YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

1937

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PATRIOTISM : An Alternative to Socialism, s/-
An Essay towards a Constructive Theory of Politics.
(Messrs. Geo. Allen & Sons.)
THE MAINTENANCE OF DENOMINATIONAL
TEACHING UNDER THE EDUCATION
ACT, 1902. 1/6. (Messrs. Geo. Allen & Sons.)
A PLEA FOR CHURCH SCHOOLS, dd. (Messrs.
Geo. Allen & Sons.)
IS THE NEW THEOLOGY CHRISTIAN? 2/6.
A Criticism of Mr. Campbell's Teaching. (Messrs.
Geo. Allen & Sons. )
A NEW WAY IN APOLOGETIC, i/-. With an
Appendix on Dr. Fairbairn's Philosophy. (Messrs.
Mowbray & Co. )
NOTES ON THE EDUCATION BILL, 1906. i/-.
(Mr. Verity, Electric Press, Middleton, Man
chester.)
THE WITHDRAWAL OF SCHOOLS. 6d.
Notes on the Trust Deeds of Voluntary Schools.
(Mr. Verity, Electric Press, Middleton, Man
chester.)
INDIVIDUALISM AND THE STATE. \\d.
(Mr. Verity, Electric Press, Middleton, Man
chester.)
LIBERAL THEOLOGY AND THE GROUND OF
FAITH. 3/6. Essays towards a Conservative
Restatement of Apologetic. (Sir Isaac Pitman &
Sons.)
THE REASONABLENESS OF MIRACLES. i\d.
(Faith Press, Leighton Buzzard.)

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM

FATHER TYRRELL'S
MODERNISM
AN EXPOSITORY CRITICISM OF
'THROUGH SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS'
IN AN
OPEN LETTER TO MR. ATHELSTAN RILEY

BY
HAKLUYT EGERTON

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LIMITED
DRYDEN H:0USE, 43 GERRARD STREET, W.
1909

Richard Clav & Sons, Limited,
BREAD street HILL, E.C, AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

When I commenced these notes on Father Tyrrell's
well-known book I did not think that they would make
more than a pamphlet. Therefore I felt at liberty to
gratify a personal inclination and to adopt the episto
lary form of composition. Now that my notes have
grown into a volume, I venture to retain that form —
partly for the sake of the freedom of expression and
arrangement that it affords, but principally because
I would not willingly forego the privilege of connect
ing my work with an honoured name.
I desire to express my most sincere thanks to Father
Tyrrell for the very kind permission which has enabled
me to exhibit his thought in his own words. H. E.
When no other indication is given, the page's men
tioned refer to Through Scylla and Charybdis,

vii

CONTENTS

I. FATHER TYRRELL'S 'INTRODUCTION' .
'LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI ' .
II. 'SEMPER EADEM (l) ' .
III. 'THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY'
IV. 'REVELATION' 
V. THE NORMATIVE REVELATION
VI. PROPHETIC TRUTH ....
VII. 'PRAGMATISM' 
VIII. THEISM 
IX. CONCLUSION 
APPENDED NOTES ....

PAGE s

21
3264
116
136
162
186
2 00

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM

I
Dear Mr. Athelstan Riley,
Some time ago you told us that we Anglicans
are under no obligation to take sides in the Modernist
controversy. Probably you were right, for, when you
wrote, that controversy had passed beyond the sphere
of opinion into that of discipline, and we of the
Church of England have no mission to censure the
discipline of Rome. In more than one quarter you
were thought insular, yet you had merely refused to
be impertinent. You desired, not to restrict our
interest, but to restrain it from immodesty.
But, although it were unbecoming in us to be
advocates either for or against Rome's recent acts
of discipline, we cannot be indifferent to the discus
sions which have evoked those acts. We have, it is
true, no Modernist controversy in the Church of Eng
land, but (as Father Tyrrell ^ has pointed out) we
1 I use the title by which our foremost English Modernist
is best known, although it seems not improbable that he no
longer claims it.

2 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
have all the most important elements of such a con
troversy, and at any moment those elements may
clash. Moreover, the theoretical points included in
Modernism are of such a nature that no one interested
in Christian thought can afford to ignore them. The
" Modernist question," indeed, is not before our
ecclesiastical rulers — and for this we may be
devoutly thankful — but the Modernist questions are
unmistakably before our thinkers, and must be
answered. What have we to answer ? For one thing, we have
to answer Father Tyrrell. In his recent book,
Through Scylla and Charybdis, Father Tyrrell has
put forth an earnest and powerful plea for the freedom
of theological thought, and has supported it by a
theory of revelation — a theory which includes a theory
of dogma, and leads up to a new account of the rela
tions between dogma and science. In short, he claims
a new freedom for theology, and supports his claim
by a new philosophy of religion.
We are not infrequently told that Modernism is not
a philosophy, and, therefore, should not be criticized
as though it were. Now, it is certainly true that
Modernism is not primarily a philosophical move-
ment,i and it is probably true that not all Modernists
"have a philosophy," or attempt to establish their
thought upon a philosophical foundation. Father
1 It should be remembered, however, that a non-philoso
phical doctrine may i-mpl-y a philosophy : may imply general
conceptions — for instance, conceptions of God, of truth, of
human life — which are undoubtedly philosophical.

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 3
Tyrrell, however, is not unversed in philosophy. He
was educated in the school of St. Thomas Aquinas,
and his writings show clearly that he is not unac
quainted with some, at least, of the characteristic
movements of our modern philosophical thought.
He is, indeed, said to be a mystic, but even mysticism
does not necessarily exclude philosophy.
The mystic has a distinctive experience which is
the vehicle of what — rightly or wrongly — seems to
him a valuable truth. He holds that real or seeming
truth in virtue of that experience — not by inference
from other facts, or from some independent body of
thought. Now, it may fairly be said that conceptions
thus held are not philosophical conceptions. Neither
are those conceptions which are fashioned in and by
our everyday commerce with men and things. These
latter conceptions are not philosophical conceptions :
they are the starting-point and subject-matter of
philosophy. The conceptions given (or said to be
given) to the mystic, in his distinctive experience,
are conceptions of the same kind. Mysticism, in its
essential and characteristic form, is not philosophy i
it adds certain particulars to the explicandum of
philosophy. Although, however. Mysticism be not philosophy,
a mystic may well be a philosopher, and may yet
more easily trespass unwittingly within the domain
of philosophy. If he put forth some general concep
tions of religion and of religious truth — conceptions
which purport to explain his experience and define its

4 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
value — he is clearly within the province of philosophy,
and his work may properly be criticized as a contribu
tion to philosophy.
Now, this is what Father Tyrrell has done. He
comes before us, not as a mystic describing his experi
ence, but as one who endeavours to explain it. He
propounds certain theoretical conceptions which, if
they be true, enable us to explain (more or less com
pletely) the occurrence of his experience, and to form
a more or less exact idea of its value. Clearly, those
conceptions are philosophical conceptions. It may be
that (by themselves) they do not suffice to constitute
a philosophy of religion, but they are at least the
beginnings of such a philosophy.
Even though it be true, then, that Modernism is
not a philosophy. Father Tyrrell's contribution to
Modernism undoubtedly includes a developed or an
incipient philosophy, and, as we shall see, that philo
sophy is fundamental in his argument. He claims
freedom, not because he is a mystic, but in virtue of
certain general conceptions of the nature of religion
and the character of revelation.
It may be said that those conceptions do but formu
late his mysticism. They formulate it, however, in
terms of a general theory. They do more than set
forth: they explain. They are not a bare statement
of mystic experience: they give a reasoned account
and valuation of it — an account of its happening, an
estimate of its worth.
Clearly, then, Father Tyrrell is a philosopher—

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 5
even though he be a mystic — and his thought is a
philosophy, even though it be an incomplete one.^
What, then, does Father Tyrrell say ? Fortunately,
Through Scylla and Charybdis makes the materials
for an answer easily accessible. In that book Father
Tyrrell has brought together a number of interesting
and important papers which enable us to trace clearly,
not only the outlines of his thought, but also the
development of it. Moreover, he has prefixed notes
which review his earlier work from his latest stand
point, and has written an Introduction which re
capitulates the thought that still seems to him
essential. Clearly, Father Tyrrell has done his best
to make himself intelligible. What, then, does he
say? Father Tyrrell's Introduction
We will turn first of all to his Introduction. There
we unmistakably have the lucid presentation of a not
unattractive case, I will reproduce it as briefly as
possible, and — undeterred by Father Tyrrell's plainly
expressed conviction that "a certain percentage of
inaccuracy is to be looked for in all quotation "
1 Father Tyrrell himself would not deny this.
" What I have here put together might be described as the
history of a religious, or rather of a philosophical opinion "
(p. 3)-
I argue the point merely because one hears it said by cer
tain Anglicans that the Roman authorities, in their con
demnation of Modernism, have made the initial blunder of
treating as philosophy what is not philosophy.

6 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
(p. 310)— I will do so, as far as possible, in Father
Tyrrell's own words.
The "seemingly manifest difference between later
and earlier Christian beliefs and institutions " has (we
are told) made it necessary for Catholic thinkers to
" uphold the sacred principle of apostolicity and an
tiquity " by various hypotheses (p. 5). Our increasing
knowledge of " the origins and progress of Christian-
ity" makes it impossible for the imagination any
longer to " push back full-blown Catholicism into the
apostolic age" (p. 5). More than one explanatory
expedient has been devised and tried, and, to-day.
Catholic thinkers are said to be "seeking refuge in
various developments of the development theory "
(p. 5) — a theory to which "Newman's great name"
has, " of late years," given " prominence and growing
credit " ^ (p. iii).
Conservative theologians (we are told) regard the
apostolic revelation as " a divinely authorized, though
rudimentary, theological system " (p. 7). This rudi
mentary system has been developed into a great body
of doctrine, and certain parts of that development
"have from time to tiitte received the oecumenical
approbation of the Church " (p. 7). In so far as the
entire theological system is knit together syllogistic-
ally, those parts of it that "are divinely authorized
entail the acceptance of the rest under pain of con
structive heresy " (p. 7).
1 See Appended Notes, p. 200.

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 7
This conception of revelation and its development
entails two consequences which Father Tyrrell finds
intolerable : —
(i) It "subjects the Present to the Past"
(p. 10) — apparently to "certain philosophical
and scientific categories, and certain readings of
history " found in or implied by " the sacred
Scriptures and ecclesiastical dogmas " (p. 8) — and
this subjection creates " hopeless antagonisms be
tween religion and science " (p. g), and operates
"to the detriment of all scientific and historical
liberty " (p. 10).
(2) It does not "deepen and explain," rather
does it "explain away the traditional notion of
apostolicity as the criterion of revealed truth "
(p. 6). If we grant "that nothing is 'of faith '
to-day that was not contained implicitly in the
apostolic revelation, and has not been deduced
from it by a comparison of one revealed premiss
with another," it seems to follow that we "who
possess . . . the fully expanded system are far
beyond the early Church in point of supernatural
enlightenment " — beyond " St. Bernard or St.
Thomas who denied Mary's Immaculate Con
ception "- — and that " the apostolic age, when all
these deduced dogmas were confused and undis-
cernible," was an age "of relative darkness and
chaos" (p. 8).
Father Tyrrell thinks that, out of the difficulties

8 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
thus created by the conservative conceptions, there is
" no issue except, perhaps, by a careful reconsidera
tion and criticism of the engaged notions and prin
ciples — revelation, dogma, theology " (p. lo).
He notes, however, that in certain quarters an at
tempt has been made to liberate thought from detri
mental bondage to the Past by enlarging the theory
of doctrinal development. There are thinkers who
tell us that " we cannot be bound to the obsolete cate
gories in which revelation and dogma were originally
expressed, but only to a belief in the same realities and
experiences as expressed in the categories of to-day "
(p. 9). According to them, " revelation does not mean
the inspired record of a past supernatural experience,
but the steady continuance of that experience, ever
inspiring new and more adequate expressions of itself,
and rendering earlier expressions obsolete and worth
less " (p. 10).
This doctrine seems to Father Tyrrell to be not
only "altogether inconsistent with the patristic con
ception of the ' deposit of faith ' and of the rights of
ecclesiastical dogma," but to be also a denial of revela
tion — of revelation " in the ordinary sense of the
word" (p. 9). According to it, the apostolic "form
of sound words," so far from being (" as the Fathers
taught ") " the highest form of dogmatic truth," was
"the least perfect, because the earliest attempt to
formulate the mysteries of faith " (p. 9). Moreover,
this doctrine assumes, "what antiquity never dreamt
of, that the realities and experiences which were the

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 9
subject-matter of the apostolic revelation are still
accessible to our investigation, and can serve as the
criterion of our dogmatic restatements, just as the
abiding phenomena of Nature can be used to test our
scientific restatements"^ (pp. 9, 10). Therefore, in
Father Tyrrell's judgment, this enlarged theory of
development is "not a deeper and clearer explanation
of the patristic notion, but another notion alto
gether " — a notion which utterly evaluates "the tra
ditional appeal to Scripture and the apostolic age "
(p. 10).
What, then, would Father Tyrrell have us do?
Something which, he admits, would " at first
sight" seem to many "entirely reactionary"
(p. 4).
He would have us " return to the earlier and stricter
view as to the unchanging, unprogressive character
of the apostolic revelation " (p. 4). He repudiates
" all attempts to mitigate the supposed difficulties of
this severer view by theories of development, dialect
ical or otherwise" (p. 4). Indeed, he "rejects the
very notion of the development, and still more of the
multiplication of dogmas, and acquiesces cordially in
the patristic identification of novelty and heresy "
(p. 5).
A dogma. Father Tyrrell tells us, is " a religious
truth imposed authoritatively as the Word of God "
(p. 4). He suggests, however — and the suggestion
1 See Appended Notes, p. 200.

10 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
brings us within sight of his propounded " deliver
ance from our. present grievous embarrassments"
(p. 14) — that, " underneath the obvious sense of reve-
lational and dogmatic utterances," there is "a deeper
sense, a truth of an entirely different order " (p. 10),
a truth which he terms "prophetic" and describes
as " illustrative " (p. 11). He would have ,us " regard
the apostolic revelation not as a reflex, thought-out
life-theory " — not as the product of man's reflective
thought — but as "the spontaneous self-expression of
a profound religious experience," as a "prophetic
vision" (p. 11). He would have us "take the
Church's teaching" as "simply protecting and re
asserting, but in no wise as adding to or developing
revelation " (p. 11).
Were these suggestions adopted "we should be
able" (thinks Father Tyrrell) "to retain 'the forms
of sound words,' not as mere formulas, not as voided
of all sense, but as expressive of a deeper and other
meaning than that conveyed immediately to the com
mon understanding" (p. 11). "We should retain
them as of their own nature immutable and irreform-
able; we should repudiate all demands for restate
ment; all suggestions of development" (p. 11). We
could then " rid ourselves frankly of all those falla
cious ' germ-and-organism ' metaphors " (p. 12), and
could " certainly avoid the perplexing consequence of
allowing a greater supernatural advantage to later
and more cultured ages over earlier and less cul
tured, or to the theologically wise and prudent over

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM it
the rude and simple, to whom the Gospel was more
specially preached" (p. ii).
This "perplexing consequence" is (we have seen)
one of the two consequences that, in Father Tyrrell's
judgment, make the conservative conception intoler
able. The other is not one whit less perplexing, and
is practically much more mischievous, because of the
" hopeless antagonisms " it creates between religious
and secular thought. You will remember Father Tyr
rell's account of it. He describes it as a subjection of
"the Present to the Past" — to the "categories" and
"readings of history " characteristic of a by-gone age.
Now, by what means can we avoid this consequence ?
In Father Tyrrell's opinion we can avoid it by making
a broad distinction between Revelation and Dogma
on the one hand, and Theology and every other form
of Science on the other.
Revelation and Dogma, we are told, belong to one
genus of knowledge and Theology to another (p. 12).
The language of Revelation has " no more than illus
trative value, ' ' and that of ecclesiastical Dogma ' ' no
more than protective and reassertive value " (pp. 11,
12). In neither the one case nor the other has lan
guage a scientific value. Revelation and Dogma are
not, as conservative theologians would have us believe,
" part of theology " : they are the " subject-matter "
of Theology, and " control it not as statement is con
trolled by statement, but as statement is controlled by
fact" (p. 12). Theology belongs "simply to the

12 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
institutional part of Christianity," and is governed
by general laws "of change and development and
accommodation " ^ (p. 12).
It is in this way that Father Tyrrell would disen
tangle Revelation and Theology, and adjust " their
relations of mutual dependence and independence "
(p. 14).
Were this way sanctioned, "theology and all the
sciences wtih which it is necessarily implicated "
would at once become free.
"Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi"
Thus far does Father Tyrrell's Introduction carry
us. Naturally — since it does not purport to be more
than an Introduction — it suggests questions rather
than answers them.
What is that " other truth " of Revelation ? What
does Father Tyrrell mean by " the self-expression of
a great religious experience? What is "illustrative
value"? One thing only seems clear: "illustrative value"
is not theological value. From a statement which
possesses merely " illustrative value " we cannot make
theological inferences. Could we do so those infer
ences would be binding — no less binding than the
inferences now drawn by conservative theologians
from the language of Revelation are held to be — and
thought would still be fettered to the Past.
1 See Appended Notes, p. 201.

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 13
Bearing these questions in mind, we will now leave
the Introduction and turn to Father Tyrrell's other
papers.
Of these, the earliest in date is the one now entitled
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi.
This paper, which was originally entitled The Rela
tion of Theology to Devotion, first appeared in
November 1899. It has an especial interest for us,
because it " marks a turning-point " in its author's
" theological experience."
Father Tyrrellj^ I have said, was trained in the philo
sophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and at first he "un
critically accepted the more rigid scholastic view of
the ' Deposit of Faith ' as being ' Chapter the First '
of Catholic theology written by an inspired pen "
(p. 85). Like others, he "sought to evade the obvious
difficulties of that supposition by a liberal use of the
theory of doctrinal development " (p. 85). The " in
sufficiencies of such apologetic," however, started re
flections which at last led Father Tyrrell to the
principal conclusion indicated in his Introduction — to
the conclusion, namely, " that we can reconcile the
traditional notion of the ' Deposit ' as being a ' form
of sound words ' with all the exigencies of mental
freedom, by carefully distinguishing Revelation
and Theology as generically different orders of
Truth and Knowledge; by denying strenuously
any sort of development of Revelation or Dogma,
such as obtains only in Science and Theology "
(p. 86).

