Autor: Bellco, Hilaire

Buch: The Great Heresies

Titel: The Great Heresies

Stichwort: Reformation; Ende d. Vorherrschaft d. protestantischen Kultur (1850), Ursachen ("auto-toxic"); Problem: Fixierung eines geschichtlichen Datums; Verlust d. Autorität der Bibel; Kapitalismus

Kurzinhalt: ... what really made the change was the great internal weakness of the Protestant culture as opposed to the Catholic. It was this decay of the opponent to the Church which began to transform Europe and prepare men for yet another great change ...

Textausschnitt: 110c It is very difficult to say when the tide turns in the great processes of history. But one rule may be wisely applied; the turn of the tide comes earlier than men judging by surface phenomena conceive. Any great system the actively centralized Western Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the period of Turkish rule in the East, the period of the absolute Monarchies of Western Europe has really begun to break down long before the outside observer can note any change. For instance, as late as 1630 men were still talking and thinking of the Spanish power as much the greatest thing in the world; yet it had received its death blow in Holland a lifetime before, and was after Rocroi (1643) slowly bleeding to death. (Fs) (notabene)

110d It was and is so with the Protestant hegemony over our culture, with the Protestant and anti-Catholic leadership of white civilization. The tide has turned. But what was the moment of change? When was "slack water"?

111a It is difficult to fix a date for these things, but a universal rule is that, in doubt between two dates, the earlier date is to be preferred to the later. (Fs)

Many would put the years 1899-1901, the ominous Boer War, as the turning point. Some would put it later. For my part, I should fix it round about the years 1885-1887. It seems to me that a universal observer, unbiased by patriotic feeling, would fix that moment or 1890 at the latest as the point of flexion in the curve. The Protestant powers were apparently greater than ever; but a reaction was stirring and in the next generation it was bound to become apparent. (Fs) (notabene)

111b Whatever the causes and whatever the precise dates to be fixed (certainly somewhere between 1885 and 1904) the tide was turning. It was not turning toward the re-establishment of the Catholic culture as the leader of Europe, let alone to the re-establishment of the Catholic Church as the universal spirit of that culture; but the ideas and the things which had made the opposite culture all-powerful were breaking down. This modern decline of the Protestant hegemony and its succession by an altogether new menace and a new Catholic reaction against that menace I shall now describe. (Fs) (notabene)

Whatever date we assign to the summit of power in the Protestant culture, whether we say that its decay was beginning as early as 1890 or that it cannot be put earlier than even 1904, there is no doubt that after this date in other words, with the very first years of the twentieth century the supremacy of the Protestant culture was undermined. (Fs)

111c The various Protestant heresies upon which it had been based, and the general spirit of all those heresies combined, were declining; therefore their fruit, the Protestant hegemony over Europe and the white world, was declining also. Protestantism was being strangled at its root, at its spiritual root; therefore the material fruits of that tree were beginning to wither. (Fs)

When we study in detail the process of this veiled decay in the supremacy of the Protestant culture we find two sets of causes. The first, and apparently the least important (though posterity may discover it to be of great importance), was a certain recovery of confidence in a portion (but only a portion) of the nations deriving from the Catholic culture, and at the same time a revival of vitality in Catholic teaching. (Fs)

111d Politically there was no reaction towards the old strength of the Catholic culture; it was rather the other way. Ireland continued to decline in population and wealth, and was now more subject to a Protestant power than ever before. Poland could apparently no longer hope for resurrection. The divisions within the Catholic culture itself grew worse than ever. In France (which was the keystone of the whole) the quarrel between the Church and her enemies became taken for granted and the victory of these enemies taken for granted as well. Religion was dying out in the elementary schools. Great tracts of the peasantry were losing their ancestral faith; and with the decline of religion went a decline of taste in architecture and all the arts and worst of all in letters. The old French lucidity of thought began to grow confused. There was no revival of Spain, and in Italy, what with anti-clerical and Masonic Parliamentary power and the differences between the various districts, yet another province of Catholic culture grew weaker. (Fs)

