True Progress in Religious Knowledge

But perhaps someone will say: Will there, then, be no progress in Christ’s church? Certainly there will, all the progress possible. For who is so envious of men, so full of hatred toward God, as to try to forbid it? Yet it must be real progress, not alteration of the faith. For progress means that a thing grows within itself; alteration, that it is turned into something else. The understanding, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, of individuals as of all, of one man as of the whole church, ought to grow and make great and vigorous progress through the course of ages and centuries; but only in its own kind, that is, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.

The growth of religion in the soul must be like the growth of the body. Over the years the body develops and reaches its full size, yet it remains the same. There is a great difference between the flower of youth and the ripeness of age; yet those who were once young are the same people now that they have grown old. Though a man’s height and outward form change, his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same. An infant’s limbs are small and a young man’s large, yet the infant and the young man are the same. Grown men have the same number of joints they had as children; and if there are any that riper age has brought forth, they were already present in embryo, so that nothing new appears in the old man that was not already hidden in the child. This, then, is without doubt the true and lawful rule of progress, the settled and most beautiful order of growth: that riper age always unfolds in the man the parts and forms that the Creator’s wisdom had already shaped beforehand in the infant. But if the human form were changed into some shape belonging to another kind, or if the number of its limbs were increased or reduced, the whole body would become either a wreck or a monster, or at the least would be impaired and weakened.

In the same way, Christian doctrine ought to follow these same laws of progress: to be made firmer by the years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet to remain uncorrupted and unadulterated, complete and perfect in all the proportions of its parts and, so to speak, in all its proper limbs and senses, admitting no change, no loss of its distinctive character, no variation in its boundaries.

For example: our forefathers long ago sowed wheat in the church’s field. It would be most unfitting and wrong if we, their descendants, instead of the genuine truth of wheat, should reap the counterfeit error of weeds. Rather, this should be the outcome: there should be no disagreement between the first and the last. From doctrine sown as wheat we should reap, at the harvest, doctrine of the same kind, wheat also; so that when in the course of time any of the original seed has developed, and now flourishes under cultivation, no change may come over the character of the plant. Shape, form and differences of outward appearance may be added, but the nature of each kind must remain the same. God forbid that those rose beds of catholic interpretation should be turned into thorns and thistles. God forbid that in that spiritual paradise, from plants of cinnamon and balsam, darnel and wolfsbane should suddenly spring up. [a]

Therefore whatever the faithfulness of the fathers has sown in this farm of God’s church, the same ought to be tended and cared for by the diligence of their children; the same ought to flourish and ripen, the same ought to advance and go on to perfection. For it is right that those ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed and polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. They may gain proof, illustration and precision; but they must keep their completeness, their wholeness, their distinctive character.

For if this license of impious fraud is once allowed, I dread to say how great a danger religion will be in of being utterly destroyed and wiped out. For if any one part of catholic truth is given up, another and another and another will be given up from then on as a matter of course; and when the individual parts have been rejected one by one, what will follow in the end but the rejection of the whole? On the other hand, if what is new begins to be mixed with what is old, foreign with native, profane with sacred, the habit will necessarily creep on everywhere, until at last the church has nothing left untampered with, nothing unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure. Where once there was a sanctuary of chaste and undefiled truth, from then on there will be a brothel of impious and shameful errors. May God’s mercy keep this wickedness from the minds of his servants; let it rather be the frenzy of the ungodly.

But the church of Christ, the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines entrusted to her, never changes anything in them, never takes away, never adds. She does not cut off what is necessary or add what is superfluous; she does not lose what is her own or take over what belongs to another. While she deals faithfully and wisely with ancient doctrine, she keeps this one aim carefully in view: if there is anything that antiquity left unshaped and in its first beginnings, to shape and polish it; if anything has already been given shape and developed, to make it firm and strengthen it; if anything has already been confirmed and defined, to keep and guard it. Finally, what other aim have councils ever had in their decrees than this: that what was believed before in simplicity should be believed from then on with understanding; that what was preached before without warmth should be preached from then on with earnestness; that what was practiced before carelessly should be practiced from then on with double care? This, I say, and nothing else, is what the catholic church, roused by the novelties of heretics, has done by the decrees of her councils. What she had received from those of old by tradition alone, she has from then on handed down to later generations in writing, packing a great deal into a few words, and often, for better understanding, marking an old article of the faith with the distinctive stamp of a new name. [b]