moments, as when a Disney cartoon character croons his invitation to wish upon a star, rather than praying to God. Pantheists have hated the traditional imagery of the living God not “because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king or even as warrior,” whereas “the Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing,” being “there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.” But “if the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God,” He “might do things,” work miracles in order to realize His own thoughts, not ours. God’s mind is not the human mind; it may plan miracles that register “the highest consistency,” but not the one to which we are accustomed, or to which we desire to conform. This notwithstanding, Christian theology “offers you a working arrangement which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”

Lewis next presents “the three central miracles of the Christian faith”—the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Resurrection—in light of what he calls human beings’ “innate sense of the fitness of things,” exemplified by our expectation of order rather than chaos in the world around us.

With his claim that reasoning is distinct from nature, he can assert that “our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation.” The Biblical God being “not a nature-God but the God of Nature,” and given the charity, the agapic love, of the Biblical God, surely that God’s power can effect His own incarnation in a human body, and surely His love for his once good, now fallen, creation, makes the Incarnation quite reasonable, however initially stunning to our sensibilities. Just as “a brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought” (although one might well say that an unreasoning human brain is indeed ‘less’ a brain, failing to perform to its best nature), so a man is no less a man for being used by the divine Logos. In this sense, Jesus in His incarnate form was fully God, fully Man, engaged in the rational purpose of bringing human beings at least part of the way back to their intended rational nature. “The whole Miracle” of the Incarnation, “far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary.”

The miracle of the Immaculate Conception equally points to the character of God’s interventions. Unlike the stories told by Ovid and the brothers Grimm, where metamorphosis is catastrophic to the nature of the person metamorphosed, the God of nature changes existing, defective nature for the better. He alters to perfect, “com[ing] to Nature in no anti-Natural spirit.” Lewis contrasts Jesus’ multiplication of one loaf of bread into many loaves, for the purpose of feeding the many who have gathered to his refusal of Satan’s challenge to turn a stone into a loaf of bread. In the Incarnation, God “was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew,” the perfect Man. “The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature,” a “foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future,” when Jesus will return to create a new Heaven and a new Earth.

“The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts”—that is, the supreme act for Christians to know. It showed the many witnesses to it the possibility of life after death and provided them with “a picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general.” It is the opposite of a magical act, which “arises from the spirit’s longing to get that power” without paying the ‘wage of sin,’ which is death. Left to itself, nature as it exists now is indeed entropic; only a miracle can reverse its course. The Resurrection confirms the possibility of the Christian promise, that one can be ‘born again.’ The spirituality of Christianity does not simply mean ‘not-bodily,’ immaterial, since “immaterial things may, like material things, be good or bad or indifferent.” Rather, spirituality means “the life which arises in such rational beings [i.e., human beings] when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ.” In “this sense alone…the ‘spiritual’ is always good.”

These final chapters show Lewis at his strongest, probably the most able defender of Christian faith in the English language since Chesterton. 

 

Note

1. For a ‘professional’ philosopher’s commentary on Lewis’s argument, see Elizabeth Anscombe: “C. S. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles,” lecture delivered at Oxford University, 1985.

Pius X: Lamentabili Sane (“Condemning the Errors of the Modernists”). July 3, 1907.

Pius X: Pacendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”). September 8, 1907. 

Pius X: “The Oath Against Modernism.”

 

