III
MR. WELLS’S IGNORANCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The Third mark of Mr. Wells’s outburst against me I have called his amazing ignorance upon the Catholic Church. That ignorance is, of course, still more apparent in his book. But I am concerned here only with the way in which it appears in his pamphlet. He inherits the old prejudice—flourishing strongly in the best No-Popery days—that for some unexplained reason a Catholic is opposed to that most interesting intellectual activity, the pursuit of physical knowledge. He envisages the Catholic Church as teaching an inchoate heap of unconnected doctrines, each of them highly concrete, each of them flagrantly impossible, and the chief of them an historical statement that in a particular place and at a particular time, to wit, in the neighbourhood of Baghdad 5930 years ago, there took place the Fall of Man. He has no conception that we object to a book like his and to methods such as he uses because we use the human reason, and are all brought up to know that the human reason is absolute in its own sphere.
Exactly the same habit of clear thinking which makes us know the limitations of reason and makes us accept a mystery, gives us our admiration for that divine gift of reason in man and our contempt for people who, like Mr. Wells, have never been trained to use it, and flounder the moment they try to think hard.
For instance, nowhere is Mr. Wells’s intellectual weakness more apparent than in his inability to understand what is meant by a fixed type, or general form. He meets it with the dear old fallacy which has been known for more than two thousand years under the name of Sorites—I may inform Mr. Wells that this is not the name of a disease of the body but of the intelligence. It consists in always asking, “where do you draw the line?” and on that pretence trying to avoid definition.
A fixed type does not mean that there is no difference between one individual or another, nor exact identity of form between one time and another. It means that there is a general idea which can be recognised and on which one can predicate: as, that cats mew and dogs bark, that ducks swim and hens don’t.
Mr. Wells has innumerable readers, and among them let me suppose a reader who has stolen a horse. He is asked in Court what he has to say in his own defence. Taught by Mr. Wells, I suppose he would say: “M’lud, my defence is that there is no such thing as a horse. You cannot draw the line between Eohippus, Hippus Alogos vel Hodiernus, and that glorious thing with wings and a halo which the horse will no doubt become here on earth if we give it time.” I am afraid he would not be allowed to get on very far with his defence. The judge and jury would still ignorantly go on believing that there was such a thing as a horse, an animal which behaved in a certain way and is very easy to recognise, and the humble pupil of Mr. Wells would go to gaol.
So also there is such a thing as man, though Mr. Wells seems to doubt it. Man has a particular nature, and that nature is subject to questions which it is of enormous importance to him to decide. His individuality, his soul, is, for instance, either immortal or mortal. It is of first-rate importance to decide on that—infinitely more important than it is to decide on exactly how and by what stages his body came to be; just as it is infinitely more important for a man to decide between right and wrong action in manhood than to make a selection of his photographs as a baby.
We Catholics are interested in this Animal Man, because we think (making clear use of our reason) that it is more important for man to know what happens to man and what man really is than for man to know any other subject. We believe that he has been created by an omnipotent God, to whom he is responsible for good or evil action committed by his own free will—for in man’s free will we also believe; we believe his soul to be immortal, and to be tested for eternal beatitude or eternal loss thereof.
Anyone is free to say “These doctrines are particular, you admit yourself that you hold them on Faith and not on positive evidence. I for my part do not accept them.” There is no lack of reason in making that negative statement.
But a mind that can imagine that there is no such thing as man and indeed no such thing as a thing; a mind (to put it in the old language) which is nominalist in that degree, is in great peril of ceasing to be a mind at all.
The particular point on which Mr. Wells comes his worst cropper in connection with the Catholic Church is a blunder to which he devotes a whole chapter of his pamphlet, and over ten pages of print furiously reviling me.
He has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. He imagines that we wake up in the middle of the night in an agony of imperilled faith because a long time ago there was a being which was as human as we are apparently in his brain capacity, in his power to make instruments, to light fires, and in his reverent burial of the dead, but who probably, perhaps certainly, bent a little at the knee, carried his head forward, was sloping in the chin. He thinks that unless a private individual like myself, with hardly any more reading on anthropology than Mr. Wells himself, can give a definite theological definition on whether the owners of these skeletons were true men or not, all the theological statements about man as we know him are worthless.