14 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
All this Father Tyrrell tells us in the prefatory note
prefixed to the Essay.
The opening paragraphs of the Essay itself lead up
to a careful demonstration of the inadequacy of human
language to describe the " supersensible world." As
the scholastics teach, "the ' connatural ' object of the
human mind is this material world which is presented
to our senses." We "are forced to think of every
thing else, even of our own soul, in terms of that
world. Hence all our ' explanations ' of spiritual
activity are, however disguisedly, mechanical at root ;
thought is a kind of photography or portraiture;
free-will a sort of weighing process; the soul itself,
so far as it is not described negatively, is described
in terms of body " (pp. 90, 91). When we attempt
to describe the "spiritual and supernatural world"
our language is " merely analogous " ^ (p. 91). Any
"non-analogous ideas" we can form of it "are
necessarily of the thinnest and most uninstructive
description " (p. 90). " So far as the most abstract
and ultimate ideas of our philosophy prescind from all
sensible determinations of being, and deal with the
merest outline and empty framework of thought, they
may have some literal value in the supersensible
world " (p. 89), but those ideas — the only ones " in
1 " But when we are dealing with the spiritual and super
natural world, we are under a further disadvantage; for we
can think and speak of it only in analogous terms borrowed
from this world of our sensuous experience, and with no more
exactitude than when we would express music in terms of
colour, or colour in terms of music " (pp. 88, 89).

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 15
any sense common to the world of our experience and
to the world beyond it" — are, "from the nature of
the case, the most barren and shadowy of all "
(p. 89).
There are, Father Tyrrell finds, two ways of
attempting to describe "the other world." The
one way is "vulgar," and is frankly anthropo
morphic; the other is metaphysical, and by it
men attempt to get behind the analogies of vulgar
speech. Now, "the Juda20-Christian revelation has been
communicated in vulgar and not in philosophical
terms and modes of thought " (p. 94). " God has re-
¦ vealed Himself, not to the wise and prudent, not to
the theologian or the philosopher, but to babes, to
fishermen, to peasants, to the profanum vulgus, and
therefore He has spoken their language " (p. 95).
"The Church's guardianship in the matter is to pre
serve, not to develop, the exact ideas which that
simple language conveyed to its first hearers " (p. 95).
Those ideas — that " concrete, coloured, imaginative
expression of Divine mysteries, as it lay in the mind
of the first recipients " (p. 95) — constitute the deposi-
tum fidei, and that deposit " is both the lex orandi
and the lex credendi," the " rule and corrective, both
of popular devotion and of rational theology " (p. 95).
Indeed, the deposit " is perhaps in some sense more
directly a lex orandi than a lex credendi," for "the
creed is involved in the prayer, and has to be disen
tangled from it; and formularies are ever to be tested

i6 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
and explained by the concrete religion which they
formulate." ^ (p. 104).
" Just as experience is the test and check of those
scientific hypotheses by which we try to classify,
unite, and explain experience; so revelation is the
test and check of all philosophical attempts to unify
and elucidate its contents" (p. 96). Both theology
and popular devotions " must be brought to the test
of primitive revelation as interpreted by the Church "
(p. 96). The "hypotheses, theories, and explana
tions " of theology — like those of the natural sciences
— " must square with facts," and for theology the
facts are furnished by " the Christian religion as lived
by its consistent professors " (p. 104). " Any rational
ist explanation that would make prayer nonsensical,
or would encourage laxity, or would make havoc of
the ordinary sane and sensible religious notions of
the faithful, is eo ipso condemned as not squaring
with facts. So far, for example, as the philosophical
conception of God's independence tends to create an
impression that He is not pleased with our love or
grieved by our sin, it is opposed to revelation, which
says, ' Grieve not the Holy Spirit;' or ' My Spirit will
not always strive with man;' and which everywhere
speaks of God, and therefore wants us to think of
God, as subject to passions like our own. And in so
thinking of God we think inadequately no doubt,
1 Cp. p. 104 : —
"The 'deposit' of faith is not merely a symbol or creed,
but It is a concrete religion left by Christ to His Church."

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 17
but we are far less inadequate than were we to think
of Him as passionless and indifferent. The one con
ception paralyzes as the other stimulates devotion "
(p. 96).
Father Tyrrell takes another and very striking
illustration from " what is called the Hidden Life of
our Lord in the Sacrament."
" The notion of the loneliness, the sorrows and
disappointments of the neglected Prisoner of
Love in the tabernacle may be crude and simple ;
but it is assuredly nearer the truth than the notion
of a now passionless and apathetic Christ, who
suffered these things by foresight two thousand
years ago, and whose irrevocable pains cannot
possibly be increased or lessened by any conduct
of ours. I have more than once known all the
joy and reality taken out of a life that fed on
devotion to the Sacramental Presence by such a
flash of theological illuminatioii ; and I have seen
Magdalens left weeping at empty tombs and cry
ing, ' They have taken away my Lord, and I
know not where they have laid Him ' " (pp. 99,
100).
The " simple devotion which regards God's pas
sion as continually present, as augmented by our sins,
as alleviated by our love," is, thinks Father Tyrrell,
" less inadequate and more philosophically true than
the shallowly rationalistic view " (p. 103).

i8 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
It is very important, we read, " to remember the
abstract character of certain theological conclusions,
and the superiority of the concrete language of reve
lation as a guide to truth " (p. 98). "To say," for
instance, " that love and sorrow, joy and anger, exist
in God eminenter, purified from their imperfections,
identified with one another, is for us, and as far as
any effectual idea is concerned, the same as telling us
that they do not really exist in God at all " (p. loi).
"God's way of putting the truth was, after all, the
better and the wiser" (p. loi). The "Incarnation
assures us that whatever consoles and helps us in our
simpler anthropomorphic conception of God, is not
more, but far less than the truth " : it brings home
"to our imagination and emotion those truths about
God's fatherhood and love, which are so unreal to us
in their philosophic or theological garb " (p. loi).
The foregoing paragraphs,.! think, fairly represent
the essential thoughts of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi,
and, whenever possible, they re-present them in the
original words.
Those thoughts mark, as we have seen, the com
mencement of Father Tyrrell's journey towards
Modernism. What are the characteristics of that commencement ?
We notice at once that two topics —
(i) the development of dogma,
(2) the bondage of thought to the categories
and conceptions of the Past —

FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM 19
which are very prominent in the Introduction, do not
appear, or scarcely appear, in Lex Orandi, Lex Cre
dendi.^ Neither does that Essay contain the concep
tion of illustrative value. In place of that conception
we have the idea of analogy, and the presence of that
idea marks the position of the Essay in the history of
Father Tyrrell's thought. Analogical value and
illustrative value are not identical, and Father Tyr
rell's transition from the one to the other was a
noteworthy stage in the growth of Modernism.
The Church's duty is represented as a duty to " pre
serve, not to develop," the primary Revelation, but
we are not told why development is excluded. Father
Tyrrell does not suggest that there cannot be a valid
development (by inference) from analogical state
ments, and we discover no sign of the argument that
plays so important a part in the Introduction — the
argument, namely, that the unchanging Revelation
and developing Theology are two different kinds of
knowledge. When, after an interval of eight years, Father
Tyrrell looked back upon his work, he was ' ' amazed
to see how little ' ' he had ' ' really advanced ' ' — how
he had "simply eddied round and round the same
point" (p. 84). I am persuaded that, in this retro
spective judgment, he did himself injustice. His
^ There is an incidental reference to development in a pas
sage quoted on p. 13 of this Letter. Nowhere else in the
Essay does "develop" or any of its cognates occur.

20 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
thought was not stationary from 1899 to 1907. Be
tween the writing of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi and
the writing of his Introduction he made a real and
not inconsiderable advance. The thought of his
earlier work is not the thought of his later.
Yet, because that earlier work does, in fact, mark
a " turning-point," we find in it the fruitful germs of
conceptions that afterwards became prominent. We
find:— (i) the thought that the language of Revelation
does not give a literal description of the super
natural world, and
(2) the thought that the religious life is, in
some way and to some extent, the criterion of
theology.

II
"semper eadem (i)"
Immediately after Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi we
have two Essays, entitled Semper Eadem. The first
of these Essays is a review of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's
Problems and Persons, and in it Father Tyrrell
attempts to make clear the " essential and all-permeat
ing diversity " (p. 132) of scholastic and " liberal ^ or
purely critical " theology.
Scholastic theology, we are told, "occupies itself
about the ' deposit of faith ' as its principal object.
By this it understands a certain body of divine know
ledge revealed supernaturally to the Apostles and
delivered by them under the form of certain cate
gories, ideas, and images, to their immediate succes
sors. This formulated revelation is the depositum
fidei" (p. 112). "What the Apostles saw they
recorded and formulated. To their followers they
transmitted the record; not the privilege of direct
vision " 2 (p. 112). "That which is semper idem,
1 See Appended Notes, p. 201.
2 Cp. p. 268 :—
" For us the Revelation of St. John is but the record of
an experience; for him it was an experience. St. Stephen
saw the heavens opened ; we are but told that he saw them
21

22 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
constantly the same under all developments and accre
tions, is in the case of scholastic theology a doctrine,
a record of an experience gone, never to be repeated,
preserved for us only in and through that doctrine "
(pp. 113, 114).
On the other hand "the 'constant,' the semper
idem of liberal theology ... is the reality dealt with,
and not any doctrine, or representation of that reality.
It deals with those ever-present evidences of God in
Nature and in the universal religious experiences of
mankind which are accessible to all, at all times, and
by which all theories and doctrines as to the origin,
nature, and end of these experiences can be experi
mentally tested. Taking ' Nature ' in the most com
prehensive sense, liberal theology is a branch of the
science of Nature. It is the old ' Natural Theology '
enriched and improved by an application of the in
ductive historical and experimental method to the
religions of mankind. Nature is always there to
be studied and formulated, and is not given us
only by tradition from a privileged past generation "
(p. 114).
Scholastic theology studies "a record of past
supernatural experiences " : liberal theology studies
" a certain class of natural experiences " (p. 115).
Between the scholastic and liberal theologies, then,
there is a very im.portant difference — a difference
which Father Tyrrell believes to be "radical" and
opened. To him they were revealed, to us it is only revealed
that they were revealed."

'SEMPER EADEM (I)' 23
"irreconcilable" (p. 113). "For the realities dealt
with are in the case of the former confessedly beyond,
and in that of the latter within the experience of all
men. The teachings of the latter can, those of the
former cannot, be brought directly to the test of
experience, of comparison between ideas and, things"
(P- "3)-
The "principal subject-matter" of scholastic
theology is " the record of an ancient and never-to-be-
repeated revelation of supernatural and inaccessible
realities — realities, therefore, which cannot be con
sulted iri order to determine the precise sense of that
record, the precise degree of its inadequacies ; for they
are known to us only representatively; only in and
through that record " (pp. 116, 117).
Now, just because, according to scholastic theology,
the apostolical experience "cannot be repeated, it is
all important to preserve, if not the exact words, yet the
exact sense and meaning " which the record " of that
revelation " had for the minds of those to whom it was
first delivered by the Apostles " (p. 114). Thus " the
ideas, categories, and symbols which constitute this
representation are of the very substance of the
depositum fidei; if there is a contingent and accidental
element it must be looked for merely in the language,
in the verbal signs that stand for those ideas "
(p. 114). For scholastic theology it is "a matter of
life and death . . . custodire depositum, to hold fast
to its primitive record, if not to the very words, at
least to the very ideas, symbols, and categories in

24 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
which the Christian revelation has been given to it "
(p. 117).
Men sometimes distinguish between that primitive
record and the supernatural realities behind it. The
latter, they say, constitute the ' ' substance ' ' of Reve
lation : the record is merely its "form." The scho
lastic theologian must deem this distinction "mis
leading." For him the record is the revelation : the
supernatural realities are known only in and through
the record, and one cannot get behind it. He has
"no means" of "sundering substantials from acci
dentals " (p. 117).
This disability, we are told, is entailed by the fact
that scholastic theology " can only get at the repre
sentation or record of its object" (p. 117). Liberal
theology is under no such disability, for the " natural
experiences" which are its object are always acces
sible — it can always ' ' get at ' ' them directly, and,
therefore, can always compare record with thing
recorded, representation with thing represented. The
distinction which scholastic theology cannot make
liberal theology can make.
We have seen that, according to Father Tyrrell,
the two theologies — the scholastic and the liberal —
study two radically different objects. The one studies
a record of supernatural experiences; the other a cer
tain class of natural experiences. From this difference
"flows another affecting the manner of growth and
development in liberal and scholastic theology sever-
ally" (p. 115).

'SEMPER EADEM (I)' 25
There is development in each theology, but the
scholastic development differs generically from the
liberal development.
For scholastic theology it is (as we have seen) ' ' a
matter of life and death ... to hold fast to its
primitive record" (p. 117). That "original deposit of
faith is necessarily the supreme criterion of Scholastic
theology. Its fruitfulness for knowledge depends
... on its being preserved fixed and unchangeable "
(p. 117). Therefore, in scholastic theology, develop
ment takes place only dialectically ^ — by "explica
tion " and " application." 2
The liberal development, on the other hand, is not
dialectical but " quasi-biological " (p. 120). In it we
have the " free and unfettered application of the cate
gories of biological evolution to the subject of
religion " ^ (p. 129). " Like natural science," liberal
theology " has for its subject-matter a certain ever-
present department of human experience which it
endeavours progressively to formulate and under
stand, and which is ever at hand to furnish a criterion
of the success of such endeavours " * (p. 136). It
1 It is the "protective husk," the "clothing of the deposit,"
that grows. "The kernel, that which is protected and
clothed," remains unaltered (p. 120).
2 See Appended Notes, p. 201.
8 " Not necessarily denying, but putting aside all belief in
the miraculous and the supernatural, liberal theology works
out the consequences of modern scientific presuppositions and
critical methods as applied to the religion of mankind "
(p. 129).
* Page 136 belongs to the second of the two Essays that

26 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
develops also as natural science develops — not merely
(as does scholastic theology) " in virtue of mental
labour and reflection brought to bear on an unchang
ing datum, but in virtue of an ever new supply of
experience, presenting us with ever new aspects and
parts of the subject-matter." " It looks back on its
own past as a man does on his childhood ... as on
something that had to be gone through and left
behind for the sake of the present, much as Chemistry,
Physiology, or Biology look back with a sort of
dilettante curiosity to their conjectural origins in the
darkness of the past" (p. ii6). The "liberal theo
logian " does not "ask or care that his theology be
substantially identical with that of the past, but only
that it be truer to experience than that which it super
sedes "1 (p. 136).
This "comparative indifference to the doctrinal
forms and categories of the past " is, however, " out
of the question in the case of scholastic theology"
(p. 116). For it, as I have said, the record is the
revelation. The " categories and conceptions " found
in the record "belong to the very substance of the
deposit of faith " (p. 118). " Were they exploded we
should lose not merely the containing vessel, but its

bear the name Semper Eadem. It belongs, however, to the
opening part of the second — to the part wherein Father Tyrrell
recapitulates the first. Therefore it seems permissible to
quote from it when one is attempting to explain the first.
1 On p. 321 "liberal theology" is described as "a theology
unfettered by deference to the formulations of the Past."

'SEMPER EADEM (I)' 27
content as well, since we have no means of separating
one from the other " (pp. 118, 119).
Hence scholastic theology " has always and con
sistently fought tooth and nail for those philosophical
categories and historical beliefs which it conceives to
be involved" in the depositum fidei (p. 119). It has
never "treated them as indifferent vehicles of values
that could be otherwise and better secured" (p. 119).
This necessity of preserving the original categories
and conceptions of the deposit of faith has brought
scholastic theology "into continual opposition and
conflict with the ceaseless changes and developments
of secular knowledge" (p. 119). "Unlike liberal
theology," it "cannot be indifferent to the said
change and developments as though its ultimate
criterion were realities and experiences, and not rather
a doctrine about realities. On the contrary, it has
consistently claimed a sort of indirect jurisdiction
over the whole field of knowledge so far as the
interests of its own categories and beliefs are thereby
engaged " (p. 120).
Hence has arisen the long conflict between Science
and Theology, a conflict with which Liberal Theology
is not burdened, because, when Science becomes in
sistent, that Theology can always do what Scholastic
Theology cannot do — revise its categories and con
ceptions. Liberal theology is naturally at peace with the
modern world. This gives it an important advantage,
but one that, in Father Tyrrell's opinion, is too dearly

28 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
purchased. It is impossible, he thinks, to maintain
the liberal conclusions " absolutely and in the con
crete, except at the cost of a wholesale repudiation of
the bases of Catholic theology " ^ (p. 129).
Between theologies so widely different it would,
thinks Father Tyrrell, "be vain to seek a via. media
by way of amalgamation or synthesis " (p. 130).
' ' Neither could ' come to terms ' by way of conces
sion to the other, without being absorbed, without
ceasing to be itself altogether " (p. 130). The " recal
citrant elements in each system which make their
amalgamation impossible, are of their very essence "
(p. 130). The two theologies " move in different
planes, deal with different subject-matters, develop by
different laws, are governed by different criteria. In
a true sense each may say to the other, ' What have I
to do with thee?' " (p. 132).
Yet — writes Father Tyrrell in his concluding para
graphs — it might " mitigate the impatience of liberal
theology " were we "to insist more emphatically than
has always been done" upon the following tripartite
" fact " :—
1 This appears to represent Father Tyrrell's mature judg
ment. In the most recent part of his book — ^the Introduction
— he tells us that the liberal idea "subjects the Past to the
Present, to the utter evaluation of the traditional appeal to
scripture and the apostolic age" (p. lo).
Probably it was Father Tyrrell's destructive criticism of
liberal theology that moved the "ultra-conservative" theo
logians to applaud Semper Eadem (I) "with both hands"
(P- 133)-

'SEMPER EADEM (I)' 29
(1) The " deposit of faith is a translation of
supernatural experiences into the terms of
natural;" (2) The truth of the deposit is the truth of
analogy, not of exact scientific equation ;
(3) In "guarding unchanged" the "apostolic
conceptions and categories and symbols, . . . the
Church is the guardian of an expression," 1 and
' ' claims no direct access to the experiences ex
pressed " 2 (p. 131).
This Essay shows plainly what Father Tyrrell
rejected. He rejected the "liberal conception " that
theology is the expression of a developing and con
stantly present natural experience. This should be
clearly remembered, because — as we shall presently
find — it is of capital importance for the right under
standing of Father Tyrrell's work.
We know, then, what Father Tyrrell rejected; but
what did he accept ?
His prefatory note, written from the point of view
of the Introduction, tells us that, in the concluding
^ This word is so important that I have ventured to under
line it.
* Those experiences are said to be "unique experiences
which lie outside that world of ordinary experiences with
which liberal theology deals " (p. 131).
It will be remembered that, according to Father Tyrrell,
liberal theology studies "a certain class of natural experi
ences," whereas scholastic theology studies "a record of past
supernatural experiences" (p. 114).

