Отрывок из книги
Various Authors
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Yet it may naturally be felt by some by some that the authors of the Letter have, in their anxiety to place themselves at the modern point of view, especially in philosophical questions, conceded to it more than was absolutely necessary—more, even, than it itself demands. "It is our mind," they say in the name of modern critical philosophy, "which by its operation creates the things whose aspects only at a given moment we know" ("È il nostro spirito che agisce e crea le cose delle quali noi conosciamo solo gli aspetti in un dato momento"). There may seem, here and in the passage which follows, to be a denial of anything immediate and objective in our knowledge of reality. Such a representation of the results of critical philosophy can hardly be justified. That the mind in its operations is from the very beginning in immediate and vital touch with a permanent and objective reality, that its subjective representations are consistently determined by the character of that objective world as once and for all given, that the categories of the understanding are in their last analysis the forms of a necessary relation between our own minds and the world of fact, and therefore possess something of an objective character—these are positions which critical philosophy not only does not deny, but increasingly tends to affirm. Yet with this reservation—and it is a reservation which probably the authors of this Letter would themselves make—it remains true that our knowledge is "subjective, relative, and susceptible of transformation and variation according to the evolution of the human mind."
Liberals outside the Roman Communion are still a little bewildered by the boldness and courage of this movement within the Roman pale. They are still haunted by the invincible prejudice that no good thing can come out of Rome. They believe that a crusade on behalf of truth and freedom, undertaken under the conditions which communion with Rome imposes, is chimerical and foredoomed to failure. But, after all, no project is chimerical for which men are willing to fight and to suffer, and no project is worth much which does not impose upon its champions this double necessity. The men who are resisting absolutism in the Roman Church know well that it is a mountain they are attempting to remove. But they have not set their hands to the task without counting the cost and remembering the conditions of its successful accomplishment. If they are fighting absolutism, they are fighting it in the unhesitating faith that it is the last and worst of heresies. We who are outside the Roman Communion are too ready to believe that absolutism is the indispensable dogma, the normal and necessary form, of Roman religion. We may, indeed, be pardoned for holding that behef, for a triumphant Ultramontanism has for a whole century been dinning it into our ears. It is, as a Liberal Catholic has recently affirmed,[1] the very triumph of Ultramontanism to have created that belief. But these men are fighting this particular form of heresy, and they will continue to fight until their Church has been delivered from the grip of the monster which is now strangling its spiritual life.
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