Preview: Belloc and Undset and Church History, Part III

In what I think is our last discussion (on Monday, November 2, All Soul's Day) of Belloc's The Catholic Church and History for this Son Rise Morning Show series on English Catholic influences on Sigrid Undset, we'll look at the challenge Belloc considered most essential in his day/her day to answer:

I have said that much the most important form of historical attack upon the Catholic position, the most formidable, and to-day the most hardly pressed, the most lively and the most universal, is the Pagan or purely Sceptical, the definition of which I will here repeat.

It is maintained that the claim of the Catholic Church to Divine Infallible Authority is baseless, because it is manifestly man-made. The process of reasoning is as follows:

Man is to be discovered in history perpetually making gods, erecting religious themes, constructing cosmogonies. It is in his nature thus to project himself upon the universe and to take his imaginations for realities. His gods are but large reflected images of himself; his religious doctrines, from the petty myths of a small savage tribe to the majestic fabric of Catholicism, are one and all upon the same model. Each is false, for each differs from the rest; and all are false, for all are compact of the same stuff as the others: a stuff bearing plainly the marks of human emotion and human construction. Now this prophet is deified, now that chief, now that other imaginary figure, half legendary or perhaps wholly without historical existence; and what is true of any one of these is true also of the Catholic scheme. The deification of its Founder is an example of deification like any other. Its elaborate theology is but a somewhat more developed specimen of what men have done before us and will do after us—a spinning of logical systems into the void on premises that are without substantial basis. Its affirmations of the miraculous are of the same legendary sort as those to be discovered in a thousand other forms; its ritual can be proved to have cousinship in this point or in that with many another ritual of sacrifice, expiation and the rest; the very details of its liturgical life, the mere ornaments, the host of practices, the great monastic institutions, the pretty small devotions of light and ornament—all these are of one material. That material has been exhaustively examined and is now historically known. A vast mass of evidence has been accumulated and continues to accumulate. The more it is co-ordinated the more clearly this conclusion appears.

That is the position we have to meet. That is the main historical argument against the divine origin and authority of the Church of God.

Belloc does highlight, of course, the role of the virtue of Faith in our Catholic belief in Jesus, the Son of God Incarnate and the Church He established and instructed to preach and baptize the nations, but then notes that it not the response his book requires. Instead:

Now what is our reply?

Our reply is that the generalisation is hasty and inaccurate, and that the more you examine it the more you discover upon what a false and superficial basis it reposes.

There is not a great number of religions, nor has there been in the past a greater number, apparent to men of different nations and temperaments, of which hotchpotch the Catholic Church is but one. There is not a multitude of systems of theology falling under the one general category “theologies,” of which the Catholic scheme is but a single specimen. Upon the contrary, there is, and has been for these centuries past, a social and religious phenomenon unique and comparable to nothing else, called the Catholic Church. Its spirit, quality, voice, personality is such that the line of cleavage does not lie between it and pure scepticism, leaving on the one side all religions (including Catholicism) and on the other the free uncertain mind; the line of cleavage lies between the Faith upon one side and all other human opinions and moods upon the other. And this unique character of the Catholic Church is as plain an historical truth as the astronomical truth of the reverse rotation of Uranus is unique among the planets. It claims what no other society has ever claimed. It affirms its Founder to have been what no other society claims its founder to have been. It functions as no other society has functioned: by an unsupported authority, absolute in its affirmation.

Belloc then notes that practically, or pragmatically speaking "One might say that, outside the Catholic Church, the human mind can stand quite unattached, examining all things by no criterion save common experience and the deductive power of the intelligence. In pure theory there might be a whole society of such detached (but also quite unrooted) minds with no certitudes, no ethical predicates, living upon the void." 

But then he says there is no one who has "no certitudes, no ethical predicates", who lives "upon the void." As Chesterton wrote, “There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.” ("On Europe and Asia" in Generally Speaking)

Belloc concurs: "There is not one of us that can point to any mind of his acquaintance, or to any mind appearing through the pages of a book which occupies such a position. All without exception betray an ethical theory of some kind, that is, doctrines which, though the holder of them may refuse to formulate them, appear in his actions. Every man is a theologian. Every man has his philosophy of the world."

Then Belloc goes point by point to demonstrate that the Catholic Church is unique:

In the first place, is it true that there are a mass of religions bearing for their chief characteristic that which is the chief characteristic of the Catholic Church—a secure, unfailing and constant affirmation of Infallible Authority?