Pius X is best remembered today as a critic of “modernism,” as set forth in the writings of the French Catholic priest Alfred Loisy, author of The Gospel and the Church, published in 1903. A student of Ernest Renan, the Hegelian scholar whose widely distributed Life of Jesus denied the divinity of Christ and the occurrence of miracles, Loisy maintained that the Church was founded by His disciples in the years after Jesus’ death. (Mistakenly supposing that His Kingdom would be established very soon, Jesus Himself had no reason to found the Church, Loisy claimed.) In a 1907 document, Lamentabili Sane, compiled by the Church’s Holy Office and endorsed by Pius, this claim was listed as the thirty-third of sixty-five modern heresies listed—thirty-three being Jesus’ age when crucified. [1] Other heresies included the ‘scientific’ criticism of Scripture, which claims that “Catholic teaching cannot really be reconciled with the true origins of the Christian religion”; denial of God’s authorship of Scripture; denial of the unerring character of Scripture; the claim that the Book of Revelation is only “a mystical contemplation of the Gospel,” not a real prophecy; the definition of revelation as consciousness; the assertion that because revelation is only human consciousness it is incomplete, ongoing, the Bible being an important way station in its unfolding but no more than that; the charge that Church dogmas have been designed by human beings with no divine assistance; the claim that faithful assent to Church teaching is a probabilistic human judgment, uninfluenced by the Holy Spirit; denial of Christ’s divinity, messiahship, Sonship; denial of the Resurrection, of the expiatory character of Christ’s death, and of the validity of the sacraments, including baptism. Loisy accordingly took a more or less contemptuous view of the Catholic Church, considering it hostile not only to modern natural science but also to advances in theological science. In the words of the Holy Office, modernism holds that the Church “obstinately clings to immutable doctrines which cannot be reconciled with modern progress,” and that such progress “demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted,” since “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.” These are indeed claims consistent with Hegelian historicism, and therefore a century old at the time Loisy published them. The novelty of them, and Pius’ indignation, likely derived from Loisy’s status as a Catholic priest. He would be excommunicated, a year later.

Pius himself wrote a detailed critique of modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, published a few months after the Lamentabili. “These latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ”—enemies who “put themselves reformers of the Church” and are the more dangerous because they know the Church more intimately than the outsiders do.” They lay the axe to the root of Church, faith itself, by “play[ing] the double role of rationalist and Catholic.” One of their techniques consists of a sort of intellectual guerrilla warfare, “present[ing] their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement” while hiding under several guises: philosopher, believer, theologian, historian, critic, apologist, reformer.

As philosophers, Modernists affirm the doctrine of agnosticism, holding that human reason applies rightly only to the phenomena, with “neither the right nor the power to overstep these limits.” Reason cannot reach God, affirm his existence, “even by means of visible things”—i.e., the argument from design, cited by the Apostle Paul. Thus, they rule out Thomism, “which they denounce as a system which is ridiculous and long since defunct.” This might have led them to a Protestant-like reliance on faith alone, but their agnosticism is only a way station to atheism, at least in the fields of science and history. There, “God and all that is divine are utterly excluded.” They replace God with “what they call vital immanence”—Hegel with a Bergsonian twist. Religion, Modernists maintain, can be understood scientifically and historically within the life of man, originating not in the Holy Spirit but in “a certain need or impulsion,” in “a movement of the heart,” a ‘religious sense’ located in man’s subconscious mind. God is a sort of life-force, permeated the human mind; ‘revelation’ is only the consciousness of the initially subconscious religious sense. “The religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion.” This being the case, all religions are “both natural and supernatural,” and there is no principled way to distinguish them or to prefer one to another. Catholicism “is quite on a level with the rest.”

Having rejected God in their scientific and historical work ‘in advance,’ Modernists predictably find nothing about “nothing that is not human” in “the Person of Christ.” Christ is not eternal but ‘historically relative’: in considering Him, “everything should be excluded, deeds and words and all else, that is not in strict keeping with His character, condition, and education, and with the place and time in which He lived.” What Christ taught has been clarified in subsequent generations by the logic of the human intellect, as Christ spoke in terms of mere symbols and parables. Thus, there has been an “intrinsic evolution of dogma,” consistent with the Modernists’ historicism. 

Modernists distinguish philosophers and theologians from believers. As believer, the Modernist claims to know God through their “personal experience,” thereby departing from rationalism “only to fall into the views of the Protestants and pseudo-mystics.” He reaches God-as-life-force by way of “a kind of intuition of the heart” which “exceed[s] any scientific conviction.” If I deny this ‘God’s’ existence, it is only because I am “unwilling to put [myself] in the moral state necessary to produce” the religious experience. This again affirms the claim that many religions are true. 

