Josef Donat

“ How could she favour the progress made in enlightening reason or in advancing human knowledge? Must she not fear for its intellectual sway over men whom she keeps under the yoke of faith? Must she not fear that they might awaken from the slumber in which they were held prisoners by the suggestive force of her authority, held to be transcendental; that they might awaken to find out the truth for themselves? ”

“ Unfree is a science that restrains the mental eye with the blinkers of theophoby. Our age seeks for the lost happiness of the soul, it seeks longingly God and the supernatural that have been removed from its sight. But science, so often its leader, loathingly dodges God, and refuses to fold the hands and pray. As long as our age does not break with a science that refuses to know a God and a Saviour, so long will it hopelessly grope about without result, and look in vain for an escape from the wretched labyrinth of doubt. ”

“ Freedom clearly means nothing less than to be untrammeled and free from restraint, from fetter and check, in action, thought, and desire. The prisoner is free when his chains drop off, a people is free when it has cast off the yoke of serfdom, the eagle is free and can spread out its wings in lofty flight when not bound down to the earth. Science, therefore, should be free in its activity from bond, fetter, and restraint. ”

“ The Church is holy, holy in her moral laws, holy in her service of the truth; she never shirks truth, not even where truth is painful; the Church never surrenders the truth to human passions. The Church is Catholic, general, for the learned and the unlearned; she is apostolic, with faithful hand she preserves for all generations the spiritual patrimony of the forefathers. And the unbelieving science of liberalism, where is its holiness, when its eye cannot bear the sight of heaven? when it numbers among its admirers all the unholy elements of humanity? ”

“ Can hypotheses claim to rank as assured results of research which should be universally accepted? Why should it not be allowed to contradict them, to oppose them with other suppositions? Is it not in the interest of science that this be done, that they be subjected to sharp criticism, lest they gradually be given out for positive results? Is it not a shameful trifling with the truth, when a Haeckel deceives wide circles by pretending that most frivolous hypotheses are established results of science? ”

“ All that is good and Christian in modern culture is not touched by the Syllabus; it strikes only at what is anti-Christian in our times and in the leading ideas of our times. It does not condemn freedom of science, but only the liberal freedom which throws off the yoke of faith; it does not repudiate freedom of religion and conscience, but the liberal freedom which will not acknowledge a divine revelation nor take the Church as a guide. Not the foundations of modern states are attacked, but only the liberal ideas of emancipation from religion, and of opposition to the Church. ”

“ In the eyes of free-thought the state is an imaginary being, hovering over the heads of its citizens; though they may be religious, the state itself should have no Religion. What absurdity! It is nothing short of nonsense to demand of the members of a state, the overwhelming majority of whom hold Religion to be true and necessary, that as a political community they are to act as if their Religion were false and worthless, as if to deny and to destroy it were quite proper. What else is the state but an organized aggregation of its citizens? ”

“ Woe to the planet that feels its orbit a tyrannical restraint, and leaves it to move in sovereign freedom through the universe! It will move along free, and free will it go to ruin. Woe to the speeding train that leaves its track; it will speed on free, but invariably dash itself to pieces! A nature that abandons the prescribed safeguards can only degenerate into a wild sprout. We shall see how these principles have actually become in modern intellectual life the principles of negation and intellectual degeneration. ”

“ True research, with a firm hand at the helm, aims to direct its craft so as to discover new coasts, or at least a new island; the exploring done by liberal research is like casting off the rudder to be tossed by the waves, for its task is only to hold to the course which the waving billows of individual life give to it. True science, finally, seeks for serious results, able to withstand criticism: the research by individualism produces results which, as individualism itself confesses, must not be taken seriously. ”

“ Where is left now to liberal science a single remnant of those great truths on which mankind has hitherto lived, and which it needs for existence? There was a God—but He is gone. There was a life to come, and a supernatural world; they are lost. Man had a soul, endowed with freedom, spirituality, and immortality; he has it no longer. He had fixed principles of reasoning and laws of morals; they are gone. He possessed Christ, full of grace and truth, he possessed redemption and a Church; everything is lost. Burnt to the ground is the homestead. ”

“ This freedom is demanded, even more imperatively, by the vocation of science to work for the progress of mankind, primarily for the intellectual and through this for the general progress. The demand in behalf of the individual is even more urgent in behalf of science at large: no standing still, ever onward to new knowledge and the enrichment of the mind, to moral uplift, to a beautifying of life—and ultimately to the glorification of God! For, verily, the purpose of the whole universe is the glory of the Creator. ”

“ Another consequence is this: since science is an activity of the human mind, it shares all its imperfections and weaknesses. It is truly flesh of its flesh. The fruit cannot be more perfect than the tree that produces it, nor the flower better than the plant on which it blossomed. Now, as the human mind is throughout limited in its nature, so is it also in its research. It is not given to man to soar aloft on eagle wings to the heights of knowledge, thence to gaze upon truth with unerring intuition; the ascent must be slow, with constant dangers of stumbling, even of falling headlong. ”

“ This, then, is the terminal at which the free-thought of subjectivism has arrived: the loss of truth, without which man's mind wanders restlessly and without a goal. That is the penalty for gambling boldly with human perception, the retribution for rebelling against the rights of truth and for the vainglorious arrogance of the intellect, which would draw only from its own cisterns the water of life, while alone those lying deep in the Divine may offer him the eternal fountains of objective truth. Scepticism is gnawing at the mental life of the world. ”

