Tragic Sense Of Life

Pauline, or Athanasian solution of our inwa

he one Judaic, the other Hellenic-each of which had already influenced th

ans from among whom the Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste of death till they had seen the kingdom of God-that is, that the kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter, verse 10, it is sai

uppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense (see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a thing perta

if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another life was neither gener

red as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more universal

nt elements must be counted the belief in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, Psyche, "Die Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a hylozoistic system with spiri

hie auf geschichtliche Grundlage, 3. Berlin, 1896), "no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism which ended in the re

puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The discovery of death is that which revea

postolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892). He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life-not his ethica

y Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that "all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they may be deemed t

the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily anthropomorphic, is He who-as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which we were made to learn by heart at school says-created the world for man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save us from

the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher-a teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us. "He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He was first God and then became man in order that He might the better deify us (θεοποιηση)" (Orat. i. 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored;[15] and th

s same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius k

radictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated it

sense-the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the spirit

mortuorum et vitam venturi s?culi-the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. In th

os en polvo

, nuestra es

emos a viv

la piel que n

ey lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the soul is th

ewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety-the Sacrament of the Eu

ress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of this sac

this latter ethical. It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived

ue importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity. What we may call "other-worldliness" (Jenseitigkeit) was obliterated little by little by "this-worldliness" (Diesseitigkeit); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious coarseness

ely to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind. Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything-i.e., of understanding the necessar

Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that time-that is to say, until Luther-the Church had accepted much as doctrina sacra which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot conceive the li

s, then, is what Protestantism dissolves into-celestial music![19] On the other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most ma

compense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element preponderating. The most authentic

, mi Dios,

me tienes p

rest tha

ing for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal-that is, a heretic-is worse than bein

ble, or a society of men-the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibilit

tood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, f

. Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history, together with that general philosophy of nature and history which results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even a

hurch's attitude in its struggle with Modernism, o

eover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, Dogme et Critique, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consci

bsequium, and although faith precedes reason (fides pr?cedit rationem), according to St. Augustine, this same learned doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (per fidem ad intellectum), and to believe in order to understand (credo ut intelligam). How far is this from that superb expression of Tertullian-et sepultus resurrexit,

by that great Catholic, whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have the Catholic hall-mark-the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is uncertain, either we mu

erely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of

ituted, that the teaching Church might be the depositary-"reservoir instead of river," as Phillips Brooks said-of theological secrets. "The work of the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (Dogmengeschichte, ii. 1, cap. vii. 3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians. The setting up of the

not so much upon the essence as upon the free and inscrutable will of God-by accentuating its supreme irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is de

eo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between

rejected. And hence the result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticis

rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what c

or scientific solution-or, more pr

TNO

Griechen." Tübingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work

Gal.

see, among others, Harnack, Dogmengesc

1

e are be

Lord, our h

hall live

nd skin that o

ersión de la Magdelen

e christliche Religion, Berlin, 1909, one of the series en

e "nonsense, something not worth listening to," lends it a sati

s me to love Thee. (Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeen

rence en matière de reli

de Saint-Pétersbo

lity of belief in the Trinity. The coalheaver took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three folds. "He

atik," in Systematische Christliche Religion,

Considered," 1816, in The Complete Works of