This split between science, the knowable, philosophy, and faith, the unknowable, belief, accrues to the advantage of science, which judges religious belief. Modernism makes science “entirely independent of faith” while “faith is made subject to science.” In this, Modernists reject the teaching of “Our predecessor,” Pius IX, wrote, “In matters of religion it is the duty of philosophy not to command but to serve, not to prescribe what is to be believed, but to embrace what is to be believed with reasonable obedience, not to scrutinize the depths of the mysteries of God, but to venerate them devoutly and humbly.” Pius X instead stands with Pius IX and indeed with the distinguished Counter-Reformer Charles Borromeo, deploring the Modernists, who act “on the principle that science in no way depends upon faith” and therefore “feel no especial horror in treading in the footsteps of Luther!”

The Modernist as philosopher holds that “the principle of faith is immanent”; the Modernist as believer adds, “this principle is God”; the theologian concludes, “God is immanent in man.” In so arguing, he reduces the elements of the Catholic liturgy to the status of mere symbols. But what do these symbols now symbolize, if not a Bergsonian, a Hegelian, or even Spinozist God, the God not of holiness or separation but of pantheism? 

The Modernist theologian denies that the Church and the sacraments were instituted by Christ. After all, according to them “Christ [was] nothing more than a man whose religious consciousness has been, like that of all men, formed by degrees”—developed, evolved over time. “All Christian consciences were, [Modernists] affirm, in a manner virtually included in the conscience of Christ as the plant is included in the seed.” Scriptural writers ‘heard’ God, but “only by immanence and vital permanence,” since “inspiration…is in nowise distinguished from that impulse which stimulates the believer to reveal the faith that is in him by words of writing, except perhaps by its vehemence.” The Bible is “a human work, made by men for men,” but an expression of the immanence Modernists call God. As for the Church, it is simply “the product of the collective consciousness” of believers—not revealed to individuals and surely not founded by Christ. In this, Pius suggests, the Modernists are the ones who are limited by the ‘spirit’ of their time and place. “For we are living in an age when the sense of liberty has reached its highest development,” seen in the civil order by the prevalence of “popular government” and in the ecclesiastical order in the democratic notion of collective consciousness. To the Catholic Modernist mind, the highest authority is the Church as collective consciousness, an attempt to reconcile “the authority of the Church” with “the liberty of the believers.”

Politically, Catholic Modernism seeks separation of Church and State. The traditional Catholic teaching also separated Church and State but with the State subordinate to the Church. For the Modernists, the Church no longer exercises authority over citizens as citizens. This means that “in temporal matters the Church must be subject to the State.” And if the magisterium of the Church “springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideas.” Without this democratization of theological teachings, the evolution of Church dogma will be stymied. To hasten this desired end, ecclesiastical authority “should strip itself of that external pomp which adorns it in the eyes of the public.” Ultimately, democratization “would make the laity the factor of progress in the Church.”

At the central point of his Encyclical, Pius pivots from the Modernists’ ideas to their practice as Church historians, critics, apologists, and reformers. Their “historico-critical conclusions are the natural outcome of their philosophical principles.” So, for example, in considering the life of Christ as historians, the Modernists’ agnosticism assigns the human aspect of Jesus to the realm of historical research while relegating His divine aspect to the realm of faith. The same goes for “the Church of history and the Church of faith. To be sure, faith itself has a history, but it cannot be explained historically by having recourse to supernatural explanations. “The historian must set aside all that surpasses man in his natural condition”—his natural condition being limited to his psychology and “the time and period of his existence.” Historians also limit themselves, perhaps unwittingly, to the presuppositions of their own time and place, a time and place characterized by ‘democracy’ or egalitarianism: “They will not allow that Christ ever uttered those things which do not seem to be within the capacity of the multitudes that listened to Him,” or, even more boldly, those things that they take to have been beyond his character, condition of life, and education. “Their method is to put themselves into the position and person of Christ, and then to attribute to Him what they would have done under the circumstances.”

“As history takes its conclusions from philosophy,” from the ideational framework of the historians, “so too criticism takes its conclusions from history.” According to the Modernists, there is “the history of the faith” or “internal history”—the story the Church tells its members about itself—and there is “the real history” of the Church; there is the Church history of Christ and the “real history” of Christ, the first reflecting the “of faith, who never really existed,” a Christ “who never lived outside the pious meditations of the believer,” the second reflecting “a real Christ. Add the doctrines of immanence and evolution to the equation and one gets the “scientific criticism” of the Bible. Scientific criticism gives us an originally incoherent Bible, whose books were not written by “the authors whose names they bear,” whose passages have been cobbled together from diverse materials by men who lived long after the events described. Such coherence as the Bible now comes from its compilers and editors, who contributed to its “vital evolution springing from and corresponding with the evolution of faith.” 

