A Note on Comparative Religion (II)

Since writing in the last issue I have seen something in a popular publication which constitutes a sort of commentary on what I wrote; something that is in form a contradiction and in fact a confirmation. I remarked that Mr. Wells, who had previously maintained that things could not really be assimilated to each other at all, had afterwards assimilated the historic religions to each other a great deal too much. I pointed out that what we call the world’s religions differ not only in the sense in which they are true, but in the sense in which they are religious. They differ not only in what they succeed in doing, but in what they profess to do. One of the most interesting of them, Buddhism, is in some sense the subject of a passage in the current publication called The Outline of Literature, and there Mr. Wells himself is quoted as an authority on the Gospel of Buddha. He begins by saying, ‘The fundamental teaching of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to us by the study of original sources, is clear and simple, and in the closest harmony with modern ideas.’ This may be very consoling; but a man who has turned over a reasonable amount of modern journalism and controversy may still feel impelled to ask : Which modern ideas? Even in the work of Mr. Wells alone, there is so large and rich a variety of modern ideas as to make it a little difficult to be in the closest harmony with all of them. We all have a vague popular impression about Buddhism, that it advises abnegation, the extinction of the ego, and so on; but these phrases might mean several different things.

The countries sometimes inaccurately styled ‘Succession States,’ in allusion to the late Hapsburg Empire, still suffer from the gangrene of a decaying system, as well as from their own inherent defects. A century ago Joseph de Maistre described the existence of Austria as ‘an insult to God and man’; and at a later date, Montalembert, called her the high priestess of oppression who managed to survive by pitting race against race. One is sorry to see the Irish name of Taafe among the prominent Austrian statesmen who upheld the view that this Empire ‘which, did it not exist, would have to be invented,’ could only live by fostering mutual hatreds.

The terse qualification of Austria as ‘the greatest foe of mankind’ was too convenient to be let drop. It is now being currently applied to Poland, on account of its land-bound frontier; to Czecho Slovakia because of its ‘ridiculous’ configuration; to Rumania, because of its absorption of Bessarabia and Transylvania so long held by Russia and Hungaria respectively; to Yugoslavia because of its political reunion of Slavs belonging to different creeds. There is no doubt that the self-styled ‘superior’ races are hard put to it for hewers of wood and drawers of water since the Slavs and Latins were withdrawn from their domination. Poland, however, was a political entity before Rudolf the Freebooter had laid the foundations of the mighty Austria of the future. The Czechs were already an independent community in the tenth century. The Southern Slavs, rampart of Austria-Hungary against the Turks, with dauntless little Serbia as standard-bearer, wrested independence from Turkey by several stages in spite of the ‘Christian Protectors’ who so often shook hands with the Sultan over her bleeding

Are you Zionists? ‘I asked.

‘Yes, but orthodox Zionists,’ came the quick answer.

In this short dialogue, spoken in one of the miniature shops of the bazaar inside the old Jaffa Gate at Jerusalem, you have the problem of modern Jewry. Imagine a room, nine feet by six, with three blank walls; the fourth side is open, and serves as window and door-way. There you have the shop. Its proprietors are two Jews of very typical appearance, clothed in flowing gabardines and soft felt hats (which are always worn), and bedecked with one cork-screw curl of hair on each side of the face. The elder would easily do for a scribe of the time of Our Lord, while the younger, with his olive-complexioned and gentle face, might pose for the Christus at Oberammergau.

By means of a jargon of English, French and German, with an occasional word of Hebrew, we managed to do business as well as to learn a little of each other’s history and opinions. Neither of them, I learnt, was born in Palestine. The elder came thither from Russia about thirty years ago; the younger from Hungary. They were evidently of the strict and old-fashion sect, ‘exceedingly zealous of the traditions of their fathers.’ The old man one day tapped his forehead and said in broken English :

‘The Bible and Talmud here.’

I never thought of doubting him; nor would you, had you been in the Jerusalem synagogues and seen the old men reciting the Scriptures in Hebrew at a tremendous rate, without apparently paying much attention to their bibles.