112a But there was already apparent some revival of religion in the wealthier classes among all the nations of Catholic culture. (Fs) (notabene)

This might not seem to mean much, for the wealthier classes are a small minority; but they influenced the universities and therefore the literature and philosophy of their generation. Where, half a lifetime before, anyone would have told you that Catholicism could never again appear in the University of Paris there were evident signs that it was again being taken very seriously. In all this the great Pope Leo XIII played a chief part, seconded by him who was later to become Cardinal Mercier. St. Thomas Aquinas was rehabilitated and the University of Louvain became a focus of intellectual energy radiating throughout Western Europe. (Fs)

112b Still, all this was, I repeat, of less significance than the decline of the Protestant culture from within. The Catholic culture continued to be divided; there were no signs of its returning to its great role in the past; and though the seeds both of Irish and Polish recovery had been sown (the former through the very important recovery of their land by the tenacious Irish peasantry) no one could have foretold as indeed most cannot yet perceive the strengthening of the Catholic culture as a whole throughout our civilization. (Fs)

112c There were great converts, as there have always been; there were what is even more significant, whole groups of very eminent men, such as Brunetière in France, who grew less and less sympathetic with the old-fashioned atheism and agnosticism, and who, without declaring themselves Catholic, were clearly sympathetic with the Catholic side. But these did not influence the main current; what really made the change was the great internal weakness of the Protestant culture as opposed to the Catholic. It was this decay of the opponent to the Church which began to transform Europe and prepare men for yet another great change, which I shall call (so as to give it a name and be able to study it later) "The Modern Phase." (Fs) (notabene)

113a Protestant culture decayed from within from a number of causes, all probably connected, although it is difficult to trace the connection; all probably proceeding from what physicists call the "auto-toxic" condition of the Protestant culture. We say that an organism has become "auto-toxic" when it is beginning to poison itself, when it loses vigour in its vital processes and accumulates secretions which continually lessen its energies. Something of this kind was happening to the Protestant culture towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. (Fs) (notabene)

This was the general cause of the Protestant decline, but its action was vague and hard to grasp; on the particular causes of that decline we may be more concrete and certain. (Fs)

113b For one thing the spiritual basis of Protestantism went to pieces through the breakdown of the Bible as a supreme authority. This breakdown was the result of that very spirit of sceptical inquiry upon which Protestantism had always been based. It had begun by saying, "I deny the authority of the Church: every man must examine the credibility of every doctrine for himself." But it had taken as a prop (illogically enough) the Catholic doctrine of Scriptural inspiration. That great mass of Jewish folklore, poetry and traditional popular history and proverbial wisdom which we call the Old Testament, that body of records of the Early Church which we call the New Testament, the Catholic Church had declared to be Divinely inspired. Protestantism (as we all know) turned this very doctrine of the Church against the Church herself, and appealed to the Bible against Catholic authority. (Fs) (notabene)

113c Hence the Bible Old and New Testaments combined became an object of worship in itself throughout the Protestant culture. There was a great deal of doubt and even paganism floating about before the end of the nineteenth century in the nations of Protestant culture; but the mass of their populations, in Germany as in England and Scandinavia, certainly in the United States, anchored themselves to the literal interpretation of the Bible. (Fs)

Now historical research, research in physical science and research in textual criticism, shook this attitude. The Protestant culture began to go to the other extreme; from having worshipped the very text of the Bible as something immutable and the clear voice of God, it fell to doubting almost everything that the Bible contained. (Fs) (notabene)

113d It questioned the authenticity of the four Gospels, particularly the two written by eye-witnesses to the life of Our Lord and more especially that of St. John, the prime witness to the Incarnation. (Fs)
114a It came to deny the historical value of nearly everything in the Old Testament prior to the Babylonian exile; it denied as a matter of course every miracle from cover to cover and every prophecy. (Fs)

That a document should contain prophecy was taken to prove that it must have been written after the event. Every inconvenient text was labelled as an interpolation. In fine, when this spirit (which was the very product of Protestantism itself) had done with the Bible the very foundation of Protestantism it had left nothing of Protestantism but a mass of ruins. (Fs)