30 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
paragraph of the Essay, he suggests that " the
' sacred form of sound words ' may have other than
theological value; that its categories are eternalised
merely as illustrative of that other value; and not as
philosophically or scientifically valid " (p. 107).
Once more, however, Father Tyrrell seems to have
read his later thought back into his earlier. The
concluding paragraphs of Semper Eadem (I) do not
contain the suggestions mentioned in Father Tyrrell's
introductory comment. They tell us, indeed, that the
truth of the deposit " is the truth of analogy, not of
exact scientific equation" (p. 131), but analogy is
more than illustration. An analogical proposition
tells us something about its subject, and, if the subject
be religious, that predicated "something" may be
theological. Analogical character does not exclude
theological value.
In this direction, then — Father Tyrrell's preface
notwithstanding — Semper Eadem (I) does not advance
beyond the point reached by Lex Orandi, Lex Cre
dendi. Each Essay leaves us with the conclusion that
the language of Revelation is analogical. In one par
ticular, indeed. Semper Eadem (I) falls short of the
earlier Essay. One of the most distinctive notes of
that Essay is, you will remember, the clearly expressed
thought that Revelation and Theology are two gener
ically different kinds of knowledge. That thought is
not apparent in Semper Eadem (I). It may, -indeed,
be implied in the description of revealed truth as
analogical, but nowhere is it plainly stated.

'SEMPER EADEM (I)' 31
The concluding paragraphs of Semper Eadem (I)
do, however, clearly open up one new line of thought
which the later development of Father Tyrrell's
thought has made very important. They tell us that
" the deposit of faith is a translation of supernatural
experiences" (p. 131). This thought is not to be
found in Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. In that Essay,
Revelation is described as "an expression of Divine
mysteries" (p. 95), "a communication in terms and
modes of thought" (p. 94). The transition to
"supernatural experiences" was an important step
towards fully developed Modernism.

Ill
"the rights and limits of theology"
The year 1903, which saw the publication of Mr.
Ward's Problems and Persons, saw also the publica
tion of Dr. White's History of the Warfare of Science
with Theology in Christendom. This book Father
Tyrrell reviewed for The Quarterly in an essay
entitled. The Rights and Limits of Theology.
Dr. White contends : —
(i) That Draper's well-known book. The Con
flict between Science and Religion, burdens
religion with a " guilt that we should lay wholly
on the shoulders of theology " (p. 202).
(2) That the conflict which Draper narrates
were better described as a conflict "between two
epochs in the evolution of human thought — the
theological and the scientific" (White, Vol. I,
P- 9),-
Father Tyrrell suggests yet another amendment.
He would describe the conflict as one between science
and dogmatic theology (p. 203) — between science and
a " pseudo-science." 32

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 33
He tells us that dogmatic theology "in the lawful
sense" — and "the lawful sense" seems to be the
Modernist sense — " is that which reckons with revela
tion and dogma as data of religious experience and
not as theological statement" (p. 203, footnote).^
In his amendment to Dr. White's contention, how
ever, he does not use those words in that "lawful
sense," but as the equivalent of "theologism," or
"the old theology," or "the dogmatic fallacy"
(p. 203, footnote).
" When theologians take the dogmas or articles
of the creed and use them as principles or pre
misses of argumentation, truths outside the domain
of faith, so as to deduce further conclusions to be
imposed on the mind under pain of at least ' con
structive ' heresy, the resulting doctrinal system
is what is here meant by theologism. We have
called it a pseudo-science . . . because it treats
prophetic enigmas and mysteries, which, of their
very nature, are ambiguous and incapable of
exact determination, as principles of exactly deter
minable intellectual value, and argues from them
accordingly. We propose to call this the dogmatic
fallacy, . . ."2 (pp. 204, 205).
^ Cp. pp. 103-115 of this Letter.
2 Cp. p. 212 : —
" Here we have theologism full-blown in all its hybrid
enormity, i. e. a would-be science governed, not by a scientific,
but by a prophetic criterion."
What Father Lebreton calls "Theology," Father Tyrrell pre
fers to call "by the sectarian name of ' Theologism,' " since he
3

34 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Here, for the first time, Father Tyrrell is in full
rebellion. Neither of the earlier Essays we have
reviewed — neither Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi nor
Semper Eadem (I) were Essays in revolt; neither is
openly hostile to the established order of things. The
later of the two — Semper Eadem (I) — contains a very
clear statement of the difficulties that arise out of the
scholastic presupposition and method. It does not,
however, reject scholasticism : it rejects only " liberal
ism." The earlier Essay rejects nothing — nothing,
that is, except a metaphysical opinion which few, if
any, hold. It rejects the opinion that our descrip
tions of the "spiritual and supernatural world" —
when they go beyond " the most abstract and ulti
mate ideas of our philosophy " (p. 89) — have more
than analogical value.
What, then, led to the revolt in The Quarterly?
The discovery — if one may use the word— that the
truth of Revelation is not theological but prophetic.
This ' ' discovery ' ' Father Tyrrell did not make
until some time after he had reached the " turning-
point " marked by Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. He
had not made it even when he wrote Semper Eadem
(I). He then still thought that the truth of Revela
tion is " the truth of analogy " (p. 131). The ana-
regards it "as the mother and mistress of all heresies from
the beginning; as the sword which has hewn Christendom
into pieces ; as the force which both keeps and drives out of
the Church multitudes of the most religious-minded men of
our day; as the corrupter at once of revelation and theology;
the enemy alike of faith and of reason " (p. 350).

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 35
logical character of a proposition, however, does not
prevent valid inference. If an analogical proposition
be theological, there may be valid theological infer
ence from it. Therefore, the thought that Revelation
is analogical did not enable Father Tyrrell to reject
the scholastic inferences from Revelation, and Semper
Eadem (I) — although it contains a very clear state
ment of the difficulties created or occasioned by scho
lasticism — closes without any rejection of the scholastic
method- Father Tyrrell's discovery, however — the discovery
that the characteristic truth of Revelation is not theo
logical but "prophetic" — cut at the root of the scho
lastic development of doctrine, and the rejection of
that development became a matter of course.^
In the essay now before us Father Tyrrell tells us
of this "discovery," — not of the way in which he
made it, but of what he discovered.
He had discovered, or believed himself to have dis
covered, nothing less than a new theory of Revelation.
Even after he had reached his "turning-point,"
Father Tyrrell had continued to think of Revelation
as most people still think of it— as an imparting of
ideas.2 1 In Father Tyrrell's later thought it is quite clear that
revealed truth is a kind of truth from which one cannot
make valid theological inference. (See pp. 104-112 of this
Letter.) 2 Cp. p. 227 : —
"A direct instruction of man's intellect by God."
After Father Tyrrell had made his "discovery," this idea of
Revelation seemed to imply "intellectualism" (p. 227).

36 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
By the time, however, that he reviewed Dr. White's
book he had discovered, as he thought, three things.
He had discovered : —
(i) That Revelation is not an imparting of
ideas.
(2) That the ideas wherein Revelation is ex
pressed and communicated do not come from the
"other world."
(3) That those ideas do not directly describe
the actual constitution of that " other world,"
but merely set forth its practical relation to
human life.
This account of Father Tyrrell's discovery may be
most conveniently confirmed by setting out the
answers furnished by The Rights and Limits of
Theology to the three following questions: —
(I) What is Revelation ?
(II) Whence come the ideas wherein Revela
tion is expressed and communicated?
(Ill) What is the value of those ideas?
(I) What is Revelation? It is the " self-manifesta
tion of the divine in our inward life " ^ (p. 205). The
"divine which is immanent ^ in man's spirit does
^ This reference of Revelation to "the divine" is confessedly
assumed, not demonstrated.
Cp. footnote on p. 99 of this Letter.
2 Note this earliest use of a very important word.

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 37
naturally and inevitably . . . reveal itself to him, how
ever dimly, as a vita nuova, a new sort of life, the life
of religion, with its needs and its cravings for self-
adjustment to realities lying beyond the bourne of
time and place" (p. 205). What Revelation "first
defines for us is, therefore, a certain mode or way of
life, action, and conduct " (pp. 205, 206). The revela-
tional " manifestation of the divine will " ^ is experi
enced "chiefly and more immediately as a deter
minant of conduct, a consciousness of right and
wrong" (p. 205). What is Revelation? We may
say provisionally that, according to Father Tyrrell,
it is an ethical experience.
(II) Whence come the ideas wherein Revelation is
expressed and communicated? Revelation, we are
told, is " a knowledge derived from, as well as con
cerning, the ' other world,' the supernatural " (p. 207).
Father Tyrrell adds, however, that "its derivation
is decidedly indirect" (p. 207).
We will see presently in what sense, according to
Father Tyrrell's new theory, Revelation is a know
ledge of the " other world." Here we are concerned
only to note that the ideas in which it is expressed,
and through which it is communicated from man to
man, belong wholly to this present world. Revelation,
we read, although "an expression of the divine mind
1 Cp. p. 208 :—
"All Revelation truly such is in some measure or other an
expression of the divine mind in man, of the spirit of Gk)d."

38 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
in man, of the spirit of God," is not necessarily "a
divine expression of that spirit; for the expression is
but the reaction, spontaneous or reflex, of the human
mind to God's touch felt within the heart, and this
reaction is characterized wholly by the ideas, forms,
and images wherewith the mind is stocked in each
particular case" (pp. 208, 209).
"Spontaneous or reflex" — the following passage
vividly illustrates reaction of the former type : —
" There is, however, little doubt that an intense
feeling, passion, or emotion will in some in
stances incorporate itself in congenial imagina
tions and conceptions; that from the storehouse
of the memory it will, as it rushes outwards,
snatch to itself by a sort of magnetism such gar
ments as may best set it forth on the stage of
thought"! (p. 208).
The "reaction" to "God's touch "—the "effort
to interpret the workings of grace in the heart"
(p. 209) — is, however, not always "spontaneous."
Sometimes it is a deliberate reflection.

1 Cp. p. 229 : —
"... the materials from which religious experience seeks a
garment wherein to clothe and communicate itself."
On p. 228 the religious "construction of the other world"
is said to be "more or less instinctively created out of mate
rials supplied by popular belief, sentiments, traditions, and
views." Cp. the distinction on p. 210 between "the infusion of divine
love" and "the inspired image in which it clothes itself."

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 39
" It is only later, and in the second place, that
our intelligence begins to reflect on this process,^
and tries to picture it and understand it, to invent
a philosophy or history to explain it, and still
more for the practical purpose of registering or
fixing our experiences, of communicating them
and comparing them with those of others "
(p. 206).
Clearly, such reflection cannot yield more than a
human explanation and description. " What alone is
directly given from above, or from beyond, is the
spiritual craving or impulse with its specific deter
mination " (p. 207). Man's mental "reaction" to
this gift — whether it be spontaneous or reflex — " is
characterized wholly by the ideas, forms, and images
wherewith the mind is stocked in each particular
case " (pp. 208, 209).
(Ill) What is the value of the ideas wherein
Revelation is expressed and communicated?
(a) It seems clear that the ideas of religion, whether
spontaneously snatched up or deliberately sought out,
are intended to "picture" and "explain" religious
experience (the religious process), " to set it forth on
the stage of thought " (p. 208). They originate in an
effort (spontaneous or deliberate) "to interpret the
1 The "process" referred to is the revelational process —
the process which defines for us "a certain mode or way of
life, action, and conduct."

40 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
workings of grace in the heart" (p. 209), and are
explanatory of " the facts and phenomena of the
religious life" (p. 206). ^
(b) Have, then, those ideas no reference to the
"other world"? — to the supernatural order? Un
doubtedly they have. They are " representations of
the other world which are shaped and determined by
man's inward religious experience" (p. 209). That
experience — the facts and phenomena of the religious
life, the vita nuova into which the Divine impulse
quickens us — has reference "to a world or order of
existence beyond, above, yet closely related with, the
world of daily experience " (p. 206).
It is, however, "determined," not by our know
ledge of that order, but by " its nature and action
upon us " (p. 207). Revelation is not a communica
tion of ideas, not a divine instruction, not speculative
knowledge : it subsists in a certain divine impulse to
a certain " way of life or mode of action " (p. 206).
The ideas of Revelation picture, explain, set forth,
our experience of that impulse, and are "only in
directly representative" (p. 206) of the supernatural
world to which that experience refers. If we say that
"revelation (considered objectively) is a knowledge
. . . concerning . . , the supernatural " (p. 207), we
are bound to add that "its derivation is decidedly
indirect " (p. 207).
! "In the main, then, religious belief is directly explanatory
and justificatory of religious life and sentiment " (p. 206).

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 41
It is immediately "shaped and determined," not
by the supernatural world, but by " man's inward
religious experience" (p. 209). It is, indeed, the
"natural shadow" (p. 231), the "spontaneous
mental self-embodiment" (p. 228), "an immediate
and natural reflexion" (p. 237) of that experience,
and it does not represent " the divine mind in the
same way as a philosophy or science represents the
human mind " (p. 210). To suggest that it does, to
view it as a "miraculously communicated science,"
is " the fundamental mistake of theologism " (p. 210).
(c) But, if this be the origin of the ideas of
Religion, why suppose that those ideas give even an
"indirect" knowledge of the supernatural world?
Why suppose that the knowledge they communicate
goes beyond the inner experience they set forth ?
Apparently, we are to suppose this because that
experience itself has reference to the "other world."
"If," says Father Tyrrell, "we consider the
generic characteristic " of the conceptions whereby
men seek to explain their religious experience, "it is
plain that the way of life or mode of action whereof
those imaginings are explanatory must have reference
to a world or order of existence beyond, above, yet
closely related with, the world of daily experience"
(p. 206).
This seems clear. The "way of life" — the
"way" that is made known in revelational experi
ence — has a supernatural reference.

42 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
You will, however, point out that, in this passage,
the supernatural reference appears to be inferred, not
given — to be inferred from man's explanations of
religious experience, and not to be given in that
experience. All those explanations affirm, we are told,
the " existence of superhuman transcendent beings
beyond the range of ordinary experience, with whom,
nevertheless, man stands in close practical relations
of subjection and dependence " (p. 206), and Father
Tyrrell seems to argue that the supernatural reference
would not be universally found in the explanations
unless there were actually a supernatural reference
in the explicandum — in " the way of life."
It is clear, however, from other passages, that Father
Tyrrell finds the supernatural reference actually
present in the explained experience, and does not
reach it by inference from the suggested explanations.
Religious experience is said to be " the sense of the
dynamic relationship obtaining between our spirit
and the Universal Spirit" (p. 230). In that experi
ence " man seems to be guided and taught, not
through the ordinary ways of knowledge, but more
or less supernaturally, by a divine spirit in direct com
munication with his own " (p. 209). The religious
life, we are told, reveals to man ' ' the divine which is
immanent " in his spirit (p. 205), and religious life
and sentiment ' ' have reference " to " that order of
things " which (by its action upon us) evokes them ^
(pp. 206, 207). ^ See Appended Notes, p. 202.

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 43
Unmistakably, Father Tyrrell believes that a certain
supernatural reference is integral in religious experi
ence itself, and this belief enables him to attribute a
similar reference, although an indirect one, to the
religious ideas which more or less adequately set forth
and explain that experience. ^
Id) In virtue of this supernatural reference the ideas
of religion tell man something about the supernatural
world. What do they tell him ? What kind of infor
mation do they communicate, or (at least) purport to
communicate ?
(i) Recall, for a moraent, Father Tyrrell's account
of religious beliefs. Those beliefs are said to be
representations and explanations of religious experi
ence. They have a supernatural reference because
there is a supernatural reference in the experience
they set forth and explain.
What, then, is the nature of that supernatural refer
ence? What is the "objective" element in revela
tional experience?
One thing seems clear: revelational experience is
a caused experience, an effect.^ Now, in every effect
we find some marks of its cause. Something in the
effect tells us that it is an effect, and its qualities or
characteristics — ^which derive their existence from
^ See Appended Notes, p. 202.
* "Religious life and sentiment" are, "in the first instance,
determined by the nature and action upon us of that order
of things to which they have reference " (pp. 206, 207).

44 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
certain powers or active properties in its cause — point
us to those powers or properties. For instance,
marks of intelligent design point us to a designing
mind. As Father Tyrrell elsewhere ^ says, "effects
are in some sense ' representative ' of their causes."
He adds, however — what is obviously true — that
they are not representative "by way of similitude or
likeness, or as a predicate 'represents' its subject"
(p. 284). It is not, for instance, in either of these
ways that a statue represents the sculptor.
This brings us within sight of two important con
clusions : —
(i) Because revelational experience is an effect
produced in us by the supernatural "order of
things," it in some way represents that order,
and the ideas which represent that experience
also represent that order.
(2) Because those ideas represent the super
natural world only indirectly— only in and
through their representation of the revelational
experience which is its effect — their representa
tion of that world cannot be photographic.
How, then, shall we describe the representation of
the supernatural world by the ideas of religion ?
According to Father Tyrrell, that representation is
not merely " poetical " or "allegorical " (p. 230), but
" figurative " (p. 229), and " more or less symbolic "
(p. 219). Its "correspondence to the felt realities of
1 In the Essay entitled Revelation.

