 section 37 Europe and the Faith this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Baylock section 37 chapter 10 conclusion the grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul this was its fruit from this all its consequences proceed not only those clearly noxious which have put in jeopardy the whole of our traditions and all our happiness but those apparently advantageous especially in material things the process cannot be seen to work if we take a particular date especially too early a date and call it the moment of the catastrophe there was a long interval of confusion and doubt in which it was not certain whether the catastrophe would be final or no in which its final form remained undetermined and only upon the conclusion of which could modern Europe with its new divisions and its new fates be perceived clearly the breach with authority began in the very first years of the 16th century it is not until the middle of the 17th century at least and even somewhat later that the new era begins for more than a hundred years the conception of the struggle as an ecumenical struggle as something affecting the whole body of Europe continued the general upheaval the revolt which first shook the West in the early years of the 16th century to take a particular year the year 1517 concerned all our civilization was everywhere debated produced the universal reaction met by as universal a resistance for three generations of men no young man who saw the first outbreak of the storm could imagine it even in old age as a disruption of Europe no such man lived to see it more than halfway through it was not until a corresponding day in the succeeding century or rather later not until Elizabeth of England and Henry the 4th of France were dead and all the protagonists the reformers on one side Loyola neary on the other long dead not until a career Vishnu in the one country and the beginning of an aristocratic parliament in England were apparent that the reformation could clearly be seen to have separated certain districts of our civilization from the general traditions of the whole and to have produced in special regions and sections of society the peculiar Protestant type which was to mark the future the work of the reformation was accomplished one may say a little after the outbreak of the 30 years war England in particular was definitely Protestant by the decade 1620 1630 hardly earlier the French Huguenot body though still confused with political effort had come to have a separate and real existence at about the same time the oligarchy of Dutch merchants had similarly cut off their part of the low countries from imperial rule and virtually established their independence the north German principalities and sundry smaller states of the mountains notably Geneva had definitely received the new stamp as definitely France Bohemia the Danube Poland and Italy and all the self were saved though an armed struggle was long to continue though the northern Germans were nearly recaptured by the imperial power and only saved by French policy though we were to have a reflex of it here in the civil wars and the destruction of the crown and though the last struggle against the stewards and the greater general war against Louis the 14th were but sequels to the vast affair yet the great consequence of that affair was fixed before these wars began the first third of the 17th century launches a new epic from about that time they're go forward upon parallel lines the great spiritual and consequent temporal processes of modern Europe they have yet to come to judgment for they are not yet fulfilled but perhaps their judgment is near these processes filling the last 300 years have been as follows one a rapid extension of physical science and with it of every other form of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things to the rise chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe but spreading that's in part to the Catholic of what we call today capitalism that is the possession of the means of production by the few and their exploitation of the many three the corruption of the principle of authority until it was confused with mere force for the general though not universal growth of total wealth with the growth of physical knowledge by the ever widening effect of skepticism which whether masked under traditional forms or no was from the beginning a spirit of complete negation and led at last to the questioning not only of any human institutions but of the very forms of thought and of the mathematical truths six with all these of course we have a universal mark the progressive extension of despair could anyone look back upon these three centuries from some very great distance of time he would see them as an episode of extraordinary extension in things that should be disassociated knowledge and wealth on the one hand the unhappiness of men upon the other and he would see that as the process matured or rather as the corruption divined all its marks were pushed to a degree so extreme as to jeopardize at last the very structure of European society physical science acquired such power the oppression of the poor was pushed to such a length the reasoning spirit in man was permitted to attain such a tottering pitch of insecurity that a question never yet put to Europe arose at last whether Europe not from external foes but from her own inward lesion may not fail corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question the culmination of so much evil necessarily arises this sole vital formula of our time Europe must return to the faith or she will perish I have said that the prime product of the reformation was the isolation of the soul that truth contains in its development very much more than its mere statement my promise the isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance of the same balance produced by general experience the weight of security and the general will the isolation of the soul is the very definition of its unhappiness but this solvent applied to society does very much more than merely complete and confirm human misery in the first