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Generally speaking, the conventional wisdom about outsiders being able to see things that insiders cannot, fails to hold in matters of the faith. From St. Augustine’s time and before (though St. Anselm is generally credited with the insight) it has been recognized that faith is often a prerequisite to understanding. Many aspects of it will appear arbitrary or even crazy until the sensibilities are properly trained.
Nonetheless, it can be interesting at times to see what vestiges of truth penetrate the warped sensibilities of those who are entirely hostile to the faith. In this spirit, I offer a little excerpt from Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century’s rock star atheists. His book, Why I Am Not a Christian, is on the whole a disappointing read if you pick it up hoping for an invigorating challenge. Maybe some day I’ll get around to writing a post making fun of him. But he did have a way with words, and the book is peppered with memorable phrases. His essay On Catholic and Protestant Skeptics hones in on a point that I have made before in another form: the seeds of truth are often planted much more deeply in the soul than we ever expect. Even for those Catholics who are trying to lose themselves in the woods, the compass is still calibrated.
Obviously Russell does not put it that way. He only observes that Catholics, even bad ones, seem to feel a very powerful tie to the Church, which continues to follow and haunt them even after they’ve resolved to abandon it. The point of the essay could be boiled down to the following: Protestant “freethinkers” rebel in order to be good; Catholic “freethinkers” rebel in order to be bad. There’s a charming simplicity to this very true observation.
“To the Protestant the exceptionally good man is one who opposes the authorities and the received doctrines, like Luther at the Diet of Worms. The Protestant conception of goodness is of something individual and isolated. I was myself educated as a Protestant, and one of the texts most impressed upon my youthful mind was, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” I am conscious that to this day this text influences me in my most serious actions. The Catholic has quite a different conception of virtue: to him there is in all virtue an element of submission, not only to the voice of God as revealed in conscience but also to the authority of the church as the repository of Revelation. This gives to the Catholic a conception of virtue far more social than that of the Protestant and makes the wrench much greater when he severs his connection with the church. The Protestant who leaves the particular Protestant sect in which he has been brought up is only doing what the founders of that sect did not so very long ago, and his mentality is adapted to the foundation of a new sect. The Catholic, on the other hand, feels himself lost without the support of the church. He can, of course, join some other institution, such as the freemasons, but he remains conscious, nonetheless, of desperate revolt. And he generally remains convinced, at any rate subconsciously, that the moral life is confined to members of the church, so that for the freethinker the highest kinds of virtue have become impossible.”
Russell takes some more shots at both groups, but particularly the Protestants. “The Protestant freethinker of the present day,” he observes, “is apt to take liberties in action as well as in thought, but that is only a symptom of the general decay of Protestantism. In the good old days a Protestant freethinker would have been capable of deciding in favor of free love, and nevertheless living all his days a life of strict celibacy.”
Ambrosius likes to remind us that the best Protestants become Catholics, while the worst Catholics become Protestants. Interesting that even an atheist can see this difference: Protestants can’t make up their minds what it means to live well, whereas Catholics know in their souls that they have the truth already, so that the most important question is whether or not they want to live it.
Interesting remarks!
Joyce was an ex-Catholic freethinker. I’ve been told that one of the freethinking characters in a novel of his is asked, “So have you become a Protestant?” He responds, “I’ve lost my faith, not my mind.”
I believe the novel you are referring to is The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I read the book in my senior year of high school. Overall, I didn’t find it very interesting, but the Catholic sermons in the third chapter were impressive.
Hmm. If Protestant freethinkers revolt to be good, Catholic freethinkers to be bad, then what about Orthodox freethinkers? They revolt to become communists. Which is that? It has something of the effort to be good about it, but actually leads to becoming worse than any Catholic apostate that I’m aware of. (Even the French revolutionaries never held a candle to the crimes of the Bolsheviks.)
Then there are contemporary Islamists who probably have the sense of revolt characteristic of an apostate even as they blow themselves up in the name of their faith. They revolt, in order to be bad, by living their faith…
“They revolt, in order to be bad, by living their faith…”
Well, if you read what Russell wrote (and he should know), protestant freethinkers actually are living their “faith” — private interpretation and the total depravity of man — as much as Islamists are living their “faith.” Protestant freethinkers are just living out the logical consequences of the theological, and hence moral and intellectual, chaos wrought by Calvin et al. Many of the leading German philosophes were the children of Lutheran pastors, for instance. One of my mentors, Vin Lewis, likes to say that Catholics go to hell for rejecting their religion, protestants and all other non-Catholics go to hell for following theirs.
So I agree with Ambrosius: the best protestants turn Catholic, the worst Catholics turn protestant. I would add that many of the leading protestants are ex-Catholics precisely because they bring more residual fragments of truth with them, plus a guilty conscience that forces them to rationalize their apostasy via greater commitment to heresy than those raised in these sects would ever care to muster. To account for this (why ex-Catholics are the most zealous protestants) the following saying of a high school teacher of mine comes to mind: “In the land of the blind, the cyclops is king.”
Plus, we should remember that many (not all, but many) of the more influential founding Bolsheviks were Jewish, not eastern “orthodox” (sic). So they were enacting the false messianism of rabbinic judaism, but in a secular, international-utopian (as opposed to national-Zionist) manner.
Perhaps the “orthodox” situation can be understood in terms of the caesaro-papism of schismatic lands. These people already expect a virtually all-powerful secular ruler to control and manipulate a national sect. Communism substitutes the Communist dictator for the Czar, the Party for the Church.
Actually, Russell talks about the Bolsheviks in the essay. He classes Orthodox thinkers together with Catholics since they both look to a single Church as the foundation of their faith. He claims that Catholic freethinkers, once they revolt, can go one of two ways. Either they have a sense of fun, take a “moral holiday”, and become Montaigne-type figures, or else they’re unfun people and seek to recreate the central authority in some other way. And his main example of that is Lenin.