All of this puts apologetics on a new footing. No longer do those who defend Catholicism defend Church teachings as authoritative, simply. They rather admit “errors and contradictions” in them, adding “that this is not only excusable but—curiously enough—that it is even right and proper,” given not only the evolutionary character of faith but the logographic necessity under which Church authorities have operated, their teachings limited by the capacities of the persons they addressed. Errors of science and of history have been defended because the majority of Catholics couldn’t handle the truth, as it were. Focused primarily on “religion and morals,” the authors and editors of Scripture deployed history and science for heuristic purposes, only. As Nietzsche had claimed during the same epoch Modernism arose, “life has its own truths and its own logic—quite different from rational truth and rational logic, belonging as they do to a different order, viz., truth of adaptation and of proportion both with what they call the medium in which it lives and with the end for which it lives.” What is “true and legitimate [is] whatever is explained by life”—an expression of their vitalism.

Pius X intervenes in his description of Modernist arguments to observe that “this is equivalent to attributing to God Himself the lie of utility or officious lie,” the “noble lie” of Plato’s Socrates. Biblical prophecies are no more than “artifices of preaching, which are justified by life.” Such noble lies include Jesus’ apparent claim that his Kingdom was coming very soon. “They tell us that we must not be surprised at this since even He Himself was subject to the laws of life!” In justifying the supposedly “flagrant contradictions” of Church teachings, Modernists justify them on the grounds of the necessities of life. “But when they justify even contradictions, what is it that they will refuse to justify?” Will their lies enhance life, or only aggrandize their own lives? And even if their lies enhance life, does this not amount to worshipping Creation in the place of the Creator? 

In Pius’ estimation, even as a form of apologetics, this will not do. Modernist defenders of the Church must attempt “to persuade the non-believer that down in the very depths of his nature and his life lie hidden the need and the desire for some religion, and this is not a religion of any kind, but the specific religion known as Catholicism,” which must be held up as “the perfect development of life,” as somehow immanent in life itself. “They would show to the non-believer, as hidden in his being, the very germs which Christ Himself had in His consciousness, and which He transmitted to mankind.” But like all such claims, this one subverts the actual teaching of Scripture, which adjures human beings to worship God as their Creator, not as integral to Creation, and to understand God as Holy, separate from all He has created and all He has inspired. Jesus may live within me, but He is not part of me. 

The Modernist as Church reformer exhibits a passion for comprehensive innovation. He demands that Church government “be reformed in all its all its branches, but especially in its disciplinary and dogmatic departments.” These “must be brought into harmony with the modern conscience which now wholly tends towards democracy; a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity.” While the Church should remain outside political organizations, it “must adapt itself to them in order to penetrate them with its spirit.” Pius calls this “Americanism,” and it includes not only democratization but the claim “that the active virtues are more important than the passive, and are to be more encouraged in practice.” This insistence fits with egalitarianism, as the active virtues are the virtues of ‘the many,’ theoretical or contemplative virtues primarily for ‘the few.’ 

Adroitly aiming Hegelian language against the neo-Hegelian Modernists, Pius calls Modernism “the synthesis of all heresies.” The new theorists, the new ‘few,’ redirect the human intellect in accordance with their core doctrine, agnosticism. “By it every avenue to God on the side of the intellect is barred to man.” Since “the sense of the soul is the response to the action of the thing which the intellect or the outward senses set before it,” agnosticism cuts off the distinctively human characteristic, reason, from the Creator of human beings. This is highly unlikely to lead to an enhancement of faith; “take away the intelligence, and man, already inclined to follow the senses, becomes their slave”—as already seen in the writings of Hobbes, who calls reason the scout of the passions. But “all these fantasies of the religious sense will never be able to destroy common sense,” which “tells us that emotion and everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to the discovery of truth”—human appetites being foolish and inconsistent counselors, as Socrates had remarked. As defined by Modernists, religious experience in its variety adds nothing “beyond a certain intensity and a proportionate deepening of the conviction of the reality of the object.” “But these two will never make the sense of the soul into anything but sense.”