114b There was also another example of the spirit of Protestantism destroying its own foundations, but in a different field that of social economics. (Fs)

Protestantism had produced free competition permitting usury and destroying the old safeguards of the small man's property the guild and the village association. (Fs)

114c In most places where it was powerful (and especially in England) Protestantism had destroyed the peasantry altogether. It had produced modern industrialism in its capitalistic form; it had produced modern banking, which at last became the master of the community; but not much more than a lifetime's experience of industrial capitalism and of the banker's usurious power was enough to show that neither the one nor the other could continue. They had bred vast social evils which went from bad to worse, until men, without consciously appreciating the ultimate cause of those evils (which cause is, of course, spiritual and religious) at any rate found the evils unendurable. (Fs)

But the later wealth and political power of the Protestant culture had been based upon these very institutions, now challenged. (Fs)

Industrial capitalism and the usurious banking power were the very strength of nineteenth-century Protestant civilization. They had especially triumphed in Victorian England. They are, at the moment in which I write these words, still on the surface all-powerful but we every one of us know that their hour has struck. They have rotted from within; and with them the Protestant hegemony which they so powerfully supported in the generations immediately before our own. (Fs)

114d There was yet another cause of weakening and decline in the Protestant culture: the various parts of it tended to quarrel one with the other. That was what one would have expected from a system at once based upon competition and flattering human pride. The various Protestant societies, notably the British and Prussian, were each convinced of its own complete superiority. But you cannot have two or more superior races. (Fs)

115a This mood of self-worship necessarily led to conflict between the self-worshippers. They might all combine in despising the Catholic culture, but they could not preserve unity among themselves. (Fs)

The trouble was made worse by an inherent lack of plan. The Protestant culture having begun by exaggerating the power of human reason, was ending by abandoning human reason. It boasted its dependence upon instinct and even upon good fortune. There was no commoner phrase upon the lips of Protestant Englishmen than the phrase, "We are not a logical nation." Each Protestant group was "God's country" God's favourite and somehow or other was bound to come out on top without the bother of thinking out a scheme for its own conduct. (Fs) (notabene)

115b Nothing more fatal for an individual or a large society in the long run can be conceived than this blind dependence upon an assured good fortune, and an equally blind neglect of rational processes. It opens the door to every extravagance, material and spiritual; to conceptions of universal dominion, world power and the rest of it, which in their effect are mortal poisons. (Fs)

All these things combined led to the great breakdown which we date overtly from 1914 but of which the inception lay three years earlier at least; for it was three years before the outbreak of the Great War that the nations began to make their preparations for conflict. (Fs)

115c In the Great War, of course, the whole of the old state of affairs went down with a crash. So much as survived what had been the institutions of the Protestant hegemony control by the banks, the levying of general usury through international loans, the wholly competitive industrial system, the unchecked exploitation of a vast proletariat by a small capitalist class only survived precariously, propped up by every sort of device, and that in only a few societies. In the mass of our civilization these things rapidly disappeared. The main political institution which had gone with them parliaments composed of professional politicians and calling themselves "representative" went down the same road. Our civilization began to enter a period of political experiments, including despotisms, each of which experiments may be and probably is ephemeral, but all of which are, at any rate, a complete break with the immediate past. (Fs)

The old white world wherein a divided and distracted Catholic culture was overshadowed by a triumphant and powerful Protestant culture was no more. (Fs)

115d But let it be noted that this breakdown of the older anti-Catholic thing, the Protestant culture, shows no sign of being followed by an hegemony of the Catholic culture. There is no sign as yet of a reaction towards the domination of Catholic ideas the full restoration of the Faith by which Europe and all our civilization can alone be saved. (Fs) (notabene)

116a It nearly always happens that when you get rid of one evil you find yourself faced with another hitherto unsuspected; and so it is now with the breakdown of the Protestant hegemony. We are entering a new phase, "The Modern Phase," as I have called it, in which very different problems face the Eternal Church and a very different enemy will challenge her existence and the salvation of the world which depends upon her. What that modern phase is I shall now attempt to analyse. (Fs)