No; it is not true. There have been many restricted, some (very few) widespread religious systems; to-day there are two in especial—the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, occur at once to mind; but not one of them makes this particular Catholic affirmation.

and

But is it not true that there are countless ceremonies and also major doctrines, comparable to and some even nearly identical with those of the Faith?

It is; and to that we answer that if there is to be such a thing as the Faith on earth, it could not but be so. If men must worship, they will worship in places. If men feel the pull of a religious emotion, at once the sacramental idea must enter in. There cannot but be a connection between the physical life of man and any religious system whatsoever, true or false, with which he is inmixed. And so surely as the ministers of the true religion will breathe and eat and walk upon their feet, each as much as the ministers of the false, so surely you will find in a true religion, if true religion there be, habits, practices, doctrines, which (not all combined, but here one, there another) men have groped for or arrived at in systems which attempted or adumbrated the truth, but did not even claim to be the full truth.

and

It is not an historical argument against the divinity of this one thing that it has the qualities which human things must have. Upon the contrary, it is an argument in favour of its claim.

That the unique object here displayed, the Catholic Church, is divine cannot on this account be affirmed; but it can be affirmed that if such a unique object exist, then it will have these characters attaching to it.

Thus Belloc demonstrates that the Catholic Church is unique and cannot be presumed to be a totally human creation, like other ethical or religious systems. That's the method of his argument against "the main historical argument against the divine origin and authority of the Church of God."  

On Friday and Saturday, October 23 and 24, I attended the annual Inklings Festival of the Eighth Day Institute at Eighth Day Books and the Ladder. The honorary Inkling, certainly an inspiration for some the Inklings, was G.K. Chesterton. The speaker, Landon Loftin, edited Chesterton and the Philosophers published by Wipf & Stock. His first of his lectures was "G.K. Chesterton and the Paradoxes of Pragmatism", contending with William James and his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and his second

was "Hume's Faith and Chesterton's Doubt"--Hume rejecting the possibility of miracles and Chesterton accepting their occurrence, of course. 

I mention this because our next topic in this series will be G.K. Chesterton's influence on Sigrid Undset. As I was listening to his talks about Chesterton's philosophy of how we think about and assent to metaphysical truths vs. William James and how we accept not just the miraculous (like healings, etc) and the ordinary miracles of nature (causation, etc) vs. David Hume, I was thinking of how Undset would have responded to Chesterton's views on those matters.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Fra Angelico: Coronation of the Virgin (in honor of All Saints and All Souls)

Preview: Belloc's "The Catholic Church and History" and Undset, Part II

As we continue to look at Belloc's The Catholic Church and History and its influence on Sigrid Undset in our Son Rise Morning Show series on Monday, October 26, I wanted to highlight some evidence of how important this book was to Undset. I received this information from Jan Frederik Solem on Facebook: "Sigrid Undset had "The Catholic Church and History" by Hilaire Belloc translated ("authorised translation") into Norwegian ("Den katolske kirke og historien") by a fellow Dominican tertiary (Ellen Faaberg) and published at her own expense in 1929." Thus she thought it was important to Norwegians to have access to Belloc's defenses of the Catholic Church.

I've selected one of the defenses Belloc offers against a charge that the Catholic Church "has actually relied on falsehood when she knew it to be falsehood and particularly in the case of errors originally committed in good faith, but continued with the deliberate intention to deceive.": the Donation of Constantine. As Belloc states the case against the Church:

The accusation in connection with the Donation of Constantine exemplifies the supposed deliberate use of forgery by the Church: the Galileo case exemplifies her supposed tenacity in demonstrated error—an authority claiming infallibility and reluctant to admit that it has been clearly proved fallible. . . .

It is asserted in the case of the Donation of Constantine that this document was a forgery: that on that forgery was based a particular docrine, to wit, the supremacy of the see of Peter: that when it was proved a falsehood the Church continued to defend it, and that, since her spokesmen were compelled at last to abandon it, with it there fell the necessary prop of the Papal contention.

The Donation of Constantine is a document purporting to be a grant by the Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester, his contemporary, of civil jurisdiction over the town of Rome; of temporal sovereignty over certain adjacent districts in Central Italy; of sundry ritual dignities in dress and public office; of the Lateran Palace for a residence in perpetuity; and with all this the recognition of the spiritual jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome over the universal Church.