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 45
eternity is more or less enigmatic and inexact"
(p. 213). It sets forth the other world " in enigmas
and mysteries" which "of their very nature are
ambiguous and incapable of exact determination "
(p. 204). In a word, it is a "prophetic" and not
a scientific representation of the "other world" — a
representation, as Father Tyrrell elsewhere says, per
speculum, in cenigmate.
You will ask. Does Father Tyrrell attribute this
"enigmatic" character only to the ideas of Natural
Religion, or does he attribute it also to those guaran
teed by Revelation ? Clearly, he attributes it to
those guaranteed by Revelation.
The familiar distinction between Natural and
Revealed Religion does not appear in this Essay.
Even " the rudest religious beliefs are inspired so far
as they originate purely in an attempt to interpret the
workings of grace" (p. 209). Revelation, we are
told, " is accorded to most men " (p. 207). On one
page (209) Revelation denotes " those presentations
of the other world which are shaped and determined
by man's inward religious experience, individual and
collective." On another (228) it denotes the "con
struction " of the other world which " has been more or
less instinctively created out of materials supplied by
popular beliefs, sentiments, traditions, and views in
obedience to the requirements of the religious life,
and which is the spontaneous mental self-embodi
ment of the collective religious experience of whole
peoples and communities." Revelation, indeed, is

46 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
co-extensive with religion, for the religious life is a
revelation — the revelation to man of " the divine
which is immanent " in his spirit — and in this Essay
no other kind of revelation is mentioned. Every
religion is a revelation, and the ideas of every revela
tion are ' ' enigmatic ' ' in their description of the other
world.! God, we are told, " is felt to stand guaranty" for
Revelation (p. 209). But what kind of truth does
He guarantee? The truth guaranteed in Revelation
. — that which veritably bears " the seal of the Spirit "
— is (we are told) "only indirectly speculative."
" What is immediately approved, as it were experi
mentally, is a way of living, feeling, and acting with
reference to the other world. The explanatory and
justificatory conceptions subsequently sought out by
the mind, as postulated by the ' way of life ' have
no direct divine approval " ^ (p, 210). Revelation is
said to be "experience," not "statement" (p. 229);
its dogmas are "true with the truth of prophecy"
(p. 233) — that is, with enigmatic truth. The " Chris
tian revelation," we read, was at first " felt to be an
utterance of prophetic enthusiasm, a communication
of visions whose correspondence to the felt realities
of eternity was more or less enigmatic and inexact " ^
(P- 213)-
1 Cp. pp. 116-119 of this Letter.
^ See Appended Notes, p. 203.
3 Cp. p. 9S :-
"God has revealed Himself ... to babes, to fishermen.

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 47
Moreover, "Theologism" is called a "pseudo-
science " precisely because it fails to recognize the
"enigmatic" character of the ideas of Revelation,
— "because it treats prophetic enigmas and mysteries,
which of their very nature are ambiguous and incap
able of exact determination, as principles of exactly
determinable intellectual value, and argues from them
accordingly " (pp. 204, 205). Its " fundamental mis
take " is to " view " the " inspired imagery of revela
tion " as "a miraculously communicated science " ^
(p. 210): its "root-error" is to look for "a perfect
adequation " between " two totally different orders of
truth — the prophetic truth of revelation, the scientific
truth of theology " (p. 238). To the confusion of
these two orders, and the consequent " ascription of
divine authority to theology and of scientific or
philosophical exactitude to revelation," the "mis
chievous results of theologism must be traced "
(p. 209).to peasants, to the profanum vulgus, and therefore He
has spoken their language. . . . The Church's guardian
ship in the matter is to preserve, not to develop, the exact
ideas which that simple language conveyed to its first
hearers, knowing well that those human ideas and
thought-forms are indefinitely inadequate to the eternal
realities which they shadow forth." (Lex Orandi, Lex
Credendi.)
! Dogmatic theology, we read, supposes that "the scriptural
and apostolic utterances were faultlessly and divinely perfect,
not merely as symbols, but as theology, history, and science "
(p. 216). In this Essay, it will be remembered, "dogmatic
theology " is a synonym of "Theologism." (See p. 203, foot
note.)

48 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
(2) What is the value of " prophetic " — of enig
matic — truth ?

"As a merely human explanation of our super
natural religious experiences, revelation has no
standing against science or even against
theology, so far as theology is a science; it is
simply the artless explanation of a child as
against that of an instructed mind " (pp. 230, 231),
A " child's story," however, is not valueless. It is
"an unsophisticated statement and direct product of
experience" (p. 231). Similarly, "revelation and pro
phetic utterance " are " the natural shadow of experi
ence, of religious fact" (p. 231). Because they are
this, they are said to be " worth more than theology
or science," and even to have a critical superiority
over science ! (p. 231). Their critical value, however,
does not lie in their explanations, but in the fact that
they embody or imply " the phenomenon to be
explained," viz. religious experience (p. 231). Their
' ' artless constructions of history and science and
philosophy may crumble under the touch of criti
cism; but this latter will be condemned unless its
reconstructions find room for all that revelation strove
to shelter " (p. 231).
" Revelation and prophetic utterance," then, are
"critically valuable" because they are an " unso-
1 They have this superiority "so far" as they have not
been "sophisticated by theology" (p. 231).

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY * 49
phisticated statement" of the "phenomenon to be
explained."! As explanations they are valueless.
This conclusion, however, is not final.
The ' ' religious spirit, ' ' we are told, gives rise to
" a certain system of conduct and observances by
which man's life in reference to the world beyond is
found experimentally to be fostered and extended"
(p. 229). " Explanatory of such observances " there
arises a ' ' body of beliefs and dogmas representative,
at least figuratively, of the nature of that world be
yond, whose growth and modification will, if disturb
ing influences are left out of account, be determined
pari passu by that of practical religion " (pp.
229, 230).
This system of thought is, "as it were," the
"shadow" of the rehgious life it interprets, and it
"grows and moves" with the "growth and move
ment" of that life (p. 219). It is "the index and
register of the degree of correspondence between the
soul and its supernatural environment " (p. 219).
The truth of this explanatory representation of the
"world beyond" is "best described" as "pro
phetic" (p. 230), and its value is primarily a prac
tical value. " However perverted from its original use,
! Cp. pp. 98-100.
" . . . it is important to remember the abstract
character of certain theological conclusions, and the super
iority of the concrete language of revelation as a guide
to truth" (p. 98).

50 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Christian theology is, according to its primary
intention, an instrument of the spiritual life; it
offers a construction ^ of that mysterious world to
which the spiritual life has reference, in the light
of which construction the soul can shape its con
duct and school its sentiment . . ." (p. 218).
We may not, however, forget that this practically
serviceable construction is enigmatic. When we use
it to shape our conduct we " walk backwards towards
the light " and " guide our steps by the shadow cast
in front of us by the objects behind us " (p. 219).^
Such an advance, you will say, is only one degree
better than a groping in the dark. Yet undoubtedly it
is better, for those prophetic, those enigmatic shadows
do tell us something. They safeguard the vita nuova
— the religious life^ — and mark out (with practical
sufficiency) the path of spiritual progress. They are
fashioned under the influence of Revelation — of that
divine impulse which lifts us into the new life; they
arise out of man's practical need to explain and
justify that life (p. 210). What Revelation immedi
ately approves is, we are told, " a way of living, feel
ing, and acting " (p. 210). The " manifestation of
the divine will" which constitutes Revelation is
¦¦¦ See Appended Notes, p. 203.
* The "light" is the supernatural world. That world we
do not behold directly, but per speculum, in cBnig-mate — in the
thought which is the shadow of our caused religious experi
ence, and therefore (indirectly) of the supernatural order which
is its cause.

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 51
experienced, "chiefly and more immediately," as
" consciousness of right and wrong " (p. 205). That
con.sciousness constitutes our revelational experience,
and is characteristically a consciousness of what ought
to be. Because revelational experience is thus an
experience of "what ought to be," prophetic utter
ances, which are a setting forth of revelational experi
ence, are a setting forth of " what ought to be " — are
a setting forth, per speculum, in cBnigmate, of what
Father Tyrrell calls " the ' ought-world ' and its
eternal realities " ^ (p. 234).
The enigmatic ideas of Religion set forth, we are
told, man's religious experience. Now, that experi
ence is an experience of " what ought to be." There
fore, in so far as religious ideas are " the index and
register of the degree of correspondence between the
soul and its supernatural environment," they indicate
and interpret man's correspondence with an " ought-
world," and, although they be shadows indirectly
cast, they tell us at least one most important speculative
truth — the truth, namely, that the " supernatural
world " is an" ought- world." This is the truth they
^ Cp. p. 210 : —
"Again, the divine approval of the way and the life (and
therefore indirectly of the explanatory truth) is mostly prefer
ential, it is a favouring of one alternative, not as ideal and
finally perfect, but as an approximation to the ideal, as a
' move in the right direction.'"
The ideal is "what ought to be." Revelational experience
— the experience wherein the divine approval is given — dis
closes the "ought-world," and, by marking out a "right
direction " makes known somewhat of its character.

52 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
set forth per speculum, in csnigmate; this the light
they kindle for the soul's guidance (p. 218).
(3) " What is the ' objective ' element in revela
tional experience?" When we first asked this ques
tion we had discovered only one " objective " element
in that experience — a casual reference to the super
natural world. We have now made another and
more important discovery. The supernatural " order
of things" has not merely a casual efficiency, it has
also an ethical character. The ' ' other world ' ' is the
" ought-world." In our secular experience we appre
hend Reality through its physical manifestations : in
revelational experience we apprehend its ethical
nature.! The one discovery is as "objective" as
the other. In all experience Reality is " objectively "
present. In one kind of experience it is present as the
physical world, in another as the " ought- world." 2
(4) We are now in a position to define more fully the
conception of prophetic truth disclosed in this Essay.
Revelational experience, we have seen, is at once a
metaphysical and an ethical characterization of the
" other world." It is a metaphysical characterization
in and through its casual reference to that world; it
is an ethical characterization in and through its appre
hension of that world as an " ought-world."
^ See Appended Notes, p. 204.
2 Father Tyrrell does not say this, but I think it fairly
represents and explains his thought.

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY' 53
Now, the ideas of Religion are representations and
explanations of revelational experience. They are
the "garments" which that experience snatches up,
" by a sort of magnetism," in order to set itself forth
" on the stage of thought " (p. 208), and they are spon
taneously selected from among ' ' the ideas, forms,
and images wherewith the mind is stocked in each
particular case" (pp. 208, 209). Because the fur
niture of human minds is exceedingly various, the
explanations of experience in terms of thought are
exceedingly various. One mind (for instance) reacts
upon experience in terms of an inherited religion,
another reacts in terms of a pantheistic philosophy,
another (less cultured) in terms of some savage super
stition. All these kinds of mental "reaction"! have, im
mediately and primarily, only a "prophetic" truth.
Revelation, we are told, belongs " to the category of
experience and not to that of statement " (p. 229),
and the truth which the several kinds of mental
" reaction " variously set forth is the truth of and in
revelational experience. That experience is an ethical
experience, — a "consciousness of right and wrong,"
an apprehension of the "ought-world," — and the ulti
mate truth set forth in the ideas of Religion is the
truth therein made known.
Those ideas set forth a certain "consciousness of
1 I take the word "reaction " from p. 208. We there read
of "the reaction, spontaneous or reflex, of the human mind
to God's touch felt within the heart."

54 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
right and wrong " and an ethical characterization of
the "other world." Their characteristic truth is the
truth of that consciousness and of that characteriza
tion : their characteristic value is the value of that
consciousness and of that characterization. Because
their value is of this kind, — because they prophetically
set forth the " ought- world " as a moral rule within
us and a moral order without us, — they are said to
furnish a "construction" of the "other world" in
the "light" of which we can live! (p. 218), and
because they have this practical utility they are said
to be " an instrument of the spiritual life " ! (p. 218).
" As merely a human explanation of our super
natural religious experiences " they have " no stand
ing against science or even against theology, so far
as theology is a science" (pp. 230, 231), but they
enshrine for us valuable experience and an invaluable
truth — the truth, namely, that the "other world" is
an " ought- world, " that the "order of things"
wherein we live is essentially a moral order. Although
they be valueless as explanations, yet, because they
set forth this truth, they are themselves eternally true
— true with the truth that Father Tyrrell calls "pro
phetic." That truth is not " merely poetical or allegorical "
(p. 230). It is "pragmatical, provisional, and
approximative " (p. 234). In other words, it is prac
tical and enigmatic, and it is other than and higher
1 See the passage quoted from p. 218 on p. 50 of this Letter.

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 55
than the truth of poetry or allegory. We may
rightly, says Father Tyrrell, " refuse to be tied down
to an exact statement" of the "speculative value"
of prophetic utterances (p. 234). Indeed, we have
already seen that, as explanations of experience, they
are almost (if not quite) valueless. As statements of
experience, however, they have a most important
value, for they embody the experience wherein we
discover the " ought-world " — the " objective " moral
order. Because they embody that experience "they
are not less but more truly representative of reality,
or representative of a truer and deeper reality,! than
the prose language of historical narrative or philo
sophical affirmation " (p. 230).
Prophecy, we are told, "has a two-fold utterance.
It expresses itself in deliberately sought-out sym
bolism, observance, ritual, parable, and fiction, or
else in a more or less idealized reading of history and
nature " (p. 232). The prophetic spirit is "keen and
impatient to see its own desire realized; to interpret
the Kingdom of God as near; to believe that what,
according to its limited outlook, ought to be, already
is; that what ought to have been actually was; to
narrow up prematurely to a sudden apex the .slowly
convergent lines of God's providence stretching out
beyond all range of our vision, to find the fulness
of His scheme in the brief pages of our recorded
history " (p. 232).
^ See pp. 147 and 154 of this Letter,

56 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Hence, Father Tyrrell paradoxically adds, "it is
ever at war with common-sense and with fact as a
bias, a principle of falsification " (p. 232).
" Still, at any given stage, the prophetic read
ing of history is true to the deeper and more
distant realities than is the common-sen.se read
ing; it is more like what ought to be and what
will be, than what is; more like what therefore
is, in the deepest stratum of reality, than what
is, on the surface " ! (p. 233),
Unlike the truth of science or history, prophetic
truth has for its " object " the " ideal rather than the
actual; the future, or else the eternal, rather than the
past or present; what ought to be and is in process
of becoming, rather than what is " (p. 231).
Precisely — so we gather — because prophetic truths
are prophetic, they are " incapable of exact deter
mination," and therefore cannot be systematized ^ as
the truths of science and philosophy can be (p. 232).
When "misinterpreted as literal statements of fact,
they are often inconsistent with one another and with
the world of fact-truths" (p. 232).
This, then — the conception that the truth of pro
phecy is enigmatic, not literal — was Father Tyrrell's
discovery. It was this that led to the revolt in
i See pp. 147-154 of this Letter.
2 See Appended Notes, p. 204,

'RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 57
The Quarterly, and that first enabled Father Tyrrell
to make a clear distinction between the sphere of
revelation and dogma on the one hand and the
spheres of theology, philosophy, and science on the
other. That distinction is plainly indicated by definitions
giveri on page 228.
Theology is said to be " that philosophical con
struction of the other world which has been built
upon the data of general experience by the reflec
tion and labour of the understanding, and which
belongs to the unity of the whole system of our
organized knowledge." !
Revelation, on the other hand, is described as
' ' that other construction of the same world which
has been more or less instinctively created out
of materials supplied by popular beliefs, senti
ments, traditions, and views in obedience to the
requirements of the religious life, and which is
the spontaneous and mental self-embodiment of
the collective religious experience of whole
peoples and communities."
^ On p. 23s we are told that theological science began with
the first attempt to answer " childish questionings " about
the gods and about another world. In so far as it is a
science, "theology is but one department of that systematiz
ing and unifying of all knowledge by which the understand
ing turns universal experience to account and makes from it
an instrument whereby we can pass from the near to the
distant, from the present to the past and the future " (pp.
23s. 236).

58 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
So widely different is Theology from Revelation
that the " notion of revealed theology " is (we are
told) " as incoherent and fallacious as that of ^¦e-
vealed astronomy, cosmogony, chemistry, medicine,
or any other sort of revealed science " (pp. 227, 228).
The fundamental mistake of theologism is to view
the " imagery of revelation " as a " miraculously
communicated science, superseding and correct
ing the natural results of theological speculation "
(p. 210).
That ' ' fundamental mistake, ' ' however, ' ' like all
widespread and persistent errors " is (we are told) " a
very natural one, as natural as the belief in geo-
centricism," " It needs no sligh't degree of critical develop
ment to distinguish momenta in a phenomenon
that seems to be given all at once, and is there
fore taken in the lump, i, e. to discern the soul of
the act " from its body, its essence from its
accidents, the action of grace from the re-action of
nature, the warmth of the heart from the light
which it kindles in the mind, the infusion of
divine love from the inspired image in which it
clothes itself or from the theological concepts in
which it is afterwards clothed by our reflection "
(pp. 210, 211).
The Christian revelation, "in its first form," was
(we read) "altogether apocalyptic, prophetic, vision-

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 59
ary in character"! (p. 211). "The kingdom of
heaven, its nature, the circumstances of its advent —
this was the 'good news'" (pp. 211, 212). The
transition from this prophetic revelation to dogmatic
theology — that is, to theologism — was, we are told,
part of the process which transformed Christianity
" from a movement inspired by a belief in an imme
diate consummation of all things into a permanent
institution and world-religion "^ (p. 222).
" However great the price paid, it must be
allowed that, but for the said process, Christi
anity could not have survived the disappointment
of its primitive hope, or have lived to understand
itself better and to determine its own essence
more fully " ^ (p. 222).
Now, by this transition, the "current theological,
•• Does Father Tyrrell suggest that the Christian revelation,
"in its first form," had neither theological intention nor
theological content?
Cp. pp. 194-196 of this Letter.
2 One may reasonably surmise that, in Father Tyrrell's
opinion, this alleged transition was favoured by the fact that
"the Christian revelation is largely expressed in the language
of theology " (p. 229). Men too readily supposed that, " in
assuming current theological notions as congenial vehicles
of self-expression," the "spirit" sealed those notions "with
a theological finality and certainty " (p. 235). They had not
learnt, or had forgotten, that what is "immediately approved"
in revelation is not a conception, but "a way of living " (p. 210).
3 In another place we are told that "dogmatic theology"
is "as old as the 'catholicizing' of Christianity," and "is
an important element of that process " (p. 239).

