Europe and the Faith: "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"Belloc, Hilaire
History
Europe and the Faith: "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"
Belloc, Hilaire
Catholic Church; Europe -- History
When acknowledged and defined Faith departs, it is clear that of the
remaining two rivals, Opinion has no ground against Science. That which
can be demonstrated holds all the field. Indeed, it is the mark of
modern insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude
save certitude through demonstration, and therefore does not, as a
rule, appreciate even its own unproved first principles.
Well, this function of the isolated soul, inquiry and the necessity for
demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and
physical fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the three
modern centuries. We all are equally familiar with its prodigious
results. Not one of them has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one
but has been increasingly misused to the misery of man. There is in the
tragedy something comic also, which is the perpetual puzzlement of
these the very authors of discovery, to find that, somehow or other,
discovery alone does not create joy, and that, somehow or other, a
great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else can be used ill. Also
in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further extension of physical
science as promising, in some illogical way, relief.
A progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so
natural to man (so long as civic order is preserved) that it would,
indeed, have taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the unity
of Europe been preserved. But the destruction of that unity totally
accelerated the pace and as totally threw the movement off its rails.
The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older
than the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The
doors upon modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was
to enter them, had been cut off from its fellows. We owe the
miscarriage of all our great endeavor in this field, not to that spring
of endeavor, but to its deflection. It is a blasphemy to deny the value
of advancing knowledge, and at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it
for its supposed consequences. Its consequences are only evil through
an evil use, that is, through an evil philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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