Belloc concedes that eventually the Donation of Constantine was acknowledged to be a forgery, or at least could not proven to exist according to rigorous archival standards. It was:

a conglomeration of legend, arisen for the most part in Syria, the growth of which can be traced through the centuries. The weight of evidence would show that it was accepted as true, not first in Rome, but in Northern France—the policy of whose monarch it exactly suited. It was first quoted, not in Rome, but in Rheims. It was not brought in to support the Papal claims even in temporal sovereignty, let alone in spiritual jurisdiction, till long after even the temporal claims had been universally admitted throughout the West, and the spiritual jurisdiction, of course, for centuries. 

And that's where Belloc makes his strongest statement against the idea that the Donation of Constantine was the basis of Catholic Church teaching about the primacy and jurisdiction of the Pope "over the universal Church" because "no doctrine was based on it." Those are Belloc's italics. He asserts:

Catholic doctrine in the matter may be very simply stated. You will find it expressed everywhere by all competent authorities over a prodigious lapse of time in words almost identical; for it is as clear as it is brief. That doctrine is as follows:

Our Lord constituted the Apostolic College. Of that College he gave Peter the Primacy. This Primacy by divine constitution successively attached to the sees which Peter founded, first at Jerusalem, then at Antioch, finally at Rome. Its power lies not in the fact that Rome was the capital of the ancient world, but in the fact that St. Peter chose it for his final see. This Primacy of the see of Rome is superior to, and more universal than, its patriarchate of the West.

Belloc asserts that this was the understanding in the Catholic Church long before the document was referenced by Pepin the Short in Rheims (not the mythical son of Charlemagne, Pippin).

That's just an example of Belloc's method: he grants all the facts against the Church about this purported document and demonstrates it was without any influence on Church teaching in matters of the organization of the Church. It's not the source of the authority of the Successor of Peter: it has no effect on foundation of the Church (Matthew 16:16-19 and 28:16-20).

He follows the same process with the Galileo controversy, noting the restrictions on Galileo were not from the Pope or a Council but "from a particular disciplinary organ of the Catholic Church, with no authority whatsoever for finally establishing a point in doctrine" and they were "disciplinary action[s] against a man who had done everything he could to provoke the constituted authorities of religion by querulous and bitter insult . . . "There was no definition binding upon Christians . . ."

Next week: Some examples of how Belloc countered the more important--in his view--attack on the reality of the Catholic Church:

The Sceptical appeal to History—much the most formidable to-day, and always intellectually the most respectable—speaks in much bolder tones, thus: “The whole of the Catholic Faith from beginning to end is man-made. It is a mass of illusions: of projections of the human mind thrown by the human imagination upon the void; of deceptions, some of them conscious in some degree, many more but half-conscious; by far the most unconscious, implanted in the mind by early training." . . .

Image Source (Public Domain): Pope Sylvester I and Constantine in San Silvestro Chapel at Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome.

Preview: Undset and Belloc on the SRMS

Update: We had to postpone this discussion because I had major computer problems! We'll talk about Belloc and Undset on Monday, October 19!

Next on our list of English Catholic authors who influenced Sigrid Undset's conversion to Catholicism is Hilaire Belloc. One of the books listed among those of Belloc's she read is The Catholic Church and History published in 1927. So we will start a Son Rise Morning Show discussion of this book and its influence on Sigrid Undset on Monday, October 12.

The Catholic Church and History is one book in the Calvert Series for which Belloc was the General Editor. The Lords Baltimore, the Calvert family, were the founders of Colonial Maryland as a refuge for English Catholics from the Penal Laws in Stuart England. Other books in the series are The Catholic Church and Conversion by G.K. Chesterton (a book we know Undset read!), The Catholic Church and Philosophy by Father Vincent McNabb, The Catholic Church and the Appeal to Reason by Leo Ward, and The Catholic Church and Its Reactions with Science by Bertram C. A. Windle.

UPDATE: I received this information from Jan Frederik Solem on Facebook: "Sigrid Undset had "The Catholic Church and History" by Hilaire Belloc translated ("authorised translation") into Norwegian ("Den katolske kirke og historien") by a fellow Dominican tertiary (Ellen Faaberg) and published at her own expense in 1929."

Today Joseph Pearce is the great apologist for Hilaire Belloc's contributions to Catholic apologetics, especially in his books about history. He cites The Church and Socialism and Europe and the Faith as two important early works and then opines that Belloc

is best remembered and most justly celebrated as a historian of the Reformation, correcting the bias and inaccuracy of what he called the “enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness” that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history.”