To start with this title is to suggest perhaps wherein lies the cause of dispute in the long discussions that have ranged round the meaning and significance of the Jus Gentium; for it is a mistranslation to give law as the English equivalent of the Latin jus. The English translators of the Summa arey not always consistent in their equivalents for the phrase, for in ia.2ez, q. 95, art. 4, in the answer to the first objection (p. 62) the expression Taw of nations’ is given, while in 2a.2ce, q. 57, art. 3 (p. 108), it is ‘the right of nations.’ It is this last that is undoubtedly the truer rendering.

The origin of the phrase, however, will help us to understand what exactly jus gentium signifies and perhaps solve it. It seems to be beyond dispute that the term began to be in use in the latter days of the Republic of Rome when the city had begun its conquests of Italy and was holding under its sway peoples for whom it did not legislate, and yet whose quarrels it had to adjust. A special judge had to be given them, the Praetor Peregrinus, whose function it was to settle their disputes, as the Praetor Urbanus settled those of the citizens of Rome. It was found in practice that these foreigners had very many institutions in common, so that gradually a code was evolved which was based upon no positive legislation of any particular city or tribe, but was the mere putting into order of what was found already to have obtained amongst these non-Roman subject peoples.

Here certainly is a book by one who knows the Middle Ages and who loves them. Religious life (it is in this sense that the word religion is used in the title), which is the subject of this first volume of over six hundred pages, is appreciated by Mr.

G. C. Coulton and in some measure understood. But the book just misses being a great book through two defects : (i) it seems to be written in a temper, and (2) it is incomplete, for it deliberately omits the great ideals and achievements of monasticism, since the author finds that these have already been sufficiently detailed elsewhere (p. 20). His temper is understandable. He is a man of immense learning, who has read many modern works on monasticism, chiefly written in its defence, and has met in them statements not only unsupported by evidence, but the very reverse of what his reading of first-hand authorities has led him to believe. The shadows of monastic realities he finds deliberately omitted. Consequently, he is determined that this one-sided account shall not prevail, and he sets to work to prove conclusively the many failures, the general imperfections, the mediocre achievements of normal monasticism. We think that Mr. Coulton has not perhaps realised how recent is this devotion to the romance of the monks which he attacks, and how Cardinal Gasquet and his school wrote their books precisely as Mr. Coulton has written his, angry and determined to right a distorted account which had for so long done duty for history.

'I'HE Church Dormant? . . . I have never heard

J. of it,’ the puzzled reader will say : ‘the Church Militant I know, the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering I have also heard of, but what on earth is the Church Dormant? Is it by chance a new confraternity for the aged?’

Nothing of the sort. It is merely a pathological condition of the Church Militant. It is endemic, but sometimes epidemic: it is epidemic to-day. It is analogous to certain functional disorders of the human body, which result from over-indulgence in eating or in drinking, or even from neglecting to take sufficient exercise. For there is a curious parallelism between spiritual and material processes, and all experience teaches us that, as the body for its life and weli-being requires a certain amount of hardship and discomfort in its surroundings, so too does the soul,—both the individual soul of the Christian man or woman, and the aggregate soul of the Christian Church.

We are accustomed to speak of the Church upon «arth as the Church Militant, but we do not always realise how necessarily true that description is. In fact, the Church upon earth can never rightly be other than a militant body. She is never so well, and so truly herself as when things are going ill with her, and she is never so powerful as when fighting for her life against the embattled enemies of her Lord. It is significant that the Age of the Martyrs was also the Age of her most rapid extension and development. In later times, with greater general security, and in apparently improved circumstances, she seems largely to have lost her grip, and instead of the ‘general advance’ that distinguished her beginnings, she now either marks time, or else just jogs along, barely holding her own. The Age of the Martyrs is over, at any rate for the present.

This little book is the only one which deals with the present position of the Catholic Church in Russia, and it is a good book, well-written, and filled with valuable information which is not to be found elsewhere.

