Winds of Doctrine | Page 9

in a landscape, without feeling bound to
scrutinise their depths simply because their depths are obscure.
Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they might merely
make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding of them to
know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the most chaotic
age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored limpidly in a great
mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works of Raphael and
Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be single, his style
unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he depicts frank and
supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness too is impossible
in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when characters are
complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of what is not
congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a word,
thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.
Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,
inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained
a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these circumstances,
some triviality and great confusion in its positive achievements are not
unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are the Wanderjahre of
faith; it looks smilingly at every new face, which might perhaps be that
of a predestined friend; it chases after any engaging stranger; it even
turns up again from time to time at home, full of a new tenderness for
all it had abandoned there. But to settle down would be impossible now.
The intellect, the judgment are in abeyance. Life is running turbid and
full; and it is no marvel that reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled
the world, should abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is
so obviously the sport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal

passions, stock sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no
responsibility laid upon it, reason has become irresponsible. Many
critics and philosophers seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself
literature. Sometimes reason tries to lend some moral authority to its
present masters, by proving how superior they are to itself; it worships
evolution, instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism,
pragmatism, and the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires
into the freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised,
the region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way
which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and
mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb all
the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to clearness
and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its own moral and
intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.
These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not dead
in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows which of
them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the coming
age steadily before it?

II
MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the cloister.
Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of history and
efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the present age; and
under the name of modernism they have made their appearance even in
that institution which is constitutionally the most stable, of most
explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective memory or
established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after this church

was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by the gradual
exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than explicit
orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or spirit,
there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics to share
the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to reconcile them
if possible with their professed faith. Often these cross influences were
so strong that the profession of faith was changed frankly to suit them,
and Catholicism was openly abandoned; but even where this did not
occur we may detect in the Catholic minds of each age some strange
conjunctions and compromises with the Zeitgeist. Thus the morality of
chivalry and war, the ideals of foppishness and honour, have been long
maintained side by side with the maxims of the gospel, which they
entirely contradict. Later the system of