Philosophical Exigencies of Christian Religion

In the study of the Christian spirit perhaps the greatest difficulty to overcome is the one that results from the unreal character, so to speak, that Catholic dogmas have taken even among many of the faithful. By dint of habit that dulls the mind, due to the development of a science that is either too notional or too focused on purely utilitarian applications, contemporary minds have turned away from invisible and concrete truths that generations of solid and practical faith have lived by. Very few realize (in the sense Newman gave to this word) the historical and permanent sense of the Christian mysteries; whence a sort of nebulous atmosphere that envelops them, without their being denied, but without anyone looking on them with the attention that gives them depth, that would understand their exigency as that of a presence coming to bear on our adherence and on our action. Very often, among intellectuals, those who call themselves faithful and intend to be faithful, cut their beliefs short in conversations with those who are strangers to their faith: a tacit half-concession makes them avoid literal formulations, formal adherences, the attitude that should result from a truly complete and effective confession of faith regarding the most essential dogmas that are simultaneously the most embarrassing at times for unbelievers, as they were already with the contemporaries of St. Paul.

Now that is a disposition or, if one prefers, a temptation against which we must above all be on guard. Two dangers threaten us constantly. One consists in looking for idealized meanings, less brutal interpretations, symbolic forms where unbelievers could themselves find charming allegories and as it were enchanting myths. But if one were to let oneself go down this incline, one would slip inevitably into a sublimation that would make evaporate the authentic reality of the only true Christian religion. Nevertheless the other danger, symmetrical to the first, is hardly less deleterious and menacing. In reacting against deleterious idealization, many fall back on a pure and simple literalism or latch on only to the container of the facts, the formulas, the rites, the traditional precepts, as if it were a question of ancestral custom or of a magical practice to be preserved without putting one’s soul and all of one’s entire life into it.

Between these two deformations of the Christian spirit, what would be the fitting attitude to define and to justify? What is the proper and truly unique mark of Christianity is the coincidence of historical reality and of dogmatic truth. The facts remain posited in the positive order in what is most singular, most personal, most apparently contingent about them; everything is incarnated in accounts that bear on beings of flesh and bones, on events humbly enmeshed in the course of this world that passes. But at the same time these authentic data serve as support or even as substance for divine interventions, for supernaturally and eternally acting causes: the virginal conception, the redemptive value of the cross, the fact of the resurrection are not parables, and their historical reality, which is a matter of faith, requires not only that they be accepted as facts taken literally like other facts of the phenomenal order, or as symbols analogous to other mythological and moral teachings; they are constitutive of an intrinsic truth whose dogmatic value is absolute. In this sense we can say that the letter of the facts is at once the living spirit, the incarnate reality without which neither the letter nor the spirit would remain what they must be. In short, in the presence of these fundamental dogmas, we must always preserve the most indissoluble union in the twofold belief in the letter of the facts and in the divine spirit of which they are the wrapping, the bearer and the authentic manifestation. We can therefore conclude that we must take the letter literally, because the true letter is such only by the spirit and the spirit itself remains spirit only if taken absolutely literally.

How far we are then from the fading attitude wherein contemporary thought is satisfied and takes refuge when faced with categorical teachings. We will be able to call ourselves Christians only on this twofold condition: that we accept as historical certitudes certain facts what we can call dogmatic, even where the proofs do not pertain to the critique of texts and testimonies: and, on the other hand, that we try to understand the intimate sense, the vital exigencies, the transfigurative character of these doctrinal truths that never remain in the state of speculative mysteries, but that must pass into us as principles of spiritual vivification and of transformative union.