6o FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
philosophical, and historical beliefs and conceptions,
in which the original Christian afflatus or enthusiasm
embodied itself," became "canonized as part and
parcel of a revealed theology, and as being therefore
God's own philosophy of existence and of human
history, ' ' and ' ' the whole force of the Christian
religion, with all its highest sanctions and motives,
was thrown into the scale against the progress of
knowledge, and, thereby, of civilization" (p. 214).
" All those categories, philosophical, scientific,
and historic, all those readings of the world and
of history, that were involved and presupposed
in the canonical traditions and scriptures, were
imposed by conscience upon the understanding
as the Word of God, as matter of divine faith,
to be questioned only at the peril of one's
immortal soul. So closely interwoven are all
parts of the kingdom of knowledge that this
meant its entire subjection (at least in the event
of conflict) to the ultimate control of revelation
now identified with dogmatic theology " (pp.
214, 215).
If this subjection be wrong, the way to liberation is
clear. We must go behind the enslaving tradition,
and return to the thought which (according to Father
Tyrrell) that transition obscured, — to the thought,
namely, that the dogmas of Revelation are true, not
literally, but " with the truth of prophecy " (p. 233).

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 6i
This is what Father Tyrrell does. He takes these
dogmas completely out of the field of science and
philosophy — and therefore out of the field of theology
— and sets them apart, as " a higher kind of truth,"
"veiled from the impertinent scrutiny of reason"!
(p. 215).
What is that higher kind of truth? It were easy
to reply: "That higher kind of truth is an ethical
truth, and, because ethical, it is higher than the
factual truth of science or the theoretical truth of
philosophy." I doubt, however, whether Father
Tyrrell means this. An ethical truth is a truth relat
ing to human conduct — such a truth, for instance, as
" Love is better than Justice." Now, prophetic truth
is undoubtedly ethical, but it is more than ethical.
It is cosmological or metaphysical, for not only is it
a precept for human conduct, it is also (as we have
seen) a characterization of Reality.
Why, then, does Father Tyrrell describe it as a
higher kind of truth? Apparently because its truth
is that of the experience it embodies, and because it
therefore has the primacy which experience always
has over explanations of experience — over scientific
and philosophical theories. It is "veiled from the
impertinent scrutiny of reason " because it has the
truth of experience, for experience is the subject-
matter of Reason, — it is the given thing which Reason
! The mischievous results of theologism must (we are told)
be traced to a confusion of theology and revelation as "truths
of the same order " (p. 209).

62 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
has to explain (if it can), and may never set aside,
and it therefore has an immediate authority which
Reason can never properly dispute.
One comment upon this is obvious. If, it may be
said, science were merely an explanation, prophetic
truth — because the truth of an explicandum, of the
thing to be explained — might lawfully claim this
primacy. Science, however, is more than an ex
planation : it is a description — a verifiable description .
Let us admit that revelational experience gives us
one view of Reality, one view of human life and its
environment. Does that view agree with the view
more or less independently given by the natural and
historical sciences?
To this question Father Tyrrell makes a clear
reply. Prophetic truth, he tells us, "can rarely, if
ever, come into dialectical conflict . . . with science
and history" (p. 233). Why not? Apparently
because (i) the truth of prophecy is the truth of a
revelational experience which gives us an ethical
characterization of Reality,
and (2) this characterization is one which
neither science nor history is likely to set aside.!
Father Tyrrell admits, indeed, that ' ' prophecy ' '
cannot be completely indifferent to " historic and
1 I do not suggest that Father Tyrrell actually says this,
but it is (I think) unmistakably implied by his argument.

' RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ' 63
scientific truth,"! but it seems clear that (according
to him) we have a religious interest in those kinds
of truth only when they touch or seem to touch that
ethical view of the world and of life which is said to
be disclosed to us in revelational experience. The
argument of this Essay, indeed, invites us to infer
that no discrepancy between the verbal expression of
prophetic truth (on the one hand), and the discoveries
of science, history, or philosophy (on the other), can
be. of vital importance for Religion so long as that
ethical Welt-Anschauung is secure.
^ "Plainly the attitude of prophecy towards historic and
scientific truth can never be so indifferent as that of poesy
and art " (p. 233).
Cp. p. 154 of this Letter.

IV
"revelation"
An examination of The Rights and Limits of
Theology has left us with these primary con
ceptions : —
(i) Revelational experience is primarily an
ethical experience wherein we make discovery of
the "objective" moral order — of the "ought-
world." (2) The ideas of Religion are derived only in
directly from the supernatural world, and give
only an indirect representation of that world — a
representation which possesses not scientific, but
merely "prophetic" truth.
(3) The ultimate truth of prophecy is the truth
of our revelational discovery of the "ought-
world."
These conceptions, however, are not final. Father
Tyrrell's book is the history of an opinion, and that
opinion was not fully formed when The Rights and
Limits of Theology was written. A later stage in
the development of Father Tyrrell's thought is given
us in the Essay entitled Revelation.
64

' REVELATION ' 65
In this Essay, which was not published until it
appeared in Through Scylla and Charybdis, Father
Tyrrell attempts
"to give greater precision to the conception
of prophetic language, and to show that it
differs from theological not merely as a poetical
from a prosaic statement of the same truth— in
which case theology would be its very substance
and kernel — but rather as a fact of religious ex
perience differs from an analysis of its cause and
significance — in which case revelation is to the
ology what the stars are to astronomy; or what
ontological truth is to logical truth."
"The success or failure of the analysis," adds
Father Tyrrell, " leaves the fact untouched.
The argument of Revelation starts from a certain
conception of religion.
In his Biblische Theologie des AUen Testaments
Stade gives a definition of Religion which Father
Tyrrell thus translates : " Religion is the sense of,
and converse with, superhuman beings." This
definition Father Tyrrell adopts.!
Now, if Religion be this, what is Revelation ? We
1 In adopting it, however. Father Tyrrell alters it.
Religion, he tells us, "is a sense of superhuman beings
with whom man can enter into practical relations " (p. 271).
This altered form does not include the idea of actual
"converse." 5

66 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
naturally incline to think that, if Religion be "the
sense of, and converse with, superhuman beings,"
Revelation must be the manifestation of the beings
with whom "converse" is held. This would make
every religion a revelation,! and you will remember
that in The Rights and Limits of Theology every
religion is a revelation.
In this later Essay, however, the word " revela
tion " is used with a narrower meaning. It means
"supernatural revelation" — revelation that is not
natural revelation.
Religious experience — the "sense of the super
human world issuing in, or inspiring, an imaginative
construction of the same " — is, we are told, something
" given " to man (p. 270). Revelation, also, is some
thing "given " : it "comes to us unsought," or "hap
pens to us" (p. 269). It is primarily "experience"
(p. 268), and it "belongs rather to the cate
gory of impressions than to that of expression "
(p. 280).
" Yet," says Father Tyrrell, "we should do ill to
consider" that all religious truths of the former
category " are deserving of the name of Revelation "
(p. 280). To deserve that name a truth must be
^- There cannot be "converse" with a superhuman being
unless that being be manifest — i. e. be present and be known
to be present.
Therefore, wherever there is "converse" there must be
also manifestation.
Therefore — if Religion be "converse" and Revelation be
manifestation — every religion must be a revelation.

' REVELATION ' 67
more than merely given : "it must be given in an
extraordinary degree, and be of a ' supernatural '
kind"! (p. 280).
" When we say that the truth revealed is ' super
natural,' we mean that it is not of a kind simply pos
tulated as necessary for the ordinary course of spiritual
and religious development. The normal and uni
versal experiences of the moral and mystical life em
body themselves in images which constitute a revela
tion of God and the other world distinct from the
theories of religious philosophy, yet which do not
merit the name of 'Supernatural Revelation,' of
Revelation in the usual sense" (p. 281).
According to Father Tyrrell, then. Revelation is
" knowledge conveyed in a miraculous or at least
supernatural or extraordinary manner ^ (p, 269), It
suggests " the sudden dropping of a veil, or lifting
of a mist, or the lightning-flash glimpse of a land
scape at night " (p. 268). " Abruptness, discontinuity
with the ordinary process of knowledge is its usual
(perhaps not essential) characteristic" (pp. 268,
269). Now, Revelation is primarily "experience" (p.
268). It "comes to us unsought; it is given to us,
or happens to us" (p. 269). In revelational experi
ence "we listen, we do not speak; we receive, we do
not give ; we are shown something, we do not show "
(p. 281). There is a "transforming and heightening"
^ See Appended Notes, p. 205. s Ibid,, p. 205.

68 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM

of the mind, but of its " receptive," not of its
" active," part (p. 281).
In one place we are told that " Revelation spon
taneously clothes itself in whatever language it finds
to its hand " (p. 279). From another we learn that
our religious "sense of the superhuman world"
issues in or inspires "an imaginative construction"
of that world (p. 270). In all this, however, — whether
man be clothing bare experience, or imaging forth
the Unseen World, — his "causal action" is "instru
mental rather than principal, and implies a maximum
of passivity, a minimum of deliberation and design " !
(p. 271).
We learnt from The Rights and Limits of Theology
that religious beliefs are fashioned out of materials
furnished by popular beliefs, and that man's choice
of materials is guided by that impulse from the Divine
Spirit which lifts him into new ways of life. We
learnt also, however, that the beliefs thus fashioned
do not bear "the seal of the spirit." However close
their connection with the life wherein, ex hypothesi.
Revelation subsists, they are distinct from that life —
distinct from it as representation and explanation
must ever be from that which is represented and ex
plained. Revelation, we were plainly told, gives
divine approval only to the represented life, not to
the representing thought.
In this later Essay, however. Father Tyrrell makes
^ On p. 280 the " irrvaginative apprehension" of truth by
Conscience seems to be described as a "passive impression."

' REVELATION ' 69
the thoughts of Religion part of Revelation, and he
accomplishes this by making them part of revelational
experience — a part of that experience, and not a repre
sentation of it.
The way for this is already prepared in the earlier
Essay. We are there told that, when an intense feeling
snatches " from the storehouse of memory " congenial
"images and conceptions" wherewith to set itself
forth " on the stage of thought," the agent is " almost
as passive and determined as he is in regard to the
spiritual emotion so embodied " (p. 208). Hence, we
read, such "presentments of the supernatural world
seem to be quite specially inspired, to possess a higher
authority, and to come less indirectly from God than
those that are deliberately sought out in explanation
of the life of religion " (p. 208).
From another passage we learn that the ideas of
Religion are not merely a "popular and practical
explanation " of religious experience, but are also an
"immediate and natural reflex of experience, nearly
equivalent to experience itself " (p. 237). According
to Father Tyrrell's later Essay, the ideas of Religion
are not "nearly equivalent to experience," for they
are experience — a;re part of the experience wherein
Revelation subsists, and, therefore, part of the
Revelation. I quote some illustrative passages : —
"For Revelation is not so much a representation
of something experienced, as one of the elements

70 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
of a complex spiritual experience — an experience
made up of feelings and impulses and imagin
ings; which reverberates in every corner of the
soul and leaves its impress everywhere; in the
mind no less than in the heart and will — just as
the impulse and sentiment of Conscience entail a
complementary impression on the mind which is
part and parcel of the same experience. It would
be misleading to regard that impression as a ' re
presentation ' of the impulse and feelings, and to
regard these latter as the exclusive substance and
reality of the experience, or as the ' content ' or
significance of that so-called ' representation.'
It is as much a part of the experience as they
are ; it is as directly ' given ' or ' presented ' ; and
in no wise the result of reflection upon them, or
of an attempt to understand and classify them "
(pp. 282, 283).
" If there is a certain contingency about the
forms and images which make part of these super
natural religious experiences, it is none the less
true that for the recipient they possess a divine
authority as given along with the other parts of
the same experience and proceeding from the same
source " (p. 290).
" Analogous to the first rude efforts at physical
science there are, among the earliest types of
humanity, childish strivings after some sort of
religious philosophy which are simply a product
of natural reason, of reflection on observation,

' REVELATION ' 71
and are in no sense spontaneous creations of the
religious spirit. On the other hand there are
revelations in the true sense; picturings of the
other world given by, in, and along with religious
experience, though expressed with all the crude-
ness of those uncultured minds from whom they
spontaneously spring, and to whose compeers
they are addressed " (p. 278).
Other passageis illustrate the same conception from
another point of view : —
" Revelation is itself a part of that concrete
' presented ' reality which is the subject-matter
of theological reflection ; it is an element of the
' experience ' to be explained and digested.
The contrary supposition is accounted for by
the fact that whereas the affective and volitional
elements of the religious experience are evanes
cent, the mental or imaginative element abides
in memory and survives as the representative of
the total experience. I cannot repeat the whole
experience at will, but I can voluntarily recall the
impression it made on my imagination. This
remembered impression very naturally arrogates
to itself the name of Revelation which strictly
should stand for the total original experience, and
not for the memory of a part of it " ! (pp, 283,
284), ••¦ See Appended Notes, p. 205.

72 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
"It is very important to remember that,
strictly speaking. Revelation consists in the total
religious experience and not simply in the
mental element in that experience, which is to the
rest as those strange figures of the nature and
cause of a pain are to the pain which they so often
accompany and which are so unlike its rational
explanation " (p. 285).
I frankly confess that these last passages caused me
at first no little surprise. A study of The Rights and
Limits of Theology, and of Father Tyrrell's later in
clusion of the ideas of Religion within revelational
experience, had not prepared me for an argument
moving in the opposite direction, and extending the
scope of Revelation, not to ideas, but from ideas.
My surprise had, however, very slight justification.
In The Rights and Limits of Theology the word
" Revelation " characteristically denotes experience —
experience which indeed expresses itself in ideas, but
does not include those ideas. And in Father Tyrrell's
later Essay, also, the word is said " to denote an ex
perience " (p. 268), and to belong " to the category
of impressions rather than to that of expression "
(p. 280). But in that Essay the word ordinarily de
notes knowledge — " knowledge conveyed in a miracu
lous or at least supernatural or extraordinary man
ner " (p. 269). " Discontinuity with the ordinary
process of knowledge " is said to be " its usual (per
haps not essential) characteristic " (pp. 268, 269).

' REVELATION ' 73
You will remember that the doctrine of "prophetic
truth " set forth in The Rights and Limits of The
ology involved the conception that prophetic utter
ances, although they disclose the supernatural world,
are not themselves revealed, and disclose that world, not
directly (as in a photograph), but indirectly — through
their representation of a revelational experience which
does not include them.
You will remember, also, that prophecy was held
to be veridical (although enigmatic), and trustworthy
as a practical guide, precisely because it was held to
represent a revelational moral experience.
Now, in his later Essay — where " Revelation "
ordinarily means ' ' knowledge ' ' — Father Tyrrell re
tains the conception of prophetic truth and the doc
trine of its ethical serviceableness. If, however,
Revelation be supposed to subsist in knowledge, and
not in life, the characteristic relation of prophecy to
life is broken. If that relation no longer subsist,
whence does prophecy derive its enigmatic truth and
its ethical usefulness? In his later Essay, no less
than in his earlier. Father Tyrrell rejects the concep
tion that Revelation is a divine instruction, a divinely
imparted science. In his earlier Essay he could infer
the trustworthiness of prophecy from the revelational
experience, the new life, wherein Revelation was there
said to subsist. Whence can that trustworthiness be
inferred, if Revelation subsist not in life, and yet be
not a divine instruction ?
It would seem thai the idea of prophetic truth must

74 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
be radically altered or the idea of Revelation enlarged.
Father Tyrrell has chosen the latter alternative. He
adds to "knowledge" certain "affective and voli
tional " experiences, and tells us that the word
" Revelation " properly designates the whole of the
complex experience which these, together with
"knowledge," constitute.
According to Father Tyrrell's latest thought. Reve
lation is a " massive spiritual experience " (p. 294),
which includes not merely an impression "in the
heart and will," but also an impression "in the
mind " (p, 282) — not only the " revelational experi
ence " of The Rights and Limits of Theology, but
also the "mental construction,"!
We are told that, whereas the "affective and voli
tional" elements in this "massive" experience are
" evanescent," the "mental or imaginative element
abides in memory and survives as the representative
of the total experience " (p. 283). From this remem
bered " mental or imaginative element " the theo
logian can " reconstruct " the whole experience, as a
palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct animal from its
fragmentary fossil remains (p. 284). It would, how
ever, be " misleading " to regard this remembered
" mental or imaginative element " as a representation
of the other elements, and these latter " as the exclu-
! According to The Rights and Limits of Theology "mental
constructions " do not form part of revelational experience.
According to Father Tyrrell's later Essay they are co
ordinate factors therein.

' REVELATION ' 75
sive substance and reality of the experience, or as the
' content ' or significance of that so-called ' representa
tion ' " (p. 283). The mental element does not " re
present " those other elements, but "they, with it,
correspond to and so far ' represent ' the hidden causes
of the total experience. For effects are in some way
' representative ' of their causes, though not by way
of similitude or likeness, or as a predicate ' represents '
its subject " ! (p. 284).
The way is now once more prepared ^ for the doc
trine of prophetic truth. What information concern
ing the supernatural world does the " mental and
imaginative element " in revelational experience give
to us?
Revelation, we are told, " means knowledge "
(p. 269). The complex experience which is Revela
tion contains a "mental or imaginative element" —
an "impression on the mind" — ^which is "as
directly " " given " or " presented " as are the other
elements in that experience (p. 283).
We find also an interesting suggestion that " a
great deal of the earliest mythology is not the fruit
of an after-effort to understand Life and Nature as
presented immediately to experience, but is the very
form in which that direct experience has written itself
in the imagination." This natural impression of ex
perience is said to be "a knowledge given to man in
and along with the experience of which it is a part,"
! See Appended Notes, p. 206. 2 Ibid., p. 206.