Apart from his seminal historical works, How the Reformation Happened and Characters of the Reformation, he also wrote biographies of many key figures of the English Reformation, including Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton and James II.

I've been appreciative of Belloc's historical work too, especially in that series of biographies Pearce lists, recently reissued by Mysterium Press (Wolsey, Cranmer, Charles I, Cromwell, Charles II, and James II). As a historical biographer, Belloc has a keen sense of character, situation, politics, economics, and social context--and military tactics when pertinent--, at least that's what I've determined after reading those books (his study of James II is still pending my review). His prose is vivid and vibrant; he sets out his purpose cogently and then makes out his argument as promised. Several years ago, we discussed every character and every chapter in Characters of the Reformation on the Son Rise Morning Show. So those are our bona fides.

Here is the Preface to The Catholic Church and History (1926/1927):

The object of the author has been to state and summarise in a brief, succinct form the arguments drawn from History in opposition to the claim of the Catholic Church: that is, to the claim put forward by that Church to speak with Divine and Infallible Authority. The author insists upon the point that he is not attempting a positive apologetic drawn from History in favour of this claim, but a rebutting of the evidence drawn from History opposed to this claim. He is engaged in examining the value of the arguments drawn from History to prove that the Catholic Church has varied or erred in her teaching or has made it depend upon immoral methods, and in showing that they have no force.

The little book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the three moral arguments: (1) that the Church has made pronouncements which History can prove to be false; (2) that the Church can be proved by History to have used material which she knew to be false; (3) that the Church, being proved by history to be not only organised but increasingly organised from the beginning of its existence, is thereby shown to be different from the simple thing which a divine institution of the sort should be.

Secondly, the intellectual argument, to wit, that the Church can be proved by History to be man-made, not God-made. This the author divides into two sections: (1) the Protestant argument that there was some original good message told by Jesus Christ, which the Church has gradually corrupted and from the origin of which she has deviated; (2) the general agnostic argument that the Church can be proved historically to be but one of many religions, to have grown up like any other religion, with the same illusions and similar rites and mysteries, and is therefore man-made—which last form of attack the author regards as to-day by far the most serious.

According to this website, "Her library contains . . . over thirty [books] by Hilaire Belloc . . .", although I haven't found any insights into when she read any of these books by Belloc. In this book he is definitely on the defensive, presenting the arguments against the Catholic Church first and then refuting them. I would guess that Undset, who had no great connection with the official Lutheran church in Norway, agreed with Belloc that the second "general agnostic argument" was more important to refute:

The Sceptical appeal to History—much the most formidable to-day, and always intellectually the most respectable—speaks in much bolder tones, thus: “The whole of the Catholic Faith from beginning to end is man-made. It is a mass of illusions: of projections of the human mind thrown by the human imagination upon the void; of deceptions, some of them conscious in some degree, many more but half-conscious; by far the most unconscious, implanted in the mind by early training. What the Catholic Church affirms is false from beginning to end, and History shows that the affirmations of the Catholic Faith have been thus man-made step by step from the very first origins we can discover. The idea of a God is man-made; so is the sacramental idea, the idea of Incarnation—the whole affair.” . . .

 Perhaps Undset, a critical and intelligent reader, found this conclusion from Belloc compelling:

A man making a survey of what little is known of the old religious experiments and perversions of mankind, and being asked, as a pure hypothesis, “Suppose a divine society, corporate, distinct, highly organised, and therefore of highly differentiated function, were to arise on earth to bear witness to the Living God: suppose such a thing for the sake of argument only, what, think you, would such a body present by way of appearance, action and thought?” could not but answer that it would have of necessity present within it not only vital truths, but also practices discoverable wherever man had groped at or half remembered a revelation.

This man, with no knowledge of such a society, but considering what his fellow beings were, what the human mind is, what questions it poses, what answers it demands, would reply: “In that society you would discover the worship of a Creator, the affirmation that he had revealed himself; a mysterious link between the divine and the human, comparable to the link between the unthinking matter of our bodies and the living essence within. It would have sacrifice and veneration combined. It would sanctify objects, places, persons and rites; it would have central institutions, and in proportion to its vitality a multitude of lesser activities; it would have symbols which it would distinguish from realities and forms of reality which it would attach to symbols; for man without a soul is a corpse, and man without a body is a wraith. This supposed society which you bid men imagine would certainly present in their highest form such elements as History has also discovered, disjointedly appearing, often perverted, often degraded, in the various (and ineffective) spiritual experiments or lapses of mankind.”