I can understand many a blunder about the Catholic position on the part of people living in a world where they do not meet Catholics and who know next to nothing of the past of Europe or of the way in which our civilisation is a product of the Catholic Faith. I often come across even well-educated men who have surprisingly little knowledge of the Church; but what I cannot understand is that a man thus ignorant should also be ignorant of the ordinary rules of thought.
A man’s Faith may possibly be shaken by some philosophical argument—though my own experience is that when it is shaken, still more when it is lost, the cause at work is not intellectual but always moral—the Faith is lost through wrong doing. But that the Faith could conceivably be lost through not being able to define at what exact moment true man appeared, is to me quite inconceivable. I confess I cannot understand the mental processes of a writer who puts a test of that kind.
We are arguing as to whether Wordsworth is a good poet or no. One man says he is, quoting from his best; another man says he isn’t, quoting from his worst. There barges in a third party who says cheerfully, “The whole discussion is futile. There was no such person as Wordsworth as a writer at all. And to prove that, here is a record of what he was like and what he did at the age of six, and another when he was inarticulate upon his death-bed. Where do you draw the line?”
We are discussing whether an individual is responsible for a particular action; for instance, writing a confused book. One man says, “It was not his fault; it was due to bad training.” The other says, “It was his fault, for any rational being ought to write more clearly than that.” A third party barges in, and says, “The whole discussion is futile, for there was no such writer. I can prove it by a photograph of him as a baby, in which it is quite clear that he couldn’t write books at all.”
But Mr. Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.
For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption only applies to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian talk is.” But we have all of us known all about that, not only since first the Church began, but since first man began to trouble himself about divine things at all. Is not the sky at night sufficient evidence of scale? Is not the brevity of human life? Is not the magnitude of the world upon which we live—of even a part of which no man could have comprehensive knowledge in a thousand years?
There is I think in all of this an honest desire upon Mr. Wells’s part—I may say a burning missionary zeal—to convert us to Atheism, something on the same level as that of those from whom he derives. They were convinced, you will remember, not so long ago, that to turn the inhabitants of Wugga-Mugga into honest folk like themselves attending chapel, meeting at tea-fights, and even keeping one or two servants, all that was wanted was a translation of the Old Testament in Wugga-Mugganese—which translation they then did order in prodigious quantities and export to Wugga-Mugga by the ton, to the huge profit of a great number of salaried officials in the W.M. Bible Society, and to honest rum-drinking sea captains as well; but to no appreciable effect upon Wugga-Muggaland, its monarch, aristocracy and common folk.
So I fear it will be with this effort at conversion of the Catholic to Atheism by an exceedingly insufficient rehash of text-books thirty years old. Mr. Wells sometimes pleads that all this doesn’t matter, because the Catholic Church no longer counts. Well, that plea itself is a very good example of ignorance. If he had a general acquaintance with Europe he would know, not only that the Catholic Church counts, but that it is beginning to count more and more. That is no proof of its right to the claim it advances of a divine authority; but it is proof that there is a great social phenomenon present to the eye of every educated and travelled man to-day—the resurrection of the Catholic Nations, the new attitude of the academic youth on the Continent, and particularly in Paris; the new wave in literature; the breakdown of the nineteenth-century materialism in philosophy—which is not present in the experience of Mr. Wells.
He tells us rather pathetically that he must know all about the Catholic Church, because he now winters on the Riviera. I answer that the experience is insufficient. If every rich Englishman who wintered on the Riviera acquired thereby a general grasp on the modern spirit of Europe, we should have among them a public to be envied; but from what I have seen of those who thus escape the English winter, the Monte Carlo Express and the Cosmopolitan hotels do not make for common culture, let alone for an understanding of divine things.
I have no space to enlarge on the point. Mr. Wells knows as much about the Catholic Church as he does of the classical spirit, of great verse, of the architecture inherited from the ancients, or indeed of any other noble tradition. Yet it should be a commonplace with anyone who attempts to write upon European history that some general knowledge of what the Faith may be is a first essential in his affair.
That knowledge is rare and fragmentary in many considerable anti-Catholic historians; in Mr. Wells it is absent.