Miss Almedingen is a young Russian lady, a graduate of Petrograd University, and a convert to Catholicism from Orthodoxy. She was received into the Church by the late Mgr, Budkiewicz; and the touching story she tells in Appendix II is probably the story of her own conversion. Otherwise there is an utter absence of the personal note, and perhaps this is just as well; but some day, I hope, the authoress will be persuaded to tell the story of her own life in Russia during the Red Terror: if she does tell it, I can promise the English reader that it will surpass in interest most of the fiction that has been written for years.

Miss Almedingen gives a short but very interesting account of the Catholic churches in Petrograd and Moscow, and especially of Mgr. Budkiewicz’s church of St. Catherine on the Nevsky Prospect. St. Catherine’s was built for the Dominicans at the end of the eighteenth century, but afterwards passed into the hands of the Jesuits, who collected in the great library attached to the church (and which still contains a magnificent full-length portrait of the Angelic Doctor) over two hundred thousand books, many of them extremely valuable. When the Jesuits were expelled from Russia, the Tzarist Government confiscated most of the books and transferred them to the great public library on the other side of the Nevsky; die church itself it restored to the Dominicans, but that Order abandoned it—why, I do not know—and for many years past it has been in the hands of Polish secular priests.

Are Cent meeting, at which, with a Cardinal presiding, several Anglicans agreed to talk over with Catholics possibilities of reconciliation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, brought me the great honour of being asked to examine Bishop Gore’s pamphlet, Catholicism and Roman Catholicism, Three Addresses delivered in Grosvenor Chapel in Advent, 1922 (London, Mowbray, 1923). This pamphlet was chosen because it provides a basis for discussion by reason of its clearly defining the position of Anglicanism with regard both to the Church of Rome and Continental Protestantism, and also because it sets out with clearness and moderation the complaints brought against us.

An Oxford man, and until recently Bishop of Oxford, but now living in London in order to devote himself exclusively to theology, Dr. Gore has a personality which exercises great attraction in England. In Anglicanism we may distinguish a Right, a Left and a Centre Party; Dr. Gore belongs to the Right by the relative completeness of his dogmatic beliefs, by his ‘Catholicism’ (in the sense in which that term has been widely used in the Church of England since the Oxford movement), but he does not belong to the extreme Right whose taste for Roman practices is well known, and he has not failed on many occasions to say perfectly clearly that the path he is following does not lead to Rome. He says so again in the present moment a man becomes a Christian, he is incorporated into a community, and is under the obligations that such an incorporation involves. A new covenant is established, not between God and individuals, but between God and a visible Church.

Vulgarity is an elusive nuisance, insinuating itself into the strongholds of propriety, so as to undermine the decencies. There is the kind that debases high things—the Sairey Gamp type. There is the over-valuation of low things—for example, in the eroticism of poor poets; while a no less offensive variety displays itself in superfluous ornamentation: ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess.’ In thought, speech and act we incline to indulge in this error of overdoing it.

Now, love of extravagance is a sign of half-trained taste. People so afflicted like everything ‘laid on thick’ : glaring colours, startling contrasts, strident notes, over-stated cases. They are impressed by the arrogance of the bounder, defer to self-assertive ignorance, and squander money on a coloured daub, seeing nothing in the good black and white drawing.

Epochs of Romanticism, periods of exhausted invention : at such times the ailment claims most victims. Why ? Because, like a convivial party having its final fling, it seems the only way to challenge attention.

Hence Italian painting of the seventeenth century and the thickets of Swinburnian verse. And the price goes up! You seem to get more for your cash, though you actually get less. Then follows decline in taste. Powers of discrimination weaken. Corruption sets in. The scorn of things simple appears a proof of culture.

In accordance with these tendencies, we have the bizarre in dress, gush in affection, highly seasoned meats, wordy wrappings around trivialities. All this spells vulgarity.

of our Holy Father, by Divine Providence, Pope

Pius XI, on the occasion of the sixth centenary of the canonisation of St. Thomas Aquinas

To our venerable Brethren, the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See,

Pius P.P. XI.

