Soliloquies in England, and Later SoliloquiesSantayana, George
Philosophy
Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies
Santayana, George
American essays -- 20th century
and full it is capable of being.
That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic
or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the
church; and it is obvious that Rome itself is heretical and schismatic
on this theory, since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the
text about Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction Over
the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive, and
which these patriarchates have never honestly acknowledged. On the
other hand, the Church of England belonged to the Western Empire
and its Christianity has always been Latin. It broke away from the
patriarchate of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of
Antioch or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with German
Protestantism. This revolt was based on the same anti-Catholic and
inconsistent motives as the German Reformation--namely, greed and
desire for absolute power in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and
impatience of moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the
clergy and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and licence were
curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of England
inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion. It is national
in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in
its sympathies, sentimental in its emotions. Spiritual minds in the
church--of which there are many--suffer under this heredity incubus of
worldliness; but what can they avail? Some join the socialists; a few
escape to Rome; there at least the worldliness, however conspicuous,
is regarded as a vice and not as a virtue. The convert will find
no dearth of petty passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and
shameless disbelief; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of
corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin, not cancer at
the heart. But then the true Catholic has made the great surrender;
he has renounced, or never thought of maintaining, the authority of
his inner man. He is a catechumen; his teachers will read for him the
symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and dispositions;
by their discipline--which is an ancient science--they will help him
to save his soul; a totally different thing from obeying the impulses
or extending the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner
man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a pathological
phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as I conceive him, living in
and by his inner man, can never be really a Catholic, either Anglican
or Roman; if he likes to call himself by either name, it is equally a
masquerade, a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so
seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a
spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a year and live in Japan with
a Japanese wife; but if he is converted really, and becomes a Catholic
at heart, for good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man
he was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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