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For the rest, as before, they met as equals, curiously congenial to each other, in spite of the battle in front. The Bishop's certainty of victory was once more emphatically shown by the friendly ease with which he still received his rebellious incumbent. Any agreeable outsider of whatever creed Renan or Loisy or Tyrrell might have been thus welcomed at the Palace.
The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks assurance of survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone?
Paul's doctrine of the Spirit and of Christ is not an imitation of mystery-doctrine, but inmost personal experience metaphysically interpreted after the manner of his time. Writers like Loisy, who say that for St.
Tyrrell's able works have a very similar philosophical basis, which is also assumed by the group of Italian priests who have remonstrated with the Pope. M. Loisy protests against the classification made in the papal Encyclical which connects biblical critics, metaphysicians, psychologists, and Church reformers, as if they were all partners in the same enterprise.
'So far from our philosophy dictating our critical method, it is the critical method that has of its own accord forced us to a very tentative and uncertain formulation of various philosophical conclusions.... This independence of our criticism is evident in many ways. The writers of this manifesto, and M. Loisy himself, appear not to perceive that their critical position rests on certain very important philosophical presuppositions; nor indeed is any criticism of religious origins possible without presuppositions which involve metaphysics.
It might be supposed that the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice. And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's attitude in its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading exponent.
Loisy, in his "Quelques Lettres," states, "If there is one thing above others that is obvious, but as to which the most powerful of theological interests have caused a deliberate or unconscious blindness, it is the profound, the irreducible incompatibility of the Synoptical Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel.
There is, as Modernist critics have seen, a real break between the Palestinian Gospel and the elaborate mystery-religion, with its graded hierarchy, its Roman organisation, its Hellenistic speculative theology, which achieved the conquest of the Empire in the fourth century. The Church, as Loisy says, determined to survive and to conquer, and adapted itself to the demands of the time.
It is difficult to see how the Vatican could even meet the reformers half-way without making ruinous concessions. This supernatural mechanism, M. Loisy says in his last book, 'Modernism tends to ruin completely, Just so; but the Roman Church lives entirely on the faith in supernatural mechanism.
The theory of development in doctrine, which, in its latest application by 'Modernists' like Loisy and Tyrell, is now agitating the Roman Church, is exciting interest in a few of the more thoughtful Anglo-Catholics; but the majority are blind to the difficulties for which the theory of two kinds of truth is a desperate remedy.
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