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)