Then, one might say to such a man, such a general scholar and observer of the unique animal, man, at prayer, “Should there conceivably be such a home upon the earth, how otherwise would you know it?” He could but answer, “Its nature would be such that it would satisfy to the full the demands of men; it would be unique so as to correspond to man himself who is unique on earth, and it would grant him fulness and repose.”

I readily admit that this is not the kind of argument that I follow easily, but something in this book contributed to Sigrid Undset's conversion to Catholicism!

Image Source (Public Domain): Author and poet Hilaire Belloc (1870 - 1953), circa 1917.

Preview: Sigrid Undset and Benson on "The Cross" on the Son Rise Morning Show

The third volume of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize Winning novel Kristen Lavransdatter is titled The Cross, so it makes sense that Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I would look at what Undset appreciated in Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's Christ in the Church. So during the October 5th edition of the Son Rise Morning Show, we'll discuss some important themes from Chapter 1 in Part IV "Failure and Triumph" in Benson's 1911 book.

In "The Theological Controversialist", chapter 8 of Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, Father Nichols quotes some passages from Benson's chapter on the Cross in the above-mentioned work, which has "some palpable results for a theology of the Church, since throughout Benson's presentation of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ he is always thinking ecclesiology . . ."

Benson discusses the Cross, and Our Lord's endurance of its agony, in response to a common argument against the authority and infallibility of the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded and protects: her historical failures mixed with the stories of great saints; our corruption and weakness:

'Your principles are splendid,' they tell us; 'at least they sound splendid. But why are they not put into practice? The Sermon on the Mount is an exquisite ideal, but why do you not try to realise it? What is the matter with Christianity is that there are no Christians. You are always making good beginnings, but you never live up to them. You were magnificent under Nero and Diocletian; but so soon as you seemed really to have conquered the world, you allowed the world to conquer you. You saved others; yourselves you cannot save. You were unworldly so long as Nero burnt and tortured you, but you became as worldly as everyone else so soon as Constantine tolerated you. . . .' (p. 176)

Benson then comments that this mixture of success and failure matches the life of Christ told in the Gospels:

Now, this is precisely the story of the Gospels. Again and again there came moments when the success of Jesus Christ seemed almost assured. There were moments when the whole world went after Him who seemed so perfectly to meet its ideals; when the world itself would come and take Him by force and make Him a King; when the kingdoms of the world seemed laid at His feet  and yet, somehow or another, it all came to nothing. His whole life on earth was a kind of crescendo of popularity, up to the last moment; and then, in an instant, it all crumbled down again to nothing. Palm Sunday immediately preceded Good Friday. . . .

Now, all this is very largely true. We may regard the progress of Christ in the Gospels and in the Church as a triumph which fails, or as a failure which triumphs. (p. 177)

At the center of that triumphant failure/failed triumph is the suffering of the Cross. As Benson notes, many thinkers have tried to find a way out of this problem, "The Problem of Pain", but he suggests that "it is worth while to point out the solution that Jesus Christ offers. His solution of suffering is to suffer." (p. 179) He suffers out of love, Benson argues, and anyone who loves, suffers:

Real love seeks not to possess, but to be possessed ; not, so to speak, to devour the beloved, to satisfy self with the beloved, but the exact contrary — to be devoured and to satisfy. (That is why the Love of God, naturally greater than human love, insists upon the Sacrament of the altar.) Real love, then, is a continual emptying and slaying of self, a continual immolation of self on the altar of the beloved. This is simply a commonplace of human experience, described by every poet and artist since the world began. It is exactly this that distinguishes it from its caricature — its antichrist — from lust or liking. Lust and liking desire to acquire and to win; love to be acquired and to be won. (p. 184)

As Benson concludes, "Pain and failure must always be elements in the life of the Church."

For his part, in his study of Undset, Nichols comments that "the Cross and its images are prominent in her work. Brother Edvin tells Kristen, "I hold on to the Cross with all my strength--one must cling to it like a kitten hanging on to a plank when it falls into the sea." (p. 158)

Certainly the Cross is prominent in Undset's life too: a failed marriage, two disabled children in her care, her son Ander's death in 1940, exile from her homeland during World War II, the despoilation of her home, requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, illness, etc. Nichols concludes that the heart of her faith was the Cross: she "found in the Cross of Christ--seen as the glorious Cross, and thus with its inherent reference to the Resurrection--the answer to the questions of existence . . .",  (p. 177) so no wonder she read and translated Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's Christ in the Church.