place and underlying all the isolation of the soul releases in a society a furious new a session of force the breakup of any stable system in physics as in society makes actual a prodigious reserve of potential energy it transforms the power that was keeping things together with the power driving separately each component part the effect of an explosion that is why the reformation launched the whole series of material advance but launched it chaotically and on divergent lines which would only end in disaster but the thing had many other results thus we next notice that the new isolation of the soul compelled the isolated soul to strong vagaries the soul will not remain in the void if you blind it it will grow if it cannot grasp what it appreciates by every sense it will grasp what it appreciates by only one on this account in the dissolution of the corporate sense and of the corporate religion you had successive idols set up worthy and unworthy none of them permanent the highest and most permanent was the reaction towards corporate life in shape of a worship of national patriotism you had at one end of the scale an extraordinary new tapas the erection in one place of a sort of maniac god blood thirsty an object of terror in another or in the same a curious new ritual observance of nothingness upon every seventh day in another and irrational attachment to particular printed book in another successive conceptions first that the human reason was sufficient for the whole foundations of human life that there were no mysteries next the opposite extravagance that the human reason had no authority even in its own sphere and these two though contradictory had one route the rationalism of the 18th century carried on through the materialism of the 19th the irrational doubts of Kant which include much emotional rubbish carried on to the sheer chaos of the latter metaphysicians with their denial of contradictions and even of being both sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to make itself some system from within as the unsupported soul in an evil dream now stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved in some fearful emptiness all this the first interior effect of the reformation strong in proportion to the strength of the reforming movement powerful in the regions or sex which had broken away far less powerful in those which had maintained the faith would seem to have run its full course and who have settled at last into universal negation and a universal challenge preferred to every institution and every postulate but since humanity cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy we may well believe that there is coming or has already begun yet another stage in which the lack of corporate support for the soul will breed attempted strange religions witchcrafts and necromancies it may be so it may be that the great debate will come up for final settlement before such novel diseases spread far at any rate for the moment we are clearly in a stage of complete negation but it is to be repeated that this breaking up of the foundations differs in degree with varying societies that still in a great mass of Europe numerically the half perhaps the necessary anchors of sanity still hold and that half is the half where directly by the practice of the faith or indirectly through a hold upon some part of its tradition the catholic church exercises and admitted or distant authority over the minds of men the end of section 37 section 38 Europe and the faith this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach section 38 chapter 10 concluded the next process we note is by what some may think a paradox also due to the isolation of the soul it is the process of increasing knowledge men acting in a fashion highly corporate will not so readily question nor therefore so readily examine as will men acting alone men whose major results are taken upon an accepted philosophy will not be driven by such a need of inquiry as those who have abandoned that guide in the moment more than a thousand years ago when the last of the evangelizing flood tide was still running strongly a very great man wrote of the physical sciences upon such toys i wasted my youth and another wrote speaking of divine knowledge all the rest is smoke but in the absences of faith demonstrable things are the sole consolation there are three forms in which the human mind can hold the truth the form of science which means that we accept a thing through demonstration and therefore cannot admit the possibility of its opposite the form of opinion which means that we accept a thing through probability that is through a partial but not complete demonstration and therefore we do not deny the possibility of the opposite the form of faith where we accept the thing without demonstration and yet deny the possibility of its opposite as for instance the faith of all men not mad in the existence of the universe about them and of other human minds when acknowledged and defined faith departs it is clear that of the remaining two rivals opinion has no ground against science that which can be demonstrated holds all the field indeed it is the mark of modern insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude save certitude through demonstration and therefore does not as a rule appreciate even its own unproved first principles well this function of the isolated soul inquiry and the necessity for demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and physical fixed knowledge as occupied as all know the three modern centuries we all are equally familiar with its prodigious results not one of them has as yet added to human happiness not one but has been increasingly misused to the misery of man there is in the tragedy something comic also which is the perpetual puzzlement of these the very authors of discovery to find that somehow or other discovery alone does not create joy and at somehow or other a great knowledge can be used ill as anything else can be used ill also in their bewilderment many turn to a yet further extension of physical science as promising in some illogical way