_French theologian's book prompts the thought

A 'THIN' TONE IN OUR CATHOLIC LIVES?
The Church is all sufficing — yet something urgent and vibrant seems to be missing
By MICHAEL de la REDOYERE
AT the present time anyone with an at all sensitive ear is aware of some spiritual want or need in the Catholicity within which we normally live. It is not easy to express this without saying or implying too much. For it is obviously not remotely a case of any actual defect, anything which the Church as such fails to give us. The life of the Church, the Mass, the sacraments, the varying deviations are admirably adapted to suit different outlooks and what Baron von Hegel called aurae's. From these each person can derive all that he requires for his spiritual life and progress. Nor indeed in any previous age could it have been easier to feed the Catholic mind with a fullness of doctrinal teaching and aid to Catholic devotion and knowledge. We need hardly add that in the government of the Church, and most of all in our present Poly Father. Pope Pius XII, we all enjoy leadership in every possible sense of spiritual leadership: personal holiness and devotion, interest in every aspect of human and social life, unprecedented initiative in adapting the tradition and order of the Church to contemporary needs.
Yet even so there is, it seems, a kind of hankering for something rather different from all this. Shall we say that there is a sense of "thinness," a sense of lack of body, a lack of something which would ensure a spiritual enrichment at what might be called the humbler and more ordinary levels of Catholic life.
So many people today are really yearning for such enrichment more as a matter of course. Perhaps in the routine of ordinary parish life. in Catholic societies and other bodies, in education and instruction, even in the ways of normal administration. they have an expectation of something which they are not getting.
SUCH thoughts as these (for what they may be worth) kept recurring in my mind as I was reading this magnificent book by Pere Bouyer' — and. I am sure that this was happening because Pere Bouyer, though in fact writing about something far removed from this, was all the time filling the need to which I refer.
The name of the book, to begin with, suggests that it is only for the specialist in a subject-matter in which relatively few Catholics are interested. And in all fairness one must confess that ii is not an easy book to read.
It is the work of a scholar with a remarkable mastery of his subject who is not out to spare the reader the trouble necessary to understand him. But perhaps the first real curiosity is whetted when one learns that. Pere Bouyer is himself a convert from Lutheranism so that we may take this work to be not so much an apologia—it is in fact entirely impersonal—as the fruit of a mind enriched by all that is best in Protestantism and the absolute truth and rightness of Catholicism alone.
Next, the reader is extraordinarily stimulated by the unexpectedness of the author's treatment and view, for much of the book reads like a defence of Protestantism, a condemnation of much of the Catholic theology and philosophy in which the ex-Catholic reformers were brought up and which affected the whole ecclesiastical air of the time.
Finally, with a masterly twist, it is demonstrated that however excusable the Reformers may have been, their whole system utterly condemned itself through having been built up on a false theological and philosophical basis, while the Church, despite passing weakness, inevitably reverted to redeveloping her true values.
The experience of the great danger, however, naturally left the Church suspicious of the positive content of Protestantism. even though, as Pare Bouyer demonstrates, that positive content was wholly derived from the true faith and spiritual treasures of the true Church. And it is precisely in this sense of missing something, as the present reader at least felt, that the Catholic today may feel the worry to which reference has been made.
But lest I be accused of exaggerating or deforming Pere Bouyer's argument, it will be well to give his own summary of his thesis, tons though it is.
PERE BOUYER writes: " We began by affirming that the essence of Protestantism lies, not in any negation, but in certain great positive assertions of Christianity. That is the standpoint from which the great principles of the Reformation must be interpreted, those we see present in Protestantism as lived. those we find immediately we seek. in the abundant production of the Reformers, what they considered essential. Next, we established that, from this point of view, the principles of Protestantism are not only authentically and essentially Christian, as is shown by revealed data, but also that they are corroborated
by Catholic tradition, not only prior to but subsequent to the Reformation.
" The question then naturally arose: how could a reform which set out from such principles end in schism, even in heresy? We answered that. in the actual development by the Reformers of these principles, there were inserted at the outset negative elements having no intrinsic connection with them, in fact, in formal contradicton with the Scriptural teaching the Reformation claimed for itself. These negative elements, we established. were the presuppositions of the nominalist thought of the fifteenth century, that is, of what was the worst of all the too real corruptions of medieval Catholicism."
TT would be impossible in a I necessarily brief article to follow the author's packed and closely reasoned pages; but in order to suggest why it is that the Catholic mind in reading this book finds itself wondering whether something in our Catholic life is missing, let me give one or two examples.