Venerable Brethren, Health and the Apostolic Blessing.

Only recently in an apostolic letter, following and confirming the statutes of Canon Law, we declared Thomas Aquinas to be the guide of youth who are engaged in the higher ecclesiastical studies. The approaching commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of St. Thomas’s enrollment among the throng of the saints affords an excellent opportunity of urging and insisting upon the supreme profit to be derived by those who make themselves pupils of so great a Doctor. F or true science and genuine piety are linked together in a wondrous kinship. God is very Truth and supreme Goodness; therefore, when God’s glory is sought in the salvation of souls—and that is the chief and essential function of the Church—it is not enough that the ministers of holy things should be well instructed in necessary knowledge, but that they should also abound in becoming virtues. This marvellous fellowship of doctrine with piety, of learning with virtue, of truth with charity, was singularly preeminent in the Angelic Doctor. He is likened to the sun because he sheds both light and warmth : he pours illumination into the mind and enkindles the flame of virtue in the will.

The late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford has published what we must call a scholarly and painful book. Only a scholar brought up in the atmosphere of a modern University could have written as Bishop Headlam has written on ‘Jesus the Christ.’ Even the ‘Map,’ which is duly heralded on the title-page, has that note of scholarship which the older Universities, with their dogged craftsmanship, keep amidst a machine-mad world.

It goes without saying that there is a long, well-documented account of ‘Modern Criticism,’ which the Bishop chivalrously calls ‘learned criticism.’ As his Lordship does not altogether agree with the findings of the learned criticism, he therefore saves us from the charge of paradox in our having suggested that a work can be at once scholarly and painful;

i.e. the fruit of research, yet wide of the truth, or, in other words, learned but wrong.

Everywhere is seen the scholarly hand of the Biblical archeologist. We have most fascinating accounts of the road-system, which indeed has a place of honour in the Appendix. In a book of some 340 pages, more than a half are given over to that geographical, political and ecclesiastical learning which naturally springs up in an atmosphere of modern books. The student, therefore, who is seeking an almost cinematically vivid picture of the times of Jesus Christ will be grateful to the Bishop of Gloucester for his book. We have said much in saying that there are pages in it as thrilling as a work of fiction.

One of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is that we can keep centenaries. And judging by the yearly crop of these celebrations, it is an advantage we seem to make the most of. St. Dominic, St. Francis, St. Ignatius, St. Jerome, Dante, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Columbus, Cervantes, Shelley and Pascal have all of late been in the thoughts of those who glory in greatness and set store by antiquity. When we are wearied by our present woeful strifes or anxious about the ill-foreboding future, we can look back and take comfort in the past. It is natural that we, who are made for an eternal destiny, should find the thought of never-ending time entrancing; and length of days seems to us a symbol and a suggestion of eternity—a hint of immortality. A man who lives a hundred years is an object of praise and wonder, but the centenarian who preserved all the grace and sprightliness of youth would be an object of envy too. It is precisely this combination that attracts us in a centenary. We are not simply revering immemorial age : we are honouring someone who has been proof against time’s decay, who is ever ancient yet ever new, as old as the hills yet as fresh as the dawn.

This month we keep the six hundredth anniversary of the canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas. The occasion seems appropriate to indulge a few reflections upon the enthusiastic interest his name still evokes, and to remind ourselves that the influence of his genius is as strong upon the minds of men of all schools of thought to-day as it was when the Church set her seal upon his greatness six hundred years ago.

The acceptance of one of the two Catholic Rites now existing in Russia—Latin and Oriental—is invariably left to the individual choice : converts are

not hindered from adopting any rite they choose, without, however, having the right to make a later change. The only restriction—if it can be called one —being that one is expected (expected, but not commanded) to make one’s Easter Devotions according to one’s adopted Rite, and, in the case of a convert wishing to dedicate his or her life to God, preference is given, in so far as circumstances permit, to a religious house of the Rite followed by the person concerned.