76 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
and, so far, we are told it is "analogous to Revela
tion" (p, 279).
Does it follow from this that the beliefs, the mental
constructions, of Religion are supernaturally im
parted? If they be supernaturally imparted, one
would incline to suppose that they tell us the truth —
the literal truth, or a truth as near thereunto as we
mortals can bear.
Now, in the Essay we are now studying there are
not a few passages — besides those from which I have
just quoted — which might dispose a hasty reader to
think that, in Father Tyrrell's opinion, those con
structions or beliefs are thus imparted.
We read of " revealed utterance " (p. 298), of " re
vealed utterances " (p. 298), of " inspired utterance "
(p. 294). Revelation, we are told, " is a showing on
the part of God, a seeing on the part of the receiver "
(p. 289). God reveals Himself in the " total experi
ence " — in the " mental element " therein no less than
in the other elements (p. 287). He " speaks by deeds,
not words. The same shock which gives fire to the
heart and impulse to the will, fills the mind with
some interpretative image of the agency at work "
(p. 287). " Certain religious experiences have filled
the prophetic imagination with images of the power,
majesty, and transcendence of God " (p, 289). These
images or conceptions, "as revealed," are "part of
the experience " (p. 289), and " for the recipient they
possess a divine authority as, given along with the
other parts of the same experience and proceeding

' REVELATION^' 77
from the same source " (p. 290). While a seer " is
still actually dominated and absorbed by his vision,"
his utterance, we are told, " is spontaneous and in
spired, and may be considered a continuous part or
prolongation of the total experience called revelation "
(p. 304)-
These pronouncements, when reinforced by the pas
sages from which I have quoted on page 75, might
well incline a careless reader to suppose that, accord
ing to Father Tyrrell's later thought, the mental
constructions in Religion are revealed constructions —
that Revelation is a divine instruction, an imparted
science. There are, however, other passages — not less con
spicuous and not less important — which, if taken by
themselves and uncorrupted by a reader's preposses
sions, would incline one towards a quite different
supposition. I reproduce the substance of some of
these. (i) Even " among the earliest types of human
ity " one finds "revelations in the true sense;
picturings of the other world given by, in, and
along with religious experience, although ex
pressed with all the crudeness of those uncultured
minds from which they spontaneously spring,
and to whose compeers they are addressed"
(p. 278).
(2) " Prior to any intention of explaining "
their moral experience, " men speak oi Con-

78 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
science as a voice, as something locally inside
them, in their breast, their heart, their brain, —
something that whispers to them and says,
' Stop ! ' or as the voice of God or of the Holy
Spirit, or of some Guardian Angel, or daimonion,
or of the indwelling Christ, or of their own Better
Self. They deal with Conscience so pictured,
obeying or disobeying it " (p. 280).
(3) " The nature of the mental element in
Revelation may be illustrated roughly by the
immediate effect of a thunderstorm on the mind.
Whether for savage or savant the external sense-
impressions are approximately the same — blind
ing flashes, awe-inspiring peals of thunder, dark
ness, torrential rain, and so forth. But the im
pression on the imagination differs considerably
accordirig to their several mental habits. In the
savage there rises at once the image of an angry
storm-god; in the savant nothing is evoked but
the idea of a thunderstorm " (p. 287).
(4) " Revelation, the natural self-expression of
a divine afflatus, is as the record of itself made by
a passing hurricane in the wrack and ruin which
it leaves in its wake. The nature of that record
varies according to what lies in the track of the
tempest" (pp. 296, 297).
(5) " Revelation spontaneously clothes itself
in whatever language it finds to its hand; and
where the mind of the prophet is already largely
instructed with theological categories and concep-

' REVELATION ' 79
tions, these will largely mingle with and govern
the images in which his vision seeks to embody
itself. Thus, without being theology, revelation
may be couched in theological terms, which it
uses not for their proper and theological values,
but for their illustrative and symbolic values "
(p. 279).
These passages suggest the doctrine already made
familiar to us by The Rights and Limits of Theology
— the doctrine, namely, that the mental constructions
in Religion are human, not divine; are shaped, in
deed, in response to a divine impulse, but are not
supernaturally communicated.
This suggestion is, I think, conclusively confirmed
by a passage on page 287. God, we are there told,
is revealed in religious experience, " not as a fact is
revealed by a statement, but as a cause is revealed in
its effect." Now, a communicated mental construc
tion would be a statement. It seems clear, however,
that the mental constructions in religion are not state
ments, for God is revealed by them, " not as a fact is
revealed by a statement, but as a cause is revealed in
its effect." Since they are effects, and not statements,
we have no reason to suppose them communicated.
Do you hesitate to trust yourself to an argument
so abstract? Turn to Father Tyrrell's own illustra
tion of the passage I have quoted.
" God speaks by deeds, not by words. The

8o FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
same shock which gives fire to the heart and im
pulse to the will, fills the mind with some inter
pretative image of the agency at work — much as
the sound of a footfall evokes the image of a
pedestrian; or as any sound suggests an idea of
its source and meaning " (p. 287).
Is not this final? Certainly, that "image of a
pedestrian " is not a communicated image.!
We have now reached this result : the suggested
inference of "approximately literal truth" from
"communicated mental construction" is an impos
sible inference — impossible because mental construc
tions are not communicated.
Let us, then, see in what terms Father Tyrrell
describes the information those constructions convey.
We will go back to the thought that God is revealed
in religious experience " as a cause is revealed in its
effect " (p. 287). The mental construction is an effect
of God's " impression " in the soul. Now, as the
construction itself is not communicated by God, the
marks of His operation must be seen, if anywhere, in
the kind of construction He evokes, and in the differ
ence between the images and conceptions chosen for
the construction and those that are not chosen.
You will remember that the impression of God is
said to be an impression not only in the mind, but
also in the heart and will. It is, then, in part, an
^ See Appended Notes, p. 206.

' REVELATION ' 8i
ethical impression. Now, we may not suppose that
the divine operation which impresses the heart and
will does not also impress the mind. There are not
two kinds of divine operation — one making an im
pression that is wholly affective and volitional, the
other an impression that is wholly mental. There is
but one kind of operation — one kind, with divers
effects in the different but inseparable parts of man's
unitary nature. God " suddenly draws near to the
soul and fills her with Himself to overflowing, flood
ing each spiritual faculty with His own Spirit"
(p. 287). " The same shock which gives fire to the
heart and impulse to the will, fills the mind with some
interpretative image of the agency at work " (p. 287).
If, then, the impression of God in the heart and will
be an ethical impression, one might not unreasonably
surmise that it will leave some ethical mark in the
mind. One might surmise, for instance, that the
mental construction it evokes will at least indicate in
some way the direction and character of ethical pro
gress. And you will remember that in The Rights
and Limits of Theology such an effect upon the mental
construction is conspicuous. Because of such an
effect, the mental construction is there said to be a
"shadow" — enigmatically veridical — of the super
natural world (p. 219).
According to that Essay, revelational experience is
wholly ethical — is experience of a new life — and the
mental constructions directly represent, not the super
natural world, but that "affective and volitional"
6

82 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
experience. They do indeed represent the supernatural
world, but they represent it indirectly — through their
representation of its self-disclosure in an ethical ex
perience. They enigmatically indicate the ethical
nature of the supernatural world, and in that indica
tion we have the mental result of the divine impres
sion in the heart and will.
In this later Essay, Revelation, Father Tyrrell tells
us, however, that the "mental element" in religious
experience does not represent the other elements
(pp. 283, 284). It and they together, we are told,
"correspond to and so far 'represent' the hidden
causes of the total experience " (p. 284). The mental
construction is not caused by the " affective and
volitional" experiences: it and they are co-ordinate
effects. We find, it is true, certain passages that seem in
consistent with this interpretation of the Essay, but
their inconsistency is, I think, not more than apparent.
(a) In one passage we are told that theologians
should ask : " What are the experiences expressed in
revealed utterances . . .?" Another passage implies
that from the recorded mental element in a revela
tional experience the theologian "can, to some
extent, reconstruct the whole of that experience"
(p. 284).
Now, one might hastily suppose that such a recon
struction of experience would proceed by argument
from effect to cause. Clearly, such reconstruction
would involve a discovery of unrecorded "affective

' REVELATION ' 83
and volitional elements," and one might be tempted
to ask : How can the " mental element " be a clue to
the " affective and volitional elements " if it were not
originally an effect of these?
The argument from effect to cause is, however, not
the only method of reconstruction. There is another
method — the method — namely, by argument from one
effect to another through their common cause. If the
" mental element " and the " affective and volitional
elements " have a common cause, it seems possible to
infer from the "mental element" somewhat of the
nature of that cause, and from the nature thus ascer
tained to infer an "affective and volitional" effect.
(b) On page 283 we are told that "the impulse and
sentiment of Conscience entail a complementary im
pression on the mind which is part and parcel of the
same experience."
Is the " mental element" in this case an effect of
the other elements? I think not. The word "en
tail " is not quite clear, but " entail " is not " cause,"
and "complementary" is not "resultant."
It seems not unreasonable to suggest that "the
impulse and sentiment of Conscience " cannot exist
without being present in consciousness, present in
knowledge, and that this presence is the "comple
mentary impression " — an impression concomitant
with the " affective and volitional " impression, but
not produced by it.
Or, again, one could suggest that — because the
human spirit is essentially an unitary spirit, and not

84 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
a group of actually separate faculties, — an impression
in it will, in some way or other, affect every part of it,
and will be seen in some characteristic form in heart
and mind and will alike.
Father Tyrrell himself suggests this. Every
" movement of the Spirit's life means," he tells us,
"an adjustment of the whole spirit — mind, heart, and
will, — for all play their part in every such movement "
(p. 287). Revelation is said to be "one of the ele
ments of a complex spiritual experience — an experi
ence made up of feelings and impulses and imagin
ings; which reverberates in every corner of the soul
and leaves its impress everywhere; in the mind no
less than in the heart and will " (p. 282).
The words last quoted form part of the very sen
tence in which Father Tyrrell speaks of the "com
plementary impression " entailed by the " impulse
and sentiment of Conscience," and they seem to indi
cate clearly in' what way Father Tyrrell supposes that
impression to be made. It is made, not by the ethical
impulse and sentiment, but by a movement of the
Spirit, which gives us (on the one hand) our ethical
experience, and (on the other) a mental impression
simultaneous therewith and inseparably concomitant
therewith. In these several passages, then, there is nothing in
consistent with the doctrine that the mental construc
tion in Religion — the mental elements in Revelation
— are not an effect of ethical experience, of the
" affective and volitional elements " in Revelation.

' REVELATION ' 85
Let us make yet another attempt to understand
the " mental element," the " impression on the
mind." (a) Because the human spirit is a self-conscious
spirit, it is aware of its own experience. The "affect
ive and volitional elements " in experience cannot
exist without being known, and I have already
made the suggestion that our knowledge of those
elements is the " mental element " in revelational
experience. Were the " impression on the mind " nothing more
than such a knowledge, the mental construction
would represent primarily the known "affective and
volitional " experience, but this, according to the
doctrine of Revelation, is just what it does not
do. (b) May it not be that the " impression on the
mind " is made through Conscience?
You will remember with what lofty eloquence New
man describes the discovery, through Conscience, of
a Sovereign Law-giver and Judge. Is Father Tyrrell
thinking of that discovery ?
I have already quoted a passage wherein he tells
us that, " prior to any intention of explaining " their
moral experience, — " the phenomenon of Moral Con-
science," — " men speak of Conscience as a voice, as
something locally inside them, in their breast, their
heart, their brain, — something that whispers to them
and says, ' Stop ! ' or as the voice of God or of the
Holy Spirit, or of some Guardian Angel, or daimo-

86 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
nion, or of the indwelling Christ, or of their own
Better Self" (p. 280).
Father Tyrrell describes this way of speaking as
an "apprehension." Have we here fhe equivalent
of Newman's vision ? One is inclined to say No,
The designations are so widely different that they
suggest the interpretation of some inner experience
rather than the description of something, as it were,
seen. And this suggestion is, to some extent, con-
firmed when we notice that Father Tyrrell, although
he describes this way of speaking as an " apprehen
sion," calls it an imaginative apprehension. The
most this passage enables us to say with certainty is
that, in moral experience, something is present, some
thing which men describe variously, not (as Father
Tyrrell points out) in "concepts," but in "images
and figures " (p. 280).
In another passage, however (p. 277), Father Tyr
rell tells us that, "as Newman rightly saw," Con
science " is revelation." " By an act of eager recog
nition " it " leaps forward at times to grasp its own,
and to lift the assent of reason to the level of a Faith
that can afford to dispense with reason's suffrage. ' I
have found Him whom my soul loveth. I will hold
Him and will not let Him go ' " (p. 277).
Is this another way of saying what Newman said?
It seems to be, and yet, according to this Essay, the
mental constructions of religion are not predominantly
or distinctively ethical. One does not hear any echo
of Newman's solemn organ-tones. True, every man

' REVELATION ' 87
is not a Newman, but, had one shared Newman's
vision, the august Reality revealed would have domi
nated every argument and every illustration.!
This inquiry into the nature of the " mental ele
ment," of the " impression on the mind," has been
incidental to an attempt to discover what kind of in
formation the mental constructions in religion give.
God is said to be revealed in revelational experience,
and, therefore, in and through the mental construc
tions which are part of that experience, — revealed
therein " as a cause is revealed in its effect." But
what do we thus learn ? Through what kind of truth
is God thus revealed ?
In this Essay Father Tyrrell tells us very little.
We read of "a sense of the superhuman world
issuing in, or inspiring, an imaginative construction
of the same " (p. 270). The " first effort of religious
imagination," we are told, is "to people and fur
nish " the " Beyond," to " interpret the limitless Un
known in terms of that infinitesimal fraction of the
Whole which falls under man's clear knowledge —
magnifying, eliminating, adapting according to the
measure of his cultivation " (p. 272). Even " among
the earliest types of humanity " there are " revelations
in the true sense ; picturings of the other world given
1- It seems not improbable that Father Tyrrell is here describ
ing some form of pragmatic assent — an assent wherein the
human spirit, moved by some experience of "serviceableness,"
leaps beyond the cautious demonstrations of its theoretical
reason, and affirms as true what it has known to be useful.

88 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
by, in, and along with religious experience, though
expressed with all the crudeness of those uncultured
minds from which they spontaneously spring, and to
whose compeers they are addressed " (p. 278). Reve
lation, says Father Tyrrell, "spontaneously clothes
itself in whatever language it finds to its hand," and
that language is said to be used, not for its " proper,"
but for its "illustrative" and "symbolic" value
(p. 278).! Man's description of "the phenomenon of
Moral Conscience " is described as an " imaginative
apprehension," a " dramatic symbolism " (p. 200).
The apostolic revelation is said to be " the imaginative
impress which Christ made on the mentality of an age
that had known and seen and touched Him " (p. 291).
According to Father Tyrrell, the mental element in
religious experience is, to the rest of that experience,
"as those strange images of the nature and cause of
a pain are to the pain which they so often accompany
and which are so unlike its rational explanation."
Those images " are suggested and impressed upon the
sufferer's imagination by the pain itself " (pp. 285, 286).
The Divine impression, we are told, "fills the mind
with some interpretative image of the agency at work
— much as the sound of a footfall evokes the image of
a pedestrian;" or as a thunderstorm evokes in a
savage mind "the image of the angry storm-god;"

1 The theological terms in which revelation incidentally
expresses itself are, says Father Tyrrell, used "not for their
proper and theological values, but for their illustrative and
symbolic values" (p. 279).

' REVELATION ' 89
or "as any sound suggests an idea of its source and
meaning" (p. 287). Revelation, which is described
as "the natural self-expression of a divine afflatus,"
is likened to " the record of itself made by a passing
hurricane in the wrack and ruin which it leaves in its
wake " (pp. 296, 297). We read of a " translation of
inward vision into outward language and symbolism,"
and are told that such translation can never be " ex
haustive " or "adequate," but is "at most suggest
ive " (p. 303).
What is the value of such " imaginative," "sym
bolic," "illustrative" constructions? What use can
one make of them ?
You will remember that, in this Essay, Father Tyr
rell describes the revelation of God as subsisting in
"the total experience" — not in the "mental ele
ment " alone, not in the " affective and volitional ele
ments " alone. That "total experience" becomes
" the subject-matter of a subsequent act of reflection
which strives " to understand it, in the interests of
" theology " or " philosophy " (p, 283). The " sub
ject-matter," you will notice, is "the total experi
ence," but whereas the "affective and volitional ele
ments " in that experience are evanescent, the
" mental or imaginative element," the mental con
struction, "abides" — in memory, in tradition, in
written records — and it is with this abiding' element
that the theologian is ordinarily most concerned. He
takes it, however, — so we are told — not as a "theo
logical statement," but as a "spiritual phenomenon"

90 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
(p. 298); not as a proposition from which something
is to be inferred, but as an experience to be explained,
an event to be understood. For him, even "prophetic
visions" are, in the first place, not "statement," but
"psychological experiences" (p. 303)— happenings,
not doctrines.!
The theologian, then, takes the mental construction
as a "given" or "presented" fact, and from it he
endeavours to " reconstruct " the " total experience "
— that " whole complex experience " which constitutes
the explicandum of his thought. "Viewing that
total experience as an effect, he then endeavours to
divine the nature of its causes and to draw certain
theological and metaphysical conclusions " ^ (p, 284).
Here, then, we have one use of the mental construc
tion. The images " suggested and impressed " upon
a sufferer's imagination are often "strange" and
"curious," but they are "safe and serviceable as a
guide to diagnosis" (p. 285). No one would accept
the savage's mythological description of a thunder
storm "as possessing the slightest scientific or ex
planatory value," yet " one could gather from it what
had really happened just as well as from the savant's
soberer and less pictorial statement " (p. 288). The
1 Cp. p. 289 :—
"Theology must take prophecy not as statement but as
experience ; . . . and use it as factual not as verbal evidence
for its conceptual constructions of the supernatural order."
2 Cp. p. 298 :—
" Similarly the theologian should ask. What are the experi
ences expressed in revealed utterances, and what do those
experiences signify for theology?"

