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Chapter II. The Authority Of Faith And The Free Exercise Of Research.
Preliminary Remarks.
We must not stop at what we have just said in general about the relation between the freedom of research and the obligation to believe. We must go further into detail, in order to give a more exact explanation of how and where the authority of faith clashes with research and restrains it. Is it true that the believing scientist cannot move freely in his research, that there are barriers on all sides which he may not overstep? Is it true that the Church may prescribe for the Catholic scientist what he is allowed to defend and approve, what he ought to refute and reprove, suppress or advocate, so that his eyes must ever be turned towards Rome, to inquire and ascertain what might there be approved? And what a chain of proscriptions of free thinking is attached to the name of Rome! Index, Syllabus, Galileo—link after link is added to this chain of miserable slavery!
We shall say something more about this chain later on. First we must consider the principal question: Where and how do faith and science come in contact? And what we are going to say we shall condense into four points. Thus freedom of science will be more precisely defined; it will be shown what freedom revelation, and especially the guardian of revelation, the Church, offers to science: there can be no doubt that its natural freedom of exercise must be left to science intact.
We shall deal in the first place with the profane sciences, and, at least for the present, leave aside the discussion of theology, since it is clear that theology, being the science of faith, must assume a peculiar position in regard to the authority [pg 082] of faith: theology, moreover, is a special mark for attack; accordingly we shall deal with it particularly later on. However, the principles to be cited, being of a general nature, refer also to the science of faith, and for this reason we shall have occasion to refer to them.
1. Authority of Faith and Private Authority.
We often meet with the most inconceivable notions. We are told quite seriously that the Church teaches, and that the Catholic has therefore to believe, that the earth is a flat disc surrounded by the sea, as the ancients believed; above it is a vault, below it hell-fire; that the earth stands still and the sun and stars revolve about it, just as Ptolemy of Egypt taught; that God created the whole world just as it is now in exactly six days of twenty-four hours each; that He made the sun and moon, just as they are now illuminating the skies; that the strata, just as they now look when bared by the geologist's hammer, even the coal-fields and petrified saurians and fossils—all were made, just as they now are, well nigh six thousand years ago. The Scriptures teach this, the Fathers of old and the theologians believe this: and that is where the Catholic must get his science. And then they are astonished, and consider dogma retreating before science, when they see other notions prevailing, when they see Catholic scientists defend without prejudice the evolution of the solar system, and even the system of the whole universe, from some primitive matter, or assume an organic evolution, as far as science supports it (cf. Braun, Ueber Kosmologie u. Standpunkt christlich. Wiss., 2d ed., 1906, etc.). They would be still more astonished perhaps to learn that similar ideas had long ago been proposed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas (cf. Summa c. G. l. 3, c. 77; Knabenbauer, in Stimmen a. M. Laach xiii, 75 seq.).
A distinction must be made between the teaching of the Church and the private views of individuals, schools, or periods. Only the teaching of the Church is the obligatory standard of Christian and Catholic thought, not the opinion of individuals. Hence not everything that Catholic savants have held to be true belongs to the teaching of the Church. Only when theologians unanimously declare something to be contained in the [pg 083] deposit of revealed truth, or the teaching of the Church,—only then is their teaching authoritative; not because it is the teaching of theologians, but because it is contained in revelation or the teaching of the Church. Else the maxim holds good: Tantum valet auctoritas, quantum argumenta. Nor is all that which a former age found in Holy Scripture, therefore to be believed as revealed truth, to the exclusion of all other interpretations.
The foregoing may be elucidated by the examples given above. When Holy Writ describes in figurative language and Oriental, demonstrative style, how God created the heaven and earth, the sun and moon, the sea and its contents, it means to teach us religious truths: that God is the First Cause of everything, and hence that the sun and moon, for instance, are not uncreated deities, as the Egyptian believed them to be. The narrative need not be taken in a literal sense, as if God immediately formed everything in the exact condition as it now appears to us; it may be interpreted in the sense that God let the present condition of things gradually grow out of the forces and materials and plan of nature He created, the result of a lengthy evolution. When our Lord tells us in the gospel that His Father in heaven feeds the birds of the air and clothes the grass of the field, we know that this is to be understood as a mediate action of God, which He exercises through the instinct of animals and through natural forces which He created for the purpose. Now when former ages, reading the narrative of Genesis, generally understood an immediate creation of the world, because the knowledge of nature at the time did not admit of any other interpretation, it is by no means necessary to conclude from it that every other interpretation must be rejected as against the Bible, or that the Church herself has prescribed this literal interpretation as the only correct one. As is known, St. Augustine, the greatest Father of the Church, had another very liberal explanation of the Genesis narrative, and the Church has never censured him. (He taught that the whole world had been created at one time, and that the six days of the Mosaic narrative were the logical divisions of an account of the various orders of creatures.) And now the interpretations vary greatly. The passages in Scripture, [pg 084] in which, according to popular modes of expression, the sun is said to rise and set and revolve about the earth, the latter standing in the centre of the world—these, too, were interpreted literally in the days of the Fathers: there was no cause for interpreting them otherwise; but it was only due to defective knowledge of nature at the time. These temporary errors remained till corrected by research in the field of the natural sciences: had the discoveries been made sooner, the errors, too, would have disappeared sooner.
The Church knows, and the holy Fathers knew, that it is not the purpose of Holy Writ to teach profane sciences, but to instruct in faith and morals; if it speaks of other matters, it is but occasionally, and then in the idiom of common life, which is not the same as the scientific language of the specialist. Indeed, the Bible does not intend to give scientific instruction in such matters, nor could it have done so at a time when men were not ripe for such enlightenment.
Thus St. Augustine insists that the Spirit of God who spoke through the authors of Scripture did not intend to instruct men in matters which do not serve for salvation, and hence he objects to the Scriptures being taken literally in regard to such matters, because the Bible adapts itself to man's manner of speech: a distinction is to be made between letter and sense (“Multi multum disputant de iis rebus, quae majore prudentia nostri auctores omiserunt, ad beatam vitam non profuturas discentibus ... Breviter dicendum est, ... Spiritum Dei, qui per ipsos loquebatur, noluisse ita docere homines nulli saluti profuturas,” De Gen. ad lit., II, 9, n. 20. Cf. De Gen. contra Manich. 1, 5, n. 3; 11, n. 17). He further cautions Bible students against putting their own interpretation upon obscure passages and then claiming it to be dogma, because one may easily go astray and thus make the Scriptures appear ridiculous. “In rebus obscuris atque a nostris oculis