“ The doctrine of a nature corrupted by original sin, of a darkened intellect that needs divine revelation, of a weakened will that needs strength from above, of sin that demands atonement,—all this has become meaningless to him, it offends his higher sentiments, his human dignity. He has no longer any understanding for a Saviour of the world, in whom alone salvation is to be sought, much less for a Cross. This sign of redemption, as a certain herald of modern thought remarked, weighs like a mountain upon the mind of our day. ”

“ Not knowledge, but knowledge of the truth, and moral dignity, make for civilization and perfection; knowledge no longer controlled by truth and ethics becomes the hireling of the low passions, and fights for their freedom.
“The Vehicle of Truth.” Back of the urgent demands for unrestricted freedom in teaching stands invariably a thought that operates with palsying effect upon the minds: to wit, that science is the embodiment of truth, a genius carrying the unextinguishable beacon of light: to silence it would be to resist the truth. ”

“ How long will it take modern philosophy to agree that the will of man is free, that there is a substantial immortal soul, that a Creator of the world dwells above the heavens? Is the Church to wait till the men of science make up their minds to desist from denying the existence of a personal God, and to bow before the Creator of heaven and earth? ”

“ How many earnest men, who in good faith are the warm advocates of freedom of science, are aware how ambiguous that term is; how a whole theory of cognition and view of the world is hidden behind it? How many can at once see the ambiguity of phrases like “Difference between knowledge and faith,” of “experiencing one's religion,” of “evolution and progress,” of “humanism,” of “unfolding personality”? And of the self-conscious postulate that science cannot reckon with supernatural factors, how many perceive that it is nothing but an undemonstrated supposition? ”

“ Of course there is a contradiction, between the conviction of the state that the principles of morals and religion must be preserved, and the grant of full freedom to an anti-religious misuse of science, whose effect upon the masses is unavoidable. It is a contradiction to tear down the dam at the river and then erect emergency levees against the onrushing flood. The amazing presumption, that holds inviolate and sacred everything that poses under the name of science, is the fault of it all. ”

“ What a striking contrast between this serious love of truth in the days of passing heathendom, and the uncontrolled thinking of so many in our Christian age! To them truth is no longer a sacred treasure, a yoke to be assumed in reverence; it has become the plaything of their impressions and inclinations. Indeed, they consider it a burden to accept the old Christian truth, with which they meet on all their ways. ”

“ Frei sich in die Lüfte windet. (Freedom be the aim of restraint, just as the vine is tied to the trellis that it may freely rise in the air, instead of crawling in the dust.) This is the freedom of mind, knowing but one yoke, the truth; the freedom that does not bow to error, nor to high sounding phrases, nor to public opinion, nor to the bondage of political life; neither is true freedom shackled by the fetters of one's own lawless impulses. ”

“ Men like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Linné, Boyle, thus knew nothing of the elements of natural science, nothing of the conformity to laws of natural forces: because they were neither monists nor atheists, but worshippers of the Creator of heaven and earth! A more painful contrast cannot be imagined than to see these great masters and pioneers rated as lesser minds, ignorant of real natural science, by those who trail far behind them and who are seeking their footsteps. ”

“ Many to whom the Catholic way of thinking is foreign, look upon the duty of obedience which ties the Catholic to his Church as a sort of servitude; to the Catholic it is the tie of love, uniting free people to a sacred authority. Many look upon the Church of Rome as a tyrannical curia, where Umbrian prelates are cracking their whips over millions of servile and ignorant souls; to the Catholic the Church is the divinely appointed institution of truth, that possesses his fullest confidence. He knows that history has given the most magnificent justification to the Catholic principle of authority. ”

“ If there is a divine revelation or an infallible Church—we speak only hypothetically—then no man and no scientific research can claim the right to contradict this revelation and Church. Scientific research is not the hypostatized activity of a superhuman genius, of a god-like intelligence. No, it is the activity of a human intellect, and the latter is subject to God and truth everywhere. There can be no freedom to oppose the truth; no privilege not to be bound to the truth but rather to have the right to construct one's views autonomously. ”

“ The deer in the forest is freer in his movements than the cautious mountain-climber, who keeps to marked roads and paths, so as to journey safely, yet the latter is not without freedom. Nor will any one deny that the Australian bushman enjoys a greater outer freedom than the civilized white, restrained by laws, by rules and regulations, by standards of decency. And the busy writer of many things and everything, who in his writing never pays any attention to logic, to scientific form, to style and tact, has more freedom than one who strictly conforms to all these. ”

“ Thus science may summon everything before its forum, no one having a right to interfere; in the superiority bestowed by the right of autocracy it may sweep aside everything that is opposed to it, no matter by what authority. Hence science must be free to jolt everything, free to question the truth of everything, which it has not itself examined and approved. This is the fundamental supposition of modern freedom of science; also a fatal error, betraying a woeful ignorance of the construction of the human intellect, in spite of all its pretentiousness. ”

“ It stands far below science.
Despair of the possibility of knowing higher truths is confronting us, the disease of deteriorating times and intellectually decaying nations. But just as Christianity, once in youthful vigour, went to the rescue of an old World dying of scepticism, just as the Catholic Church has ever upheld the rights of reason, especially against Protestantism, which from its beginning has torn asunder faith and knowledge: so the Catholic Church stands to this day unaffected by the doubting tendency of our times, upholding the rights of reason. It also upholds faith. ”