relief a progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so natural to man so long as civic order is preserved that it would indeed have taken place not so rapidly but as surely had the unity of europe been preserved but the destruction of that unity totally accelerated the pace and as totally through the movement off its rails the renaissance a noble and vividly european thing was much older than the reformation which was its perversion and corruption the doors upon modern knowledge had been open before the soul which was to enter them had been cut off from its fellows we owe the miscarriage of all our great endeavor in this field not to that spring of endeavor but to its deflection it is a blasphemy to deny the value of advancing knowledge and at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it for its supposed consequences its consequences are only evil through an evil use that is through an evil philosophy in connection with this release of powerful inquiry through the isolation of the soul you have an apparently contradictory and certainly supplementary effect the setting up of unfounded external authority it is a curious development one very little recognize but one which affixed observance of the modern world will immediately reveal and those who come to see it are invariably astonished at the magnitude of its action men under the very influence of skepticism have come to accept almost any printed matter almost any repeated name as an authority infallible and to be admitted without question they have come to regard the denial of such authority as a sort of insanity or either they have in most practical affairs come to be divided into two groups a small number of men who know the truth say upon a political matter or some financial arrangement or some unsell problem and a vast majority which accept without question and always incomplete a usually quite false statement of the things because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in a hundred books this singular and fantastic result of the long divorce between the non-catholic mind and reason has profound effect upon the modern world indeed the great battle about to be engaged between chaos and order will turn largely upon this form of suggestion this acceptation of an unfounded and irrational authority lastly there is of the major consequences of the reformation that phenomenon which we have come to call capitalism and which many recognizing its universal evil wrongly regard as the prime obstacle to right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now intolerable modern strains what is called capitalism arose directly in all its branches from the isolation of the soul that isolation permitted an unrestricted competition it gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent and unchecked career it gave every license to greed and on the other side it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in an economic stability through it there arose in england first later throughout the more active Protestant nations and later still in various degrees throughout the rest of Christendom a system under which a few possess the land and the machinery of production and the many were gradually dispossessed the many thus dispossessed could only exist upon doles meted out by the possessors nor was human life a care to these the possessors also mastered the state and all its organs hence the great national debts which accompanied the system hence even the financial hold of distant and alien men upon subject provinces of economic effort hence the draining of wealth not only from increasingly dissatisfied subjects overseas but from the individual producers of foreign independent states the true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement and you naturally get a demand for belief through the denial of the principle of ownership altogether here again as in the matter of the irrational taboos and of skepticism two apparently contradictory things have one root capitalism and the ideal inhuman system not realizable called socialism both spring from one type of mind and both apply to one kind of disease society against both the pillar of reaction is peasant society and peasant society has proved throughout europe largely coordinate with the remaining authority of the catholic church for a peasant society does not mean a society composed of peasants but one in which modern industrial capitalism yields to agriculture and in which agriculture is in the main conducted by men possessed in part or altogether of their instruments of production and of the soil either through ownership or customary tenure in such a society all the institutions of the state repose upon an underlying conception of secure and well-divided private property which can never be questioned and which colors all men's minds and that doctrine like every other sane doctrine though applicable only to temporal conditions has the firm support of the catholic church so things have gone we have reached at last as the final result of that catastrophe 300 years ago a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards a melting of the spiritual framework such that the body politic fails men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt we go further and further from a settlement our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more authority the very principle of life loses its meaning and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited and which is still our trust trembles and threatens to crash down it is clearly insecure it may fall at any moment we who still live may see the ruin but ruin when it comes is not only a sudden it is also a final thing in such a crux there remains the historical truth that this our european structure built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity was formed through exist by is consonant to and will stand only in the mold of the catholic church europe will return to the faith or she will perish the faith is europe and europe is the faith the end of section 38 the end of chapter 10 the end of europe and the faith by hillier billock