Modern Phase attack on The Church from the left socialist and on the right by the Islamists
We approach the greatest moment of all. The Faith is now in the presence not of a particular heresy as in the past the Arian, the Manichean, the Albigensian, the Mohammedan nor is it in the presence of a sort of generalized heresy as it was when it had to meet the Protestant revolution from three to four hundred years ago.
The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack," is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith upon the very existence of the Faith. And the enemy now advancing against us is increasingly conscious of the fact that there can be no question of neutrality.
The forces now opposed to the Faith design to ‘destroy’. The battle is henceforward engaged upon a definite line of cleavage, involving the survival or destruction of The Catholic Church. And, all if not a portion, of its philosophy.
We know, of course, that The Catholic Church cannot be destroyed. But what we do not know is the extent of the area over which it will survive; its power of revival or the power of the enemy to push it further and further back on to its last defences until it may seem as though anti-Christ had come and the final issue was about to be decided. Of such moment is the struggle immediately before the world.
To many who have no sympathy with Catholicism, who inherit the old Protestant animosity to The Church (although doctrinal Protestantism is now dead) and who think that any attack on The Church must somehow or other be a good thing, the struggle already appears as a coming or present attack on what they call "Christianity."
You will find people saying on every side that the Bolshevist movement (for instance) is "definitely anti-Christian and opposed to every form of Christianity" and must be "resisted by all who call themselves Christians.
Speech and writing of this kind are futile because they mean nothing definite. There is no such thing as a religion called "Christianity" there never has been such a religion.
There is and always have been The Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church's doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals. But there never has been and never can be or will be a general Christian religion professed by men who all accept some central important doctrines, while agreeing to differ about others.
There has always been, from the beginning, and will always be, The Church, and sundry heresies either doomed to decay, or, like Mohammedanism, to grow into a separate religion.
Of a common Christianity there has never been and never can be a definition, for it has never existed.
There is no essential doctrine such that if we can agree upon it we can differ about the rest: as for instance, to accept immortality but deny the Trinity. A man will call himself a Christian though he denies the unity of The Christian Church; he will call himself a Christian though he denies the presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament; he will cheerfully call himself a Christian though he denies the Incarnation.
No; the quarrel is between The Church and the anti-Church, The Church of God and anti-God, The Church of Christ and anti-Christ.
The truth is becoming every day so much more obvious that within a few years it will be universally admitted. I do not entitle the modern attack "anti-Christ" though in my heart I believe that to be the true term for it: No, I do not give it that name because it would seem for the moment exaggerated. But the name doesn't matter.
Whether we call it "The Modern Attack" or "anti-Christ" it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of Catholic morals, tradition, and authority on the one side, and the active effort to destroy them on the other.
The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us.
This first form of social evil produced by the modern spirit is rather a tendency to slavery than actual slavery; you may call it a half slavery, if you like, where it attaches to vast enterprises huge factories, monopolist corporations, and so on.
But still it is not full slavery. Now Communism is full slavery. It is the modern enemy working openly, undisguisedly, and at high pressure. Communism denies God, denies the dignity and therefore the freedom of the human soul, and openly enslaves men to what it calls "the State “but what is in practice a body of favoured officials.
Under full Communism there would be no unemployment, just as there is no unemployment in a prison. Under full Communism there would be no distress or poverty, save where the masters of the nation chose to starve men or give them insufficient clothing, or in any other way oppress them. Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery.
These are the first fruits of the Modern Attack on the social side, the first fruits appearing in the region of the social structure.
We came, before The Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of slavery. With the loss of the Faith we return to that institution again.
Next to the social fruit of the Modern Attack on The Catholic Church is the moral fruit; which extends of course over the whole moral nature of man. And throughout this field its business so far has been to undermine every form of restraint imposed by human experience acting through tradition.
I say, "so far," because in many parts of morals this rapid dissolution of the bonds must lead to a reaction; human society cannot co-exist with anarchy; new restraints and new customs will arise.
Hence those who would point to the modern break-down of sexual morals as the chief effect of the Modern Attack on The Catholic Church are probably in error; for it will not have the most permanent results. Some code, some set of morals, must, in the nature of things, arise; even if the old code is on this point destroyed. But there are other evil effects, which may prove more permanent.
Now to find out what these effects may be, we have a guide. We can consider how men of our blood carried on before The Church created Christendom.
What we chiefly discover is this:
That in the realm of morals one thing stands out, the unquestioned prevalence of cruelty in the unbaptized world. Cruelty will be the chief fruit in the moral field of the Modern Attack, just as the revival of slavery will be the chief fruit in the social field.
Here the critic may ask whether cruelty were not more the note of Christian men in the past than it is today. Is not all the history of our two thousand years a history of armed conflict, massacre, judicial tortures and horrible executions, the sack of towns, and all the rest of it?
The reply to this objection is that there is a capital distinction between cruelty exceptional, and cruelty the rule. When men apply cruel punishments, depend on physical power to obtain effects, let loose violence in the passions of war, if all this is done in violation of their own accepted morals, it is one thing; if it is done as part of a whole mental attitude taken for granted, it is another.
Therein lies the radical distinction between this new, modern, cruelty and the sporadic cruelty of earlier Christian times. Not cruel vengeance, nor cruelty in excitement, nor cruelty in punishment against acknowledged evil, nor cruelty in repression of what admittedly must be repressed, is the fruit of an evil philosophy; though such things are excesses or sins they do not come from false doctrine.
But the cruelty which accompanies the modern abandonment of our ancestral religion is a cruelty native to the Modern Attack; a cruelty which is part of its philosophy. The proof lies in this: that men are not shocked at cruelty but indifferent to it. The abominations of the revolution in Russia, extended to those in Spain, are an example in point. Not only did people on the spot receive the horror with indifference, but distant observers do so.
Those nations which are by tradition anti-Catholic, which were once Protestant and have now no fixed traditions, have been so long in the ascendant that they regard their Catholic opponents as finally beaten. Those nations which had retained the Catholic culture are now in the third generation of anti-Catholic social education. Their institutions may tolerate The Church, but are never in active alliance with it and often in acute hostility.
The future to envisage is a pagan future, and a future pagan with a new and repulsive form of paganism, but none the less powerful and omnipresent for all its repulsiveness.
The Mohammedan struggle was a very close thing; it nearly swamped us; only the armed reaction in Spain, followed by the Crusades, prevented the full triumph of Islam. The onslaught of the barbarian, of the northern pirates, of the Mongol hordes, brought Christendom to within an ace of destruction. Yet the northern pirates were tamed, defeated and baptized by force. The barbarism of the eastern nomads was eventually defeated; very tardily, but not too late to save what could be saved.
The movement called the Counter-Reformation met the hitherto triumphant advance of the sixteenth-century heretics
Lastly there is this very important and perhaps decisive consideration: ‘though the social strength of Catholicism, in numbers certainly, and in most other factors as well, is declining throughout the world; the issue, as between Catholicism and the completely new pagan thing (the destruction of all tradition, the breaking with our inheritance), is now clearly marked.’
There is not, as there was even quite a short time ago, a confused and heterogeneous margin or penumbra which could talk with confidence of itself under the vague title of "Christian," and speak confidently of some imaginary religion called "Christianity."
No. Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the Churches."The present generation cannot. There are not many churches; there is one. it is The Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set.
Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn?
THE GREAT HERESIES by Hilaire Belloc -- Chapter Seven