The question of the ‘Rite distinction,’ properly speaking, appears among the Russian converts only since 1917. Thus comparatively little can be said in connection with the progress of the Eastern Rite in the past; its history is too recent, though, embryonic as it is, it has already achieved results of no scanty importance.

How does this question stand at present, and what may be its possible aspects in the future?

The greater number of the recent Russian converts belong to the intellectual classes and have adopted the Latin Rite. It does not lie within my scope to enter here into their individual motives, but there is one obvious economic reason which can explain most of the cases, viz., that the chief workers in the Russo-Catholic field have up to now been priests of either Lithuanian or Polish nationality, and, consequently, of the Latin Rite, and, furthermore, that juridically Russia had been under the supervision of the Latin Archbishops.

But these individual cases, however numerous they may be, have no direct bearing upon the question of the Eastern Rite.

Under the title, The Inquisition, Mr. Hoffman Nickerson has written a book which has very little direct bearing on the Inquisition itself: it does something much more useful than a direct treatise could do : it describes the formation of the temper of mind that brought the Inquisition into being. Add to this that the book has a preface by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, and you have a sufficiently good understanding of its tone and spirit. Indeed, it is almost uncanny to notice the many sympathies of idea, of style, and of phrase between the writer of the preface and the writer of the book. We feel convinced that it would be easy to quote passages from the book, so choice, so determined, so much in the grand manner as to deceive even devoted followers of Mr. Belloc into thinking him the author of what are only the charming creations of Mr. Nickerson.

Furthermore, you must know that Mr. Nickerson is an American. You think at once of the immense tomes of Henry C. Lea on the iniquities of the Inquisition and you wonder what there can be in so grim and venerable a tribunal to attract the attention of Americans. What has attracted Mr. Lea in the subject we can guess, but we are not left to guesswork to discover why Mr. Nickerson has devoted himself unremittingly to this particular task. In his dedicatory letter he tells us himself the genesis of the book

It is the custom to deride the journalist as a writer of vulgarian English and a debaser of our noble mother tongue. ‘Journalese’ is the contemptuous term often applied to his style in prose. At best his utterances are regarded as sparrow’s twitterings compared with the classic notes of the authentic songsters of literature. Yet everyone reads him, even those who scoff: and numerous scholars, professors and pedants find newspapers a necessity. At his worst the journalist can be very bad; but at his best, he can reach the heights. Our own time, which might easily be labelled the Age of Print, has given the journalist his opportunity. By means of rapid machine-printing he can gain the ears of the world and, if he has something to say and a way of saying it, he can command a hearing and wield an influence that any teacher or preacher might envy.

In the very front rank of the few who have given us journalism at its best is Sir Philip Gibbs. He has had the rare gift of using to the full every opportunity that fortune threw in his way or that his own audacity could snatch. In his latest book, Adventures in Journalism he tells in his vivid and lucid way the experiences of a spectator of the world, an on-looker with a pen swiftly chronicling life’s enterprises, its pageantry, its follies, its humour, its crimes, its wars—all the medley that makes it so complex a patchwork of mad mystery. To have lived amid varied incident and stirring event is one thing : it is quite another to make them living and articulate on a printed page.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the propaganda of our public parks will have noticed a significant change during the lifetime of the present generation. There was a time when the largest crowds were drawn by speakers openly anti-religious who quoted Ingersoll, Bradlaugh, Huxley and Haeckel. That day has gone. The last popular attack on Christian dogma in this country is that for which Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion, was responsible. But Blatchford differed in one important respect from his atheistic or agnostic predecessors. He was concerned even more with social ideals than with theological iconoclasm. Instead of the hard, unsympathetic rationalism of the champions of ‘Science’ his weapon was humanitarian sentiment which often became maudlin sentimentality. Agnosticism, in the person of Nunquam (Blatchford’s nom de plume), indulged largely in what Americans called ‘sob-stuff.’ He stood as a champion of Humanity against the alleged inhumanity of the Church and its creeds. In this he marks a transition. In place of the definitely anti-religious propaganda of the past, speakers in the public parks to-day are generally engaged in pushing some reform, expressing some ethical ideal or urging a revolution that carries on its banner the magic word ‘Comradeship.’ The parks, in this respect, are symptomatic. The public to-day is not minded to discuss Biblical problems or the conflict of Religion with Science. It has left these matters on one side in order to attend, undistracted, to social ethics and economics. The argument against Christian dogmas is, not that thev are irrational, but, that they are irrelevant.

