3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.
Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a
person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions
generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted
beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a
different one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church with
its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and
life-wasting errors.
Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral
decisions are to be determined by the belief that the individual life
guided by its perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and
contributory to the undying life of the blood and race. I have decided
for myself that the general business of life is the development of a
collective consciousness and will and purpose out of a chaos of
individual consciousnesses and wills and purposes, and that the way to
that is through the development of the Socialist State, through the
socialization of existing State organizations and their merger of
pacific association in a World State. But so far I have not taken up the
collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the
development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the
form, among others, of religious institutions.
Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from
the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs
are far more enduring things than ideas,--witness the mistletoe at
Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight
of the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of
much less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a
religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an
irascible Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim; the
practical fact is that it draws together great multitudes of diverse
individualized people in a common solemnity and self-subordination
however vague, and is so far, like the State, and in a manner far more
intimate and emotional and fundamental than the State, a synthetic
power. And in particular, the idea of the Catholic Church is charged
with synthetic suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader and finer
than the constructive idea of any existing State. And just as the
Beliefs I have adopted lead me to regard myself as in and of the
existing State, such as it is, and working for its rectification and
development, so I think there is a reasonable case for considering
oneself in and of the Catholic Church and bound to work for its
rectification and development; and this in spite of the fact that one
may not feel justified in calling oneself a Christian in any sense of
the term.
It may be maintained very plausibly that the Catholic Church is
something greater than Christianity, however much the Christians may
have contributed to its making. From the historical point of view it is
a religious and social method that developed with the later development
of the world empire of Rome and as the expression of its moral and
spiritual side. Its head was, and so far as its main body is concerned
still is, the pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an official
who was performing sacrifices centuries before Christ was born. It is
easy to assert that the Empire was converted to Christianity and
submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of Rome; it is quite
equally plausible to say that the religious organization of the Empire
adopted Christianity and so made Rome, which had hitherto had no
priority over Jerusalem or Antioch in the Christian Church, the
headquarters of the adopted cult. And if the Christian movement could
take over and assimilate the prestige, the world predominance and
sacrificial conception of the pontifex maximus and go on with that as
part at any rate of the basis of a universal Church, it is manifest that
now in the fulness of time this great organization, after its
accumulation of Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still further
to alter and broaden its teaching and observances and formulae.
In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound to consider ourselves
children of the Catholic Church, albeit critical and innovating children
with a tendency to hark back to our Greek grandparents; we cannot detach
ourselves absolutely from the Church without at the same time detaching
ourselves from the main process of spiritual synthesis that has made us
what we are. And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is
this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but
that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to
join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since,
outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious
catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective
religious consciousness in the world. So far as they come to a
conception of a human synthesis they come to it by coming into our
tradition.
I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. To come from that idea
to the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of
difficulties. Is the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does
it include the Greek and Protestant Churches? Some of these bodies are
declaredly dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the
Catholic Church which have protested against and abandoned certain
errors of the central organization. I admit it becomes a very confusing
riddle in such a country as England to determine which is the Catholic
Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers
Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to
represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of
Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking
cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham
Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies.
It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in
America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments.
Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of
controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as
representing the Church. They assume a mystical Church made up of all
true believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their
formulae or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is a
fragment of the Church. All and none of these bodies are the true
Church.
This is no doubt profoundly true. It gives something like a working
assumption for the needs of the present time. People can get along upon
that. But it does not exhaust the question. We seek a real and
understanding synthesis. We want a real collectivism, not a poetical
idea; a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity,
may pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave
of emotion, develop a collective being. Doubtless right-spirited men are
praying now at a thousand discrepant altars. But for the most part those
who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in error,
they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation. Their
brotherhood is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed
collectivism; their churches are only a little more extensive than their
individualities and intenser in their collective separations.
The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious
illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I think,
develop out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all
that is worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide
Socialist State at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual
economic organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day. There
is no "beginning again" in these things. In neither case will going
apart out of existing organizations secure our ends. Out of what is, we
have to develop what has to be. To work for the Reformation of the
Catholic Church is an integral part of the duty of a believer.
It is curious how misleading a word can be. We speak of a certain phase
in the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word
effectually conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that
there has been no Reformation. There was an attempt at a Reformation in
the Catholic Church, and through a variety of causes it failed. It
detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that
organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it
achieved no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction because
the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally
necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. It fell into particularism and
failed. It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Christian
associations. It drove huge fissures through the once common platform.
In innumerable cases they were fissures of organization and prejudice
rather than real differences in belief and mental habit. Sometimes it
was manifestly conflicting material interests that made the split.
People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken
by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere
sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places. In the present
time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of
believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.
The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still
before us. It is a necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the
reformation and expansion of the organized State. Together, these
processes constitute the general duty before mankind.