' REVELATION ' 91
savage's description is " valuable as a record, not as
an explanation, of experience."
" From the impression made on that simple
mind we can divine what really happened ; as we
so often do from the accounts that children give
us of what has befallen them. If they have seen
an animal with a tail at each end, we know it is
an elephant " (p. 288).
The apostolic revelation, we read, is one element of
a ' ' great collective religious experience, ' ' for it is
"the vestige, the imaginative impress which Christ
made on the mentality of an age that had known and
seen and touched Him," and from that unforgotten
.element in that great original experience "we can
judge of the nature of the other elements " (p. 291).
This, then, is one use of the mental constructions.
From the mental constructions which have survived
the other elements in a revelational experience we
can, "to some extent," reconstruct the total original
experience. And when that reconstruction is made
we have accomplished — what? We have brought
ourselves to the commencement of theological prob
lems, for we have then to ask : What does that ex
perience signify for theology ?
The mental constructions in religion are, however,
more than material for scientific theology.
In the opening passages of this Essay Father

92 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Tyrrell notices that the word " revelation " is " used
primarily to denote an experience, and derivatively to
denote the /record or expression by which that experi
ence is retained and communicated to others."
" For us the Revelation of St. John is but the
record of an experience ; for him it was an experi
ence. St. Stephen saw the heavens opened; we
are but told that he saw them opened. To him
they were revealed, to us it is only revealed that
they were revealed" (p. 268).
Towards the end of the Essay we are told that the
"end" of all communication of "revelational" ex
perience to others " must be in some measure to evoke
the same spiritual phenomenon " in them, " to bring
them to a like relation to the Eternal " (p. 303). " The
experience of the prophet" must become "experi
ence " for his hearers (p. 305).
Now, whatever else it be, the record of a revelation
is a reproduction in narrative form of the "mental
element" in that revelation — is the reproduction of a
revelational " impression on the mind." In the re
corded " mental element " there seems to be a quality
which enables it to evoke, or to share in evoking, an
experience like to the experience in which that
" mental element " was originally integral — to evoke,
if I rightly understand Father Tyrrell's account, not
merely a mental construction like unto itself, but a
"massive spiritual experience" (p. 294), which in
cludes (besides that similar mental construction) " af-

' REVELATION ' 93
fective and volitional elements " like unto those with
which the recorded construction was originally
associated. This missionary utility of the remembered or re
corded mental construction seems closely connected
with its scientific utility. The former utility depends
on a quality which enables that perduring mental con
struction to evoke, or to share in evoking, a new
present experience like unto the original revelational
experience : the latter utility depends on a quality
which makes that construction a clue to its vanished
"affective and volitional " co-efficients. Qualities so
similar must, one would think, be very closely
connected. We have seen that, according to The Rights and
Limits of Theology, the mental constructions in re
ligion have religious value primarily in virtue of their
objective reference — because they enigmatically set
forth the" ethical nature of Reality. According to
Father Tyrrell's later Essay, however, those construc
tions have religious value primarily in virtue of their
subjective efficiency — because they can evoke, or can
share in evoking, a certain experience.!
This difference between the two Essays seems to be
the result of another difference.
1 This, as we shall see, helps us to understand certain important
modern conceptions, viz. the conception of "facts for faith"
and the conception that Christian experience, or the Christian
consciousness, constitutes a sufficient foundation for Christian
dogma.

94 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
In the later Essay, as we shall presently see. Father
Tyrrell's Mysticism is conspicuous : in the earlier it
is almost imperceptible, except in thQ doctrine of the
Divine Immanence.
Now, for the mystic. Revelation is always an inner
light — a revelation in what is ordinarily called sub
jective experience. His distinctive experience is his
religion. For him " religious value " must neces
sarily denote power to evoke, or to contribute to, that
experience — it cannot denote anything else. There
fore, in Father Tyrrell's more plainly mystical Essay,
it is precisely this kind of religious value that we find
most prominent.
It were, however, wrong to infer that, according to
this Essay on Revelation, the mental constructions
have no objective reference.
For instance. Conscience is said to give an " appre
hension " which, although set forth in "dramatic
symbolism," " possesses a most evident working
truth" and, therefore, "some kind" of "meta
physical and representative truth " (p. 280). " The
normal and universal experiences of the moral and
mystical life embody themselves," we are told, "in
images which constitute a revelation of God and the
other world" (p. 281). The "image" with which,
in revelational experience, God "fills the mind" is
described as an " interpretative image of the agency
at work " (p. 287).
This objective reference, indeed, is the necessary

' REVELATION ' 95
corollary of Father Tyrrell's doctrine that the " mental
element" in revelational experience represents, not
the other elements in that experience, but " the hidden
causes of the total experience " (p. 284). In that
"total experience" God is revealed, we are told,
"as a cause is revealed in its effect" (p. 287).
Clearly, an effect which reveals its cause must have
" objective reference " to that cause.
This objective reference is plainly apparent in
Father Tyrrell's account of " prophetic truth."
That truth shows us " the world and history sub
specie ceternitatis " (p. 302). The prophet, we are
told, " sees and expresses the religious meaning of the
world and life " (p. 302). He
"reaches back to the Alpha and forward to the
Omega, and gives us a ' statical ' and foreshort
ened presentment of the whole process, making
Past and Future meet in the Present; letting the
latent and struggling ideal shine like its aura
through the actual and earthly reality. His is a
work of interpretation; of getting at the more
inward and deeper truth through the husk of the
phenomenal and relative. His reading of past his
tory is as little historical as his reading of future
history; whether he looks back to the creation or
forward to the Messianic consummation, in both
cases he sees fact indeed, but fact transfigured and
rearranged so as to bring out the underlying

96 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
meaning of the whole process. And the like may
be said of the prophet's philosophy or science " !
(p. 302).
To " deny all historical or philosophical content to
prophetic vision is to misapprehend its character as a
supernatural interpretation or view of the world and
of history ; yet to regard it as historical or philosoph
ical statement, and to use such supposed statements as
the basis of argument, is equally to confound together
things so generically different as experience and re
flection on experience" (pp. 302, 303).
What, then, is the value of "prophetic truth"?
Revelation, says Father Tyrrell, " is a showing on
the part of God, a seeing on the part of the receiver.
Prophecy is but the communication of this vision to
others " (p. 289).
Now, vision is more than an inner experience : it is
the perception of something " objectively present," as
we say. If, then, Revelation be actually (and not
figuratively) a vision, it must have some " objective "
reference — reference, that is, to some reality or reali
ties which are other than the human spirit, and (as we
ordinarily say) are "external" to it.
Does not this argument, however, carry us beyond
the warrant of Father Tyrrell's doctrine — of the doc-
1 His work is said to be like that of the poet or dramatist
who "manipulates history and philosophy in the interests of
a higher ideal, that finds but an imperfect expression in the
actual " (p. 302).

' REVELATION ' 97
trine of this Essay? What we have thus far dis
covered of that doctrine suggests that, in Father Tyr
rell's opinion. Revelation is not vision, but experi
ence. It is, indeed, a divine impulse and impression,
but the conceptions that seem to be given are not
given, the mental constructions that seem to be per
ceived are not perceived.
According to Father Tyrrell, what we ordinarily
call revealed truth is neither communicated nor beheld,
but evoked. It is not something seen or received by
us : it is the natural reaction of our minds to the
"shock" of the divine impression. It is, indeed,
said to be an integral part of revelational experience,
but it is the human element in, the human aspect of,
the human contribution to that experience, and only
because it comes without the effort of deliberation does
it seem to be given.
"Vision" suggests "perception," but in revela
tional experience the divine impression is felt, not
perceived, and the "mental element" in Revelation
is merely a mental reaction to that felt impression.
That reaction is a psychological happening, but not a
perceptual happening : it is an effect of the super
natural world, but not a vision of that world. If
prophecy be a communication, it must (one is led to
think) be the communication of an inner experience,
not of something "objectively " revealed.
If, however, we seemed (a few minutes ago) to
overstate the doctrine of Revelation, we now seem
to have understated it, for in more than one passage
7

98 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
in that Essay "objective reference" is unmistak
able.
What, then, is the nature of that reference ?
You will remember that, in the revelational experi
ence described in The Rights and Limits of Theology,
we discovered two "objective" elements: —
(i) A casual reference! to the " other world."
(2) An ethical characterization of that world —
a characterization given in and through the dis
covery of the " ought- world."
In Revelation we have (I think) only the former of
these elements. Revelational experience is plainly
said to be a caused experience : it is not said to dis
close an "objective" moral order.
It may be suggested that the later Essay, of course,
presumes the doctrine of the earlier. I see no ground
for the " of course." We know that Father Tyrrell's
thought was not stationary while he was writing the
Essays now published together. We know, too, that
Father Tyrrell changed his mind on at least one point
— and that a most important point — after he had
written The Rights and Limits of Theology.^ It is not
antecedently incredible that Revelation presupposes
the doctrine of the earlier Essay, but the onus pro-
bandi is on those who assert the presupposition.
Certainly, the differences between the two Essays
i See Appended Notes, p. 207.
2 See pp. 116-119 of this Letter.

' REVELATION ' 99
are conspicuous and important. One we have already
noticed : — in each Essay there is a causal reference
to the " other world," but the alleged discovery of the
"ought-world" appears only in the earlier. This
difference is (I think) connected with another —
with the fact that, whereas the argument of the earlier
Essay starts from a certain conception of Revelation,!
the argument of the later Essay starts (as we have
seen) from a certain conception of religion. The earlier
argument starts from the conception that revelational
experience is characteristically an ethical experience,
" a new sort of life " : the later starts from the con
ception that religion is " the sense of, and converse
with, superhuman beings." Now, the former con
ception prepared the way for the thought that the
" new sort of life " wherein Revelation subsists is a
discovery of the " ought- world." The latter concep
tion, however, finds its natural complement in the
thought that religious experience is "the sense of
the superhuman world ^ issuing in, or inspiring, an
imaginative construction of the same " (p. 270).
^- " It may here be assumed that the divine which is imma
nent in man's spirit does naturally and inevitably . . . reveal
itself to him as a vita nuova, a new sort of life, the life of
religion . . ." (p. 205).-
* This "sense of the superhuman world" seems to corre
spond to the "sense of the Whole" mentioned in another
Essay (p. 161), and connects the account of religion given in
Revelation with Father Tyrrell's characteristic doctrine that
man's "mystical" life is (in some sufficient sense) an appre
hension of and movement towards the "Whole."
(See pp. 162-173 of this Letter.)

loo FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Because the revelational experience of The Rights
and Limits of Theology is the discovery of the
"ought-world," the truth of prophecy (according to
that Essay) is the truth of that discovery — the truth
of a certain ethical rule and a certain ethical charac
terization of Reality. Because the religious experi
ence of Revelation is what we have just seen it to be,!
the truth of prophecy (according to that later Essay)
can be merely the truth of the causal reference to the
" supernatural world."
But, you will ask, has the religious experience de
scribed in Revelation no ethical content ? Undoubt
edly it has an ethical content. The " shock " of Reve
lation, we are told, "reverberates in every corner of
the soul, and leaves its impress everywhere " (p. 282),
in the conscience no less than in the mind and will,
and its impress in the conscience is (we may suppose)
an authoritative precept or rule of life. Now, such
a precept or rule was (you will remember) one element
in the revelational experience described in The Rights
and Limits of Theology. That experience, however,
contained (as we saw) another and yet more important
element. It contained an ethical characterization of
Reality— a discovery of the "ought-world." This
other element is absent from the religious experience
described in Revelation.^
According to Revelation, then, our religious ex-
1 See passage quoted— on p. 99 of this Letter— from p. 270.
2 See Appended Notes, p. 207.

' REVELATION ' loi
perience does not include the discovery of an " ob
jective " "ought-world" — of an "objective" moral
order. That experience is, indeed, said to disclose
the supernatural world, but apparently it discloses
"that world merely as the supernatural cause of our
experience, and not as the "ought-world." Our re
ligious experience is undoubtedly an ethical experi
ence, but, as such, it ends in an ideal and a rule of life
— not in a characterization of Reality.
When, then, the "prophet" sets forth his inter
pretation of the world and of life, what is it that he
really proffers ? An interpretation governed by a
human ideal.
" . . .as the poet or dramatist manipulates
history and philosophy in the interests of a higher
ideal, that finds but an imperfect expression in
the actual ; or as the artist corrects ' the trembling
hand of Nature ' and gives forth in its purity the
thought she stumbles over; so the prophet sees
and expresses the religious meaning of the world
and life " (p. 302).
Precisely, poet and dramatist, artist and prophet
severally re-present experience so as to illustrate some
human ideal. In the case of the prophet that ideal is
an ethical ideal — a conception of what ought to be ! —
and the truth of his prophetic interpretation is the
! Cp. pp. 144-153 of this Letter, and Father Tyrrell's Essay
entitled Prophetic History.

I02 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
truth of that ideal, but the truth of that ideal is pre
sumed, not known.^ According to The Rights and
Limits of Theology the ground of prophetic inter
pretation is in an " objective " moral order disclosed
in revelational experience. According to Revelation
that ground is in a human thought — in a thought that
immediately illuminates only the tendencies and possi
bilities of human life, and not the objective environ
ment of that life .2
What is the value of such an interpretation ? Quite
consistently with the ' ' subjective ' ' nature of prophetic
truth, the value of that truth is in its "subjective
efficiency." The primary end of prophecy is not to
give us a certain apprehension of Reality — is not to
furnish a certain construction of the world — but to
communicate an experience, to make the experience of
the prophet the experience of his hearers (p. 305).
"The governing end of prophecy," we are told, "is
the practical interests of the religious life" (p. 302).
Now, " the practical interests of the religious life," as
of every other normal kind of life, are those indicated
by the words ' ' self-maintenance ' ' and ' ' develop
ment." The governing end of prophecy is to foster
^ See Appended Notes, p. 207.
2 It follows from this that the "religious meaning" ex
pressed by the prophet is not a meaning discovered by him
in the "world and life," but a meaning which he has read
into the "world and life." That meaning is derived from a
thought of what human life ought to be. But who shall say
that our ideals are "objectively" valid — that the "order of
things" is actually what our ideals would persuade us that
it is?

' REVELATION ' 103
the religious life. If it succeed in this its work is
accomplished. We are, it is true, told also that pro
phecy has " to give a construction of the other world
and of this world in relation to the other " (p. 302).
Seemingly, however, it has to give that construction
merely in "the practical interests of the religious
life," and, if it give a construction which does in fact
foster that life, then — whether that construction be
factually true or false — its work is accomplished, its
" governing end " achieved. The " prophetic truth "
of any proffered construction is not in its factual repre
sentation of the world and of history, but in its
serviceableness .!
I can surmise what you will say to this concep
tion of revealed truth, but it undoubtedly helps
Father Tyrrell to make a very broad distinction
between —
(i) Revelation and prophecy.
And (2) the several forms of philosophy and
science.
On the one hand. Revelation is experience, pro
phecy is the communication of experience, prophetic
interpretation is an interpretation governed by an
ideal which forms part of that experience.^
On the other hand, neither philosophy nor science
is experience. Each is a reflective re-presentation of
experience. 1 See Appended Notes, p. 208. ' Ibid., p. 208.

I04 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
' ' If, then, to deny all historical or philosophical
content to prophetic vision is to misapprehend its
character as a supernatural interpretation or view
of the world and history; yet to regard it as
historical or philosophical statement, and to use
such supposed statements as the basis of argu
ment, is equally to confound together things so
generically different as experience and reflection
on experience " ! (p. 303).
This, then, is the broad contrast to which, in this
Essay, Father Tyrrell leads us : — the contrast between
"experience" and "reflection on experience."
According to Father Tyrrell, Revelation is on one
side of this contrast, and science on the other. Reve
lation is related to Science as is a given subject-
matter to the thought which reflects upon it and tries
to explain it.
Now, if this contrast be accepted, it opens the way
to certain very important inferences: —
(a) To the inference that we cannot draw theo
logical inferences from the language of Revela
tion. (b) To the inference that Revelation should
control Science, not as one doctrine controls
another, but merely as a thing to be explained
controls the explanation .2
i See Appended Notes, p. 208.
^ Cp. p. II of this Letter.
The thought that Revelation is a "subject-matter" is to

' REVELATION ' 105
We can best approach these inferences from
Father Tyrrell's account of the difference between
Revelation and Theology.
Revelational experience, we are told, is the " sub
ject-matter " of theology. Its " given " mental con
structions are part of that "complex experience" — ¦
of "that concrete ' presented ' reality " (p. 283) — which
is the subject-matter of theological reflection. They
are an "element" — the "mental element" — of the
experience "to be explained and digested " (p. 283).
In other words, revelational experience is the expli
candum of theology, and controls theology " as a
science is controlled by its subject-matter" (p. 201).
" From this it follows that we must not regard
Revelation and Theology as two sorts of ' repre
sentative ' knowledge dealing with the same
theme or subject-matter, the one treating it prac
tically and imaginatively, the other conceptically
and scientifically! (p. 283).

be found also in The Rights and Limits of Theology (see p.
231)- In that Essay, however, Father Tyrrell does not draw the
obvious inference mentioned in the passage to which this note
is appended.
1 Revelation, we are told, is simply the theologian's subject-
matter, "the experience on which his science is founded,
and which it endeavours to understand and explain. It is
not a co-ordinate system of knowledge related to the same
subject-matter, and treating it merely in another way (i. e.
imaginatively rather than conceptually, less rather than more
accurately) " (p. 284).

io6 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Revelation, we may say, has no subject-matter. It
is not a deliberate activity of reflective thought, but
is something "given" or "presented." It is more
or less passively received,! and is itself the subject-
matter of theology.
According to Father Tyrrell, there are two kinds of
knowledge — one given immediately in experience, the
other reached by " reflection on experience " (p. 282).
The one is presentative; the other representative.
Revelation, we are told, is knowledge of the former
kind : theology is knowledge of the latter kind.
Revelation, then, is not an imaginative or poetical
representation which Theology has to translate into
sober prose (p. 283). Its mental constructions are
not "loose metaphors" (p. 283), which have to be
translated into "exact concepts" (p. 283). Revela
tion is experience, and theology is an interpretation
of experience. The two are on different planes, and
belong to different orders of Knowledge.
You will say, " This seems harmless. I am quite
willing to accept a theology controlled, for example,
by the revealed doctrine that Christ is God Incar
nate." Undoubtedly you are, but this willingness
does not bring you into line with Father Tyrrell.
When you say that you are willing to accept a
theology controlled by the revealed doctrine that
Christ is God Incarnate, you mean, " I can accept a
theology which would reject everything logically in
consistent with the doctrine of the Incarnation."
^ See pp. 68 and 69 of this Letter.

