The Duty of Accepting Divine Revelation as Proposed by the Catholic Church

Article 1 — Indifferentism and Liberalism

I. Absolute Indifferentism denies the necessity of any religion whatsoever, even of natural religion — a position formally condemned by the Church. It is the practical fruit of Atheism, Agnosticism, or Pantheism, and its practical application may be read in such works as F. Buisson’s La Foi Laïque. Jaurès, addressing the French Chamber of Deputies in February 1895, put the underlying attitude with startling frankness: were God Himself to appear before the multitudes in some palpable, visible form, he suggested, man’s very first duty would be to refuse Him obedience, and to treat Him as an equal to be argued with rather than a master to be submitted to.

II. Moderate Indifferentism, or Latitudinarianism, recognizes some duties toward God and some form of worship, but insists that this worship remain deliberately vague and unspecific in character — a vagueness confirmed by the fact that some proponents of this view (Jules Simon among them) go on to deny even the utility and efficacy of prayer as such. Félicité de Lamennais held that eternal salvation could be reached simply by living in accordance with what is objectively right, without the profession of any particular faith at all — a position already characterized as “Indifferentism” as early as 1817.

III. Liberalism, properly so called, has been condemned by the Church across three successive periods.

First period. Lamennais founded, in 1830, the newspaper L’Avenir to defend the rights of the Church, proposing a formal separation of Church and State as a means of securing the Church’s own freedom, and defending the civil liberty of every form of worship indiscriminately as a supposed means of reconciling Faith with modern science. Gregory XVI, in his encyclical Mirari Vos (1832), condemned this opinion as effectively paving the way for outright Indifferentism. Lamennais’s own disciples accepted the condemnation at once; Lamennais himself initially submitted, but later attacked the Church directly in his book Paroles d’un Croyant, which was itself condemned in 1834 — he died in 1854 without ever making his submission.

Second period. After a discourse delivered by Montalembert at the Congress of Mechlin in 1863, Pius IX again condemned Liberalism in his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), publishing alongside it the Syllabus of modern errors.

Third period. Leo XIII, in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), confirmed the teaching of both Gregory XVI and Pius IX, while at the same time stressing that there can be no element of compulsion in the adoption of the Catholic Faith, quoting St. Augustine’s own dictum: “man cannot believe except willingly” (credere non potest homo nisi volens). In his later encyclical Libertas (1888), Leo XIII went on to condemn the notion of an unrestrained liberty extended equally to every form of religion. Finally, Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi (1910), in his letters concerning the errors of the Sillon movement, and in the encyclical Vehementer Nos, confirmed these same condemnations once more. The essential continuity of this doctrine across the centuries may be traced by comparing these modern pronouncements with such earlier documents as Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam, or the teaching of Martin V and Leo X in their own day.

Article 2 — The Duty of Professing the Truths of Natural Religion

I. There is a moral obligation binding every individual to profess natural religion.

First argument: man needs religion to attain his natural end.

Major: The end to which man is naturally directed obliges him to make use of the means proportioned to that end. Minor: But man’s natural end obliges him, both from the standpoint of intellect and from that of will, to practise religion. Conclusion: Therefore man needs religion in order to attain his natural end.

The Major is proved from two distinct standpoints. (1) From the standpoint of intellect: the intellect is naturally directed to the knowledge of truth, and no truths are more necessary to it than the knowledge of the First Cause of our own nature, of the supreme law of moral action, and of the ultimate source of help needed for right living; our intellect is thus naturally directed toward the knowledge of God as Author of nature, insofar as He is knowable from the works of creation. (2) From the standpoint of will: the will is naturally directed to the love of whatever good the intellect presents to it; but the intellect knows not merely particular goods but good as such, in general, and can find the fullness of that good nowhere but in the Supreme Goodness of God — “our heart is restless, O Lord, until it rests in Thee,” as St. Augustine famously puts it. The will, accordingly, is naturally directed to the love of God above all created things.

