Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some
difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are
essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by
the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated
by Greece and Rome.
The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and
his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of
which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the
future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress
contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on
the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both
essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to
develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he
carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that
intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal
temporarily cuts him off.
Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming
at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was
embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire
the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers,
Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.
But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on
the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical
organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in
the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into
which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find
its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining
a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the
possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired
by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life
here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill
and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic
synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we
call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the
task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that
such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea
of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must
survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or
humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us--however we prefer to
phrase it--is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of
carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we
enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively
producing it. The new unity is itself progress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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