There is no simpler or commoner distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism that the contrast between the Protestant " faith alone" and the Catholic " faith and good works." But P'ere Bouyer, quoting liberally from St. Paul and the Fathers, argues that the Protestant ..fide soia " is the true Catholic doctrine. and that Luther himself understood it in the Catholic way as involving " good works." The Protestant insistence on the Pauline teaching was in opposition, not to true Catholic doctrine, but to medieval corruptions which came close to " idolatry," the attribution to man himself, to his own efforts or to some ritual procedure, what can proceed solely from the action of God Himself. In other words, Protestantism insisted that all grace and merit proceed from God and God only and that absolutely nothing we can do for ourselves in the way of good works has any supernatural value. . This insistence that " there is no error capable of vitiating Christianity more thoroughly, not only in its teaching, but in its life, than to put the Creator and the creature on the same plane " immediately raises the whole meaning and
essence of our Christian life to the plane of the divine. As Christians, we are caught up, from first to last, in and by Christ. Christ and Christ alone is the dimension, so to say. of ail that we dare to call religion. There is nothing else—and if we add anything to Christ, this is idolatry. What an enrichment. what a deepening. of our spiritual lives is this basic realisation.
IN the same way, Pere Bouyer states the essential rightness of the positive Pro testant insistence on the "sovereign authority of Scripture." And he summarises St. Thomas saying exactly the same thing: " The scriptural books alone, in and by themselves, enjoy absolute authority, since the Christian faith rests entirely on the revelation made by God to the Apostles. and before them to the Prophets; it is handed down to us with the direct authority of God only in the canonical books. All other writers, including the doctors of the Church, can by themselves only be the basis of probable arguments. Arguments drawn from Scripture are alone by themselves conclusive. Therefore, the Bible alone provides the real foundations for sacred science."
And again: " No Catholic theologian worthy of the name, today any more than in the Middle Ages, would place any doctrinal authority on the level of Scripture."
Again: " Consequently, it is now absolutely dear, not only that Scripture is inspired, but that there is no other ecclesiastical document of which the same may be said, even a solemn definition of Pope or Council,"
Yet the impression given by some popular apologetics seems almost the contrary. And in practice little interest in Catholic living is shown for the Word of God—God speaking to us, as He does through Scripture alone. Again a "thinness." where there should be " thickness" and substance in our habitual Catholic nourishment.
BEFORE ending, the reader is certainly entitled to an indication of what, according to Pere Bouyer, went wrong.
It was the influence of the nominalist philosophy which for a time was in the Catholic ascendant and which, because of this, forced the Protestants logically into the betrayal and dissipation of the sound positive doctrine they derived from the Catholic teaching and tradition.
Wedded to this nominalist philosophy, which denied the idea of a " universal," a substance, a relation, and accepted only as real what can be perceived, the Reformers, in appealing to the Catholic tradition, deformed it and reduced it to an absurdity. They were unable to conceive of the Fiorillo doctrine on " the analogy of being," Everything for them was a separate and hermetically closed given.
If, they said. everything of merit is from Christ. then man can have no sort of part in the work of salvation. Co-operation and good works arc impossible. In the very act of rightly attributing all to God, the denial of the relevance of man is made, and religion itself which links man to God ceases to be.
Likewise, if alt depends on Scripture, then it must be a petrified Scripture, not the living Word of God, and the idea of a Church as the Body of Christ in the mystical Catholic sense is meaningless.
The effect of these logical, or rather illogical, implications has been the Protestant divisions and diversities of creeds, the drift into extremes of naturalism and fundamentalism, the real reduction of sacraments to a human magic and the like—evils which would in fact have been far worse but for an illogical retention of some of the positive Catholic tradition within the best Protestantism.
ACCIDENTALLY, then, Pere Bouyers' work, which deals ex professo with Protestantism by one who has known it at its best from within, serves, it seems to me, to remind Catholics themselves of the rich treasures of the true Faith which, in reaction against the tragedy of the Reformation, have tended to he overlooked. Happily, it is the privilege of the present Catholic generation to see these treasures being restored to them.
One may hope and pray that the fuller restoration may not be delayed, more especially in its expression within the day-to-day life of the Church as it affects the mass of the faithful who often cannot have the chance of reading and studying for themselves.
• "THE SPIRIT AND FORMS OF PROTESTANTISM," by Louis Bouyer. Translated by A. V. Littledale. (Harvill Press, lea.).