The Minor is proved in turn: unless man actively endeavours to think rightly of God, to obey Him, and to manifest to Him, both interiorly and exteriorly, a due subjection and love — acts that together constitute the virtue of religion — his knowledge of God remains merely speculative, exercising no real influence upon his actual life. Man’s very nature, then, depends on God as its Creator, and is sustained and helped by Him continually; man accordingly owes God sentiments of subjection, honour, gratitude, and love, sincerely and consistently maintained — this constitutes interior worship. But interior worship, being real, naturally externalizes itself as well; since God, as Author of nature, is knowable by human reason generally, this exterior worship must be preserved through some form of external, and indeed genuinely social, worship as well, since God is likewise the ultimate founder of human society as such. Because worship of this kind is strictly owed to God, the virtue of religion is properly classed under the cardinal virtue of justice.

II. Corollary. Prayer and sacrifice are the chief acts of natural religion — prayer, in recognition of God’s supremacy and of our own human needs; sacrifice, in atonement for human faults.

Article 3 — The Duty Binding the Individual to Accept Divine Revelation Sufficiently Proposed, and to Seek It Out Where There Is a Serious Probability of Its Existence

I. Proof drawn from the law of God. Revelation, once sufficiently proposed, comes from God — our Creator, our Lord, the very Source of truth — and the duty of accepting it follows directly from that fact. Should the objection be raised that the obligation to accept Divine Revelation is itself a supernatural obligation, and therefore cannot rest on the natural law as such, St. Thomas replies that it is, in fact, directly against the natural law — being, precisely, an act of disobedience — to resist an interior or exterior grace, even where that grace is itself supernatural in its content, once it has been offered through the ministry of preaching. The unbeliever who resists supernatural grace thus offends directly against the supernatural law, and indirectly, but no less really, against the natural law as well.

II. Proof drawn from the end of man.

Major: Man, by the law of his own nature, is obliged to strive toward his own last end, whether that end be natural or supernatural. Minor: But without the acceptance of Divine Revelation, man cannot efficaciously attain his last end. Conclusion: Therefore man is bound to accept Divine Revelation.

The Minor is proved as follows: it has already been shown that Revelation is morally necessary if the truths of natural religion themselves are to be known speedily, with certitude, and without admixture of error; Revelation, further, is absolutely necessary for the knowledge of those specifically supernatural truths on which man’s salvation directly depends. Our duties toward God are, accordingly, of the very first importance, since they are founded immediately upon the Eternal and Natural Law themselves; the highest of all virtues are the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, which bear directly on God, followed closely by the virtue of religion. These duties toward God, moreover, form the indispensable foundation of every other human duty: were the Eternal Law, and the Natural Law that reflects it, simply disregarded, no other human duty would retain any real foundation or sanction whatsoever.

III. There is, further, a grave obligation to seek out Divine Revelation wherever there is a serious probability of its existence. This obligation is established by both the law of God and the true end of man, once the necessity of Revelation is otherwise established, as shown above.

IV. Outside the Church there is no salvation. This time-honoured principle requires careful precision in its meaning. Origen writes plainly: “outside the Church, no one is saved” (Homilies on Joshua, III, 5); St. Cyprian: “he cannot have God for his father, who does not have the Church for his mother” (De Unitate Ecclesiae, n. 6); St. Augustine likewise denies that salvation can be found by anyone genuinely outside the Church (De Baptismo, IV).

Theologians accordingly distinguish between the body and the soul of the Church. To the body of the Church belong the baptized who profess the Catholic Faith under the magisterium of the Roman Pontiff; to the soul of the Church belong those who, even outside the visible body, nonetheless possess interior grace and charity in good faith. Those who remain outside the body of the Church through their own genuine fault cannot, on this account, be saved; but those who remain outside it through no fault of their own — invincibly, in the traditional phrase — can still be saved, provided they are joined to the soul of the Church through an implicit desire, sustained by an act of perfect contrition. For salvation, then, it is absolutely necessary (necessitate medii): first, to belong really, or at least in desire, to the Church; and second, that adults belong either really or in desire, while infants must belong really, through the reception of valid baptism.

V. Difficulties.

(1) Is there not an element of truth in every form of religion? Whatever element of truth may exist within a false system of doctrine is never the true soul of that doctrine, but only, in the end, the unwitting servant of its underlying error.

(2) Does not the obedience of Faith clash with the independence and dignity of reason? The “independence” of reason is, properly understood, always limited by truth itself: it is no true mark of rational independence to claim the liberty of believing, say, that two and two make five. Reason is genuinely free only when its conclusions actually accord with truth — as Auguste Nicolas memorably put it, to be truly free is to do what one wishes, precisely in doing what one ought.