Common sense begins the road to prudence or practical reason. Pius appeals to the religious experience of the bishops: “Venerable Brethren, how necessary in such a matter” as religious experience “is prudence, and the learning,” the theoretical framework, by which prudence is guided.” You deal with human souls all the time, “especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates,” those most urgently in need of rational guidance. You have also read “the works of ascetical theology,” which possess “a refinement and subtlety of observation far beyond any which the Modernists take credit to themselves for possessing.” Modernist democrats are not as democratic as they suppose, inasmuch as “the vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly that sense and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason, cannot reach to the knowledge of God.” Absent this rational path, what can remain to men “but atheism and the absence of all religion,” the denial of God as a Person and the affirmation (at most) of pantheism? The Modernist doctrine of immanence does not “leave God distinct from Man”—the definition of pantheism.

While Modernists may “have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really serving God and the Church,” “in reality they only offend both.” Why are they doing this? Here, Pius permits himself an argumentum ad hominem. They are in the grips of a curiosity, a philosophic eros, “imprudently regulated,” seeking to know what the human soul is not “meant to know,” namely the course of Divine Providence, which they have reduced to supposedly knowable ‘laws of History.’ Even worse than their unregulated curiosity is their pride; “they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves.” And they are ignorant, having effected “the union between faith and false philosophy,” a faith in self-generated ‘progress’ of human affairs. They do, however, see some things all too clearly. “They recognize that the three chief difficulties which stand in their way are the scholastic method of philosophy”—Thomism, which adjusts the relation between the reasonings of Aristotle and the revelations of Scripture—the “authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church.” “On these they wage unrelenting war,” a long march through the institutions, “seiz[ing] upon professorships in the seminaries and universities, and gradually mak[ing] of them chairs of pestilence,” preaching their doctrines from the pulpits (“although possibly in utterances which are veiled”) and advocating them at conferences. They ‘network’ at social gatherings and publish in books, newspapers, and reviews”; “sometimes one and the same writer adopts a variety of pseudonym to trap the incautious reader into believing in a multitude of Modernist writers.” They are especially influential among the “many young men, once full of promise and capable of rendering great services to the Church,” whom they have now led astray.

Pius accordingly ordains that “scholastic philosophy be made the basis of the sacred sciences” and that all Catholic priests should “promote the study of theology,” understood Thomistically. In the universities, study of the natural sciences shall be undertaken without neglecting the sacred sciences,” which are indeed sciences, that is, forms of knowledge rationally arrived at. Catholic presses shall not publish Modernist books; let publishers outside the faith do so, if they will. Establish a “Council of Vigilance” in every diocese, capable of recognizing and exposing Modernist heresies. 

Pius was not slow to write an “Oath Against Modernism,” requiring that Catholic clergy and teachers in Catholic colleges and universities affirm that God “can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world,” as stated by the Apostle Paul in Romans I:19. The Oath further stipulated acknowledgment of miracles as proof of divine revelation, proofs valid for all time, “even of this time”; of the authority of the Catholic Church, “the guardian and teacher of the revealed truth”; of the falsity of any claim that Church teachings “evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously” or that any Church teaching was formulated by unassisted human reason; of the understanding of faith as “a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source, not “a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; and of the rejection of pantheism and of the historical relativism modern pantheism tends to support. The Oath endured until rescinded by Paul VI’s Holy Office, which replaced it with the “Profession of Faith.” The Profession eliminates the condemnation of Modernism and the affirmation of Thomism, stipulating only profession of belief in monotheism, the divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church and its teachings in their current form. That is, the Profession drops the condemnation of pantheism and appears to give some leeway to the historicist or evolutionary conception of Catholic teachings. Understandably, defenders of the Oath, and of the Thomistic Catholicism it supports, have dissented.

 

Note

1. The Holy Office is the informal term for what was then called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, so named by Pius X in 1908. The Office was founded in 1542 as part of the Counter-Reformation and was originally called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Its officers at that time conducted heresy trials. The liberalizing Pope Paul VI renamed the Office yet again in 1965, calling it the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; twenty years later, the word “Sacred” was dropped.