St. Thomas Aquinas died on the 7th of March, 1274. He was canonised on the 18th of July, 1323, and therefore last month we kept the six-hundredth anniversary of this crowning event upon a truly wonderful life. We are happy to be able to present to our readers a translation of the present Holy Father’s Encyclical Letter, in which he extols the life and works of St. Thomas and calls the attention of all Christendom to his unique glory.

F aithful Catholics who read the Encyclical will do so reverently and without demur. They take him for granted. For them he is a saint, an intellectual giant of undisputed eminence : he is the Doctor of Doctors, whose writings have received an authoritative sanction that no one without temerity would question. Yet we must in a sense try to disengage ourselves from this inherited tradition if we would appreciate to the full the prodigious importance of the Church’s action in canonising him. We need a real sense of history to understand its real significance.

Nearly half-a-century passed between St. Thomas’s death and his canonisation. The delay is significant and a large volume might be written dealing with its underlying causes. It has been said that it is a family failing of the Dominican Order to be indifferent about pressing forward the claims of its members to saintship ; but this corporate bashfulness was not the only cause that retarded St. Thomas’s elevation to the altars of the Church. St. Thomas left behind him an elaborate body of doctrine in many large volumes; and it was those volumes that chiefly caused the delay. Three centuries before St. Thomas’s time, Rabanus Maurus had said (himself having written an Encyclopedia in twenty-one volumes): ‘He alone can escape calumny who writes nothing.’ St. Thomas had written much and had received more than his share of calumny and opposition.

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease— be it blindness or consumption or mental instability— must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.

Mr. Cox bases his case upon the sordid conditions that over-population has produced in all countries ancient and modern—in the west of Ireland before the famine of the forties, or in the teeming villages of China, as much as in the slums of Glasgow or Liverpool.

With the possible exception of Norway and Finland there is no country in the civilized world so profoundly non-Catholic as Sweden. One talks vaguely of Holland and Sweden as both Protestant countries, but at least every third Dutchman is a Catholic, while there is not one among a thousand Swedes. Sweden has, in fact, a population of nearly six million souls, of whom not three thousand are Catholics. There are two little churches in Stockholm, one at Gottenburg, one at Malmo, and there are lowly chapels in one or two of the smaller towns scattered at huge intervals about this enormous, sparsely populated country. In all there are not more than eight or nine Catholic places of worship in Sweden, and there actually exist only two priests of Swedish birth. At Stockholm resides the Vicar Apostolic, who is a German, as are the majority of the priests in Sweden. Those at Gottenburg and Malmo are, however, Dutch. One of the two Swedish priests, a zealous and energetic man and an excellent linguist, edits the one Swedish Catholic newspaper, a monthly periodical, Credo, which has excited the interest and obtained the blessing of Cardinal Bourne, a gracious message from whom was printed in its pages last Christmas.

The Bishop’s church in Stockholm is situated in the Southern and smaller part of the town (Sodermalm) which is as far removed from the Northern part as Birkenhead is from Liverpool. It is a tiny red brick building and from outside bears a striking resemblance to a Primitive Methodist chapel. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes its interior decorations as being ‘tasteful.’ That is, perhaps, a matter of opinion, but at any rate the three altars are always adorned with beautiful flowers, and there is good music at High Mass on Sundays.

Joy wedded Sorrow:

Duly of the twain.

Mid Joy’s delight and Sorrow’s travail-pain, Young Love was born upon a blissful morrow.

Of one or other

Has the boy the most?

For, ‘He’s his father’s son,’ one heart will boast;

While one says sighing, ‘Nay, how like his mother.’

Sister Mary Benvenuta, O.P.