Article 4 — The Obligation Binding Civil Authority and Society to Accept Divine Revelation Sufficiently Proposed

I. Proof drawn from the law of God, Author of civil society. God is Creator, Lord, and Benefactor of civil society no less than of the individual person; society, accordingly, owes God a genuine social worship, and the obedience of Faith, wherever God has clearly revealed supernatural truth to it.

II. Proof drawn from the end of society. The end of civil society — the temporal well-being of its citizens — depends essentially on their civil and moral well-being, which in turn remains subordinate to their spiritual well-being; society, accordingly, cannot simply neglect Revealed Truth once the genuineness of that Revelation is clear. The State ought, therefore, to defend in the temporal order not only natural but also revealed religion. St. Thomas teaches that unbelievers who have never received the Faith at all, Jews and pagans among them, are not to be compelled to believe, since belief is essentially a matter of the free will; but writing of a nominally Catholic state in his own medieval period, and of those who had apostatized from a Faith once genuinely accepted, he held that such persons might rightly be compelled, even by civil penalty, to keep faith with what they had earlier promised and accepted. He goes on to argue that if forgers and other grave malefactors were justly condemned to death by secular rulers, apostates deserved, still more, not merely excommunication but, in the last resort, capital punishment as well — though the Church herself, he notes, acted with real mercy in practice, refusing to condemn without a first and then a second formal admonition; only where such admonitions proved genuinely useless did the Church excommunicate, leaving any further, strictly secular, action to the civil power (Summa, II-II, q. 10, a. 8; q. 11, a. 3).

III. How civil authority should, in practice, accept Divine Revelation. 1° Negatively: the State should enact no decree prejudicial to Revealed Religion — it has no legitimate right to prevent the preaching of God’s word, the administration of the sacraments, the celebration of divine worship, the Church’s own judgment on the morality of human acts, the education of her ministers, or the well-being of religious communities generally; nor can it deny the natural indissolubility of marriage, or lend its own sanction to divorce. 2° Positively and directly: the State should actively cherish Revealed Religion, encouraging its preaching and propagation, the building of churches, and the like. 3° Positively and indirectly: since a society’s temporal prosperity itself depends, in the end, on the civil and moral well-being of its citizens, the encouragement of true religion serves the temporal common good as well as the spiritual.

Two difficulties remain.

(1) What, in practice, can the Church reasonably ask of an indifferent, or even an actively unbelieving, State? That unbelievers and heretics be left free in the private profession of their own religion — though such profession, precisely as false or defective, is not to be positively blessed or protected as though it were equally true, but only tolerated, and then only to avoid some still greater evil. Can a genuinely Catholic State, then, actively prevent the public worship of unbelievers and heretics? The State cannot, per se — that is, without some further specific reason — simply tolerate what is directly evil and injurious to God; but it may, per accidens, tolerate the worship of unbelievers and heretics precisely in order to avoid a greater evil. What a Catholic State cannot do, however, is positively sanction, by law, an unrestricted freedom of worship, as though every religion were equally true. As the traditional formula has it: the Church is intolerant in principle, because she believes; she is tolerant in practice, because she loves. The enemies of the Church, by contrast, are tolerant in principle, because they do not believe anything in particular; they are intolerant in practice, precisely because they do not love.

(2) Is it not the proper duty of Catholic civil authority simply to attend to the temporal well-being of its subjects, remaining strictly neutral in religious matters? Temporal well-being, as already shown, is essentially subordinate to spiritual well-being; the natural order and the supernatural order, on Catholic principles, ought never to be artificially separated from one another.

Epilogue

Under the illuminating guidance of Père Garrigou-Lagrange, we have explored together the errors of Modernism and Agnosticism, of Pantheism and Rationalism. Surely the very examination of these errors has manifested, by contrast, the underlying sanity and beauty of Catholic teaching. May every reader of these principles of Catholic Apologetics reach that same glorious consummation of which St. Paul speaks — a destiny worthy of every effort we can make toward it — when creation itself “shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). And Our Blessed Lord Himself points the way to that consummation: “if you continue in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31–32).