' REVELATION ' 107
Were Father Tyrrell to adopt your words, he would
mean, not what you mean, but this, — " I can accept a
theology that would reject everything logically incon
sistent with the factual reality of that revelational
experience wherein the belief that God became Incar
nate was integral."
You are thinking of a theology controlled by reve
lation as statement is controlled by statement. Father
Tyrrell points us to a theology controlled by revela
tion as statement is controlled by fact.!
Theology, we are told, uses " revealed utterance,"
not as "theological statement" but as "spiritual
phenomenon " (p. 298), as " psychological experi
ence " (p. 303), as "experience," not "statement."
In other words, revealed utterances are not a doctrine
from which inferences can be drawn as they can be,
for instance, from the scientific doctrine of the Con
servation of Energy. They are merely psychological
facts — something that has happened in a human mind
and has to be explained. Revelation, it is true,
seems to be a doctrine because it is incidentally ex
pressed in theological terms,^ but this seeming is a
misleading one. These terms "are not the expres-
1 See p. 12.
3 " Revelation spontaneously clothes itself in whatever lan
guage it finds to its hand; and where the mind of the prophet
is already largely instructed with theological categories and
conceptions, these will largely mingle with and govern the
images in which his vision seeks to embody itself. Thus,
without being theology, revelation may be couched in theo
logical terms, which it uses not for their proper and theological
values, but for their illustrative and symbolic values " (p. 279).

io8 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
sion of theological effort and thought, but of a
massive spiritual experience" (p. 294). They are
" used for their illustrative, not for their theological
value," and "their theological value is in no wise
divinely authorized by such illustrative use " ! (p. 294).
You would argue thus : St. John tells us that the
Word was God, and " became flesh " in the Person
of our Lord. Therefore, Socinianism is untrue."
Father Tyrrell would reply that the Logos-lehre of
St. John expressed the reaction of his mind to a
certain religious experience (pp. 289, 290), that its
truth is "prophetic," not literal, and may not pro
perly be made a starting-point for theological experi
ence ^ (p, 289),
He would add that it is precisely by doing what I
have supposed you to do — " by taking the language
of revelation according to its theological values, and
making it a divinely authorized basis for deduction "
(pp. 293, 294) — that men have created the "hybrid
system," the "pseudo-science," of Theologism.
We may not, however, exaggerate Father Tyrrell's
negation. He does not mean that inference from
1 Cp. p. 289 :—
"Thus, without being theology, revelation may be couched
in theological terms, which it uses not for their proper and
theological value, but for their illustrative and symbolic
values." 8 Cp. p. 289 :—
"'Prophetic' truth cannot be used, as statements can be
used from which we can deduce other statements."

' REVELATION ' 109
Revelation is impossible. A "revealed utterance"
is undoubtedly a fact, and from every fact some infer
ence is possible — if only the inference that it has
a cause. And it is quite clear that Father Tyrrell
himself, even in his strictest moods, would make in
ferences from Revelation. Revelation, he tells us,
is the subject-matter of Theology — the given experi
ence which the science of Theology has to explain.
What is a scientific explanation if it be not
inference ?
It is, however, equally clear that Father Tyrrell
would exclude some kinds of inference. He tells us,
in effect, that we may not draw theological inferences
from the terms and propositions in which Revelation
is expressed — that is, from "revealed utterances"
and prophetic language. Why not? Clearly, it
can only be because those terms and propositions
have no theological meaning.!
Recall the account given by Father Tyrrell, in this
Essay, of man's revelational experience. The mental
constructions — the terms and propositions — of Reve
lation are merely psychological happenings, effects.
The supernatural world is, indeed, revealed by them,
not "by way of similitude or likeness," or as a
subject is revealed by its predicate (p. 284), but
merely as a cause is revealed by its effect.
According to Father Tyrrell's doctrine in this
^ If they had, theological inference from them would be
possible.

no FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Essay, two inferences and (I think) only two, can
properly be drawn from a " revealed utterance " : —
(i) Because that utterance is an event,_ it must
have had a cause.
(2) Because that event has such and such a
character, there must be something in its cause
competent to produce that character.
These inferences bring us face to face with the
characteristic questions of theological science : — What
produced the given utterance ? What light is thrown
on the general order of things by the fact that such
an utterance has, in fact, been evoked ? !
Let us take an illustration. In the first verse of
the Fourth Gospel we have this clear statement : " The
Word was God." If this be a " revealed utterance,"
then — according to Father Tyrrell — it has not prim
arily a theological value, it does not define Reality as
a subject is defined by its predicate. It was merely
a mental " reaction " to some revelational impres
sion — the reaction of a mind "stocked" with a cer
tain Logos-lehre of purely human origin — and
(according to Father Tyrrell) it can be properly used
by the theologian to-day only for the preliminary work
1 The theologian, we are told, views revelational experience
"as an effect," and "endeavours to divine the nature of its
causes and to draw certain theological and metaphysical con
clusions " (p. 284). This conception of the theologian's work
is implied in the thought that Revelation is the "subject-
matter " of Theology.

'REVELATION' iii
of reconstructing that original " massive " experience
in which it was the " mental element." When that
experience has been reconstructed, the theologian has
to ask : What brought it about ? He seeks to infer
the character of the supernatural world from its effects
in experience, and you will notice that his inference
starts, not from a doctrinal proposition, but from a
statement of experience.
Theology does not, or should not, argue in this
manner : —
The Word was God.
Therefore, the supernatural world has such
and such a character.
It argues, or should argue, in this manner : —
The author of the Fourth Gospel had a certain
revelational experience which he expressed in the
statement — "The Word was God."
The existence of that experience points to such
and such a character in its cause (the supernatural
world) .
The first and (according to Father Tyrrell) illegiti
mate argument presumes the speculative truth of a
statement. It starts from doctrinal character. The
second argument does not concern itself with the truth
or falsity of the statement. It takes the statement as a
happening in a human mind — a happening that was

112 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
part of a "massive spiritual experience" which has
to be explained. In other words, it starts from factual
nature, not from doctrinal character.
A " revealed utterance " has significance for The
ology primarily because it is an event, an effect of the
supernatural world, not because it tells us something
or seems to tell us something, not e.g. because it tells
or seems to tell us something about God.!
We may not say : —
" This proposition is true because inferred
from this 'revealed utterance.' "
Rather should we say : —
" This proposition is true because inferred
from the ' massive ' revelational experience
wherein this revealed conception was integral."
Conversely, we may not say : —
" This proposition is untrue because logically
inconsistent with the statement in this ' revealed
utterance.' "
Rather should we say : —
"This proposition is untrue because incon
sistent with the factual reality of the ' massive '
experience wherein this revealed conception was
integral."
I can surmise what you will say to all this, but —
1 See Appended Notes, p. 209.

'REVELATION' 113
once more — it undoubtedly enables Father Tyrrell to
make a very broad distinction between Revelation
and Science.
"Revealed utterances" are characteristically psy
chological facts, not doctrines, and, therefore, they
cannot impose doctrinal fetters upon Science. Reve
lation is experience, and Science is the interpretation
of experience. If we say that Science may not con
tradict Revelation, we ought (according to Father
Tyrrell) to mean nothing more than this — the inter
pretation of experience cannot contradict experience.!
In The Rights and Limits of Theology Revelation
is distinguished from Theology as a higher kind of
truth from a lower. In this later essay the distinction
between them is that between a ' ' subject-matter ' ' and
the science which deals with it. Clearly, the later
distinction sets them more widely apart than did the
earlier. The earlier essay left a conflict between
Religion and Science remotely possible. The later
makes such a conflict quite impossible, for it is clear
that there can never be a real conflict between a
science and its subject-matter, or — if Nature be indeed
a rational whole — between one science and the sub
ject-matter of another.2
According to Father Tyrrell, then. Revelation and
Science are alike free. Science may not set aside the
factual truth of revelational experience : Revelation
! See Appended Notes, p. 209. 2 Ibid., p. 209.
8

114 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
may not fetter Science. So completely, indeed, are
the two separated, that if the plain man naively ask
whether ' ' revealed utterances ' ' be true, his question
is impertinent, and he manifestly ignorant.
Father Tyrrell speaks, indeed, of " prophetic
truth," and clearly deems that truth important. But
"prophetic truth" is not what the plain man calls
truth. The "truth of prophecy" is seen, not in
a correspondence between prophetic constructions
and the actual constitution of the supernatural
world, but in the "subjective efficiency" of those
constructions — in their power to evoke, or share in
evoking, a certain kind of experience. If we inquire
whether — in the plain man's sense — they are true, we
apply an irrelevant standard. So long as they possess.
"subjective efficiency" it matters not whether they
be (in the plain man's sense) true or false.!
You will notice, moreover, that Theology is nof
bound by any presumption that the mental construc
tions of Revelation are, in the ordinary sense, true. It
takes Revelation, not as "statement," but as "psy
chological experience." It does, indeed, or should,
ask — What do revelational experiences signify? But,
if those experiences be taken as experience, not as
' ' statement, ' ' they control interpretation merely as
1 One may repeat the observation that this Essay does not-
contain the admission found in The Rights and Limits of
Theology — the admission, namely, that "prophecy" cannot be
completely indifferent to "historical and scientific truth" (p.
233)-

'REVELATION' nj
an explicandum controls explanation, not as a doc
trine controls inferences.
This control, you will notice, does not presume or
imply that Revelation is literally true — that a
"revealed utterance" is a true theological doctrine.
It is merely the control exercised by the subject-matter
of a science over the science that deals with it (p. 201).
Because Theology is thus controlled by Revelation,
its task will become complete only when it has fur
nished a scientific cosmology consistent with the
full reality of revelational experience (cp, p. 231).
" The full reality " — but what is the reality which is
thus, in a sense, normal for Theology ? It is the
factual reality of an experience, not the truth of a
statement. Theology has merely to explain the occur
rence of revelational experience as a fact — not to show
that revelational experience is, in the plain man's
sense, veridical.
The separation between Revelation and Science is
more complete in this Essay than in The Rights and
Limits of Theology, but the greater completeness of
that separation makes ' ' the truth of prophecy ' ' less
like the plain man's truth than ever.!
^ There is a clear connection between this result and Father
Tyrrell's Mysticism. Throughout this Essay Father Tyrrell's
thought is plainly of the "subjective" kind.

V
the normative revelation
Incongruously enough, as you will doubtless
think, the Essay which has led us to these unfamiliar
conclusions contains Father Tyrrell's one attempt —
at least, his one attempt in Through Scylla and
Charybdis— to take account of the uniqueness of the
Christian revelation.
When revising his earlier Essay on The Rights
and Limits of Theology, he found that he had therein
used the word "Revelation " with too wide a mean
ing — " without any distinction between apostolic
revelation and dogmatic decisions " (p. 201). We
gather — the inference, although startling, is plainly
inevitable — that when he wrote he had not yet dis
covered that " the revelations of those who knew
Christ personally must naturally differ in kind from
later revelations, and be venerated as classical and
normative" (p. 200). Consequently, he had inclined
too much ' ' to solve the riddle at the expense of the
patristic and traditional notion of the deposit of faith
as being a ' form of sound words ' " (p. 200).
Undoubtedly Father Tyrrell's comments upon that
earlier work are just. The Rights and Limits of
116

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 117
Theology sets forth all religions as revelations, and
does not even hint that one revelation is different in
kind from all others. Its author refers, indeed,
expressly to the Christian revelation — even from the
point of view he therein occupies Christianity, because
unmistakably a religion, is certainly a revelation — but
he seems to regard it as part of the general religious
process in human history, not as something essen
tially unique. Now — according to The Rights and
Limits of Theology — the religious process is one
thing; the mental constructions which set it forth are
quite another. The process itself is distinctively a
process of divine self-revelation in and through man's
religious life, and the revelational experiences of that
life undoubtedly bear the "seal of the Spirit." But
that seal is not on the mental constructions, and we
have no hint that the mental constructions of the
Christian religion are privileged Beyond others. It is
clear that the Christian "way of life" has divine
approval ; it is equally clear that the Christian mental
constructions — because not separated from other
mental constructions — "have no direct divine
approval " (cp. p. 210).
Moreover, in that Essay, Revelation is regarded as
continuous. It is the natural and inevitable self-
expression of " the divine which is immanent in man's
spirit " (p. 205), and that self-expression seems to be
thought of as universal and progressive.! Qnce more,
1 Revelation, we read, "is accorded to most men " (p. 207).

ii8 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
the Christian revelation is in no way set apart. There
has been, we read, " a continuous development of the
Christian life and spirit in the Christian people," and
a corresponding " unity and continuity in the varying
symbolism of successive ages by which that life and
spirit is interpreted " (p. 234).
This continuous life — illustrated conspicuously by
the saints and by movements of religious revival, and
clearly a revelational experience — has, to some extent,
counteracted the tendency to theologism (pp. 218-220),
and has left its mark even on the Church's dogmatic
theology. That theology is " the product not merely
of apologetic and theological ingenuity, but also of
the spirit of Christianity struggling to adjust the forms
of the past to the religious needs of the present ' ' !
(p. 222). Our creeds and dogmatic systems "are not
the work of a week of fiats, but of the slow struggling
of the spirit of light with the spirit of darkness in the
heart of man " (p. 226).
Nothing in The Rights and Limits of Theology
suggests an original revelation, " full, perfect, and
sufficient " ; nothing suggests a deposit " once for all
delivered to the saints " ; nothing suggests any distinc-
1 Cp. p. 219 : —
" For the exigencies of this ceaselessly developing life an
unalterable theology would be a strait-waistcoat, a Procrus
tean bed; every day it would become less helpful, and at last
hurtful and fatal. The soul that is alive, and wants to live
and grow, must have a congenial intelligible idea of the world
it would live in, and will therefore either adapt and interpret
the current theologies to suit its requirements, or else break
away from them altogether and make a home for itself."

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 119
tion in kind between the revelational experiences of
the Church's later life and those wherewith she com
menced. The apostolic Gospel and the latest dog
matic development seem to be equally moments in a
continuous divine process.!
Father Tyrrell's own comment upon this line of
argument is so precisely illuminating that I venture
to reproduce it : —
" Also the term ' Revelation ' is here used
sometimes to cover the whole complexus of beliefs
reached through religious experience, without
any distinction between apostolic revelation and
dogmatic decisions, merely protective of that
revelation. If Theology is cut free, and allowed
to develop on its own lines. Revelation is also
conceived, not as strictly developing, but as
growing by accretion through dogmatic deci
sions. This is to allow such decisions far more
than that merely ' protective ' value which tradi
tion assigns to them. It is to treat them not
merely as reasserting, but as amplifying the
Gospel " (p. 201).
Let us now turn to the second of the two Essays
that bear the name Semper Eadem.
In Semper Eadem (I) — an Essay that " caused a
certain flutter in Jesuit dovecotes," and eventually
^ See Appended Notes, p. 210.

120 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
brought to an end its author's connection with " that
sedate periodical," The Month (p. 346) — Father
Tyrrell had, as you will remember, emphatically
rejected "liberal" theology. That rejection certain
' ' ultra-conservative ' ' theologians had ' ' applauded
with both hands " (p. 133), and many, to whom
Father Tyrrell " had previously been anathema,"
wrote to congratulate him " as a returning prodigal "
(p- 133)' When Father Tyrrell explained that he had
not returned, those ' ' to whom moderation and object
ivity are inconceivable" at once inferred that in
Semper Eadem (I) he had really made "a covert attack
on orthodoxy and a defence of ultra-liberalism "
(P- ^33)'
The position, says Father Tyrrell, "was a suffi
ciently embarrassing one," and, "to rectify mis
understandings " (p. 134), he wrote Semper Eadem
(II) — an Essay which was rejected by The Month but
published a year later in The Catholic World.
The greater part of this Essay is taken up with a
comparison between a University Sermon on doctrinal
development, preached by Newman at Oxford in 1848,
and the famous Essay on Development published two
years later.
This comparison Father Tyrrell connects, by a few
introductory pages, with the discussions of Semper
Eadem (I).
Now, in those introductory pages we find, clearly
expressed, what we did not find in The Rights and
Limits of Theology. We find a plain statement : — ¦

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 121
(i) That " the original expression of the
mysteries of faith," in the apostolic "form of
sound words," is "classical, normative, in
spired," because " it alone has been shaped in
face of the realities expressed" (p. 137).
(2) That the preservation of the depositum fidei-
— " not merely of the dead words but of the mean
ing they bore for their first hearers ' ' — is ' ' the
supreme object of the Church's conservative
authority " (p. 137).
(3) That the later presentments of dogma cannot
possibly ' ' swallow up and supersede ' ' the earliest
and original! ^p_ 138),
Is Father Tyrrell, in these words, exhibiting his
own belief or another's? I think his own. The
point, however, is not free from difficulty.
In those introductory pages of Semper Eadem (II)
we have a long paragraph which clearly seems intended
to recapitulate the account of ' ' liberal ' ' theology given
in Semper Eadem (I). Then follows the paragraph
from which I have quoted. Clearly, this latter para
graph describes a theology which is not " liberal."
Is it scholastic, or is it Father Tyrrell's own ?
It is a theology in which the conception of the
"deposit" is fundamental, and this fact, by itself,
1 " For doctrinal development in that sense there is no
room" (p. 138).
" For theological developments of this sort the conception
of the depositum fidei as a record of a by-gone supernatural
experience leaves no place whatever" (p. 137).

122 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
might incline us to think that, as Father Tyrrell has
(in the paragraph immediately preceding) recapi
tulated his earlier account of ' ' liberal ' ' theology, so
(in this paragraph) he recapitulates his account of the
scholastic theology.
Certain parts of this paragraph are, however, quite
inconsistent with that interpretation. We are told
that those to whom was granted the ' ' supernatural
experience " recorded in the depositum fidei could
not communicate that experience " directly to others "
— ' ' they could not open the eyes of others to see what
they saw " (p. 137). A scholastic might have written
thus. But could a scholastic have written any one of
the following passages?
(i) The Apostles could not directly communi
cate to others that supernatural experience wherein
subsisted the apostolic revelation. " They could
only (under divine inspiration) reconstruct the
revealed realities in the rude algebra of con
ventional signs or symbols, by means of which
others, for whom those signs possessed a like
value, might reproduce this reconstruction in
their own minds, and see, not what the Apostles
saw, but the symbol thereof, the expression of
things supernatural and ineffable in terms of
things natural and communicable " (p. 137).
(2) Were the "original expression of the
mysteries of faith " a " mathematical equation,
and not merely a defective presentment of the

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 123
higher in terms of the lower, we might safely
translate it into its equivalents, and not alter
its truth-value; but, as it is, we dare not tamper
with it ; we cannot adjust or correct a representa
tion of what we only know through and in that
representation " (pp. 137, 138),
(3) "All unworthy though even the original
inspired formulations must necessarily be, we
dare not, in the absence of the eternal realities
for which they stand, translate them into higher
categories such as inspiration might have used
had the revelation been deferred to our own day ' '
(p. 139)-
"Rude algebra," "merely a defective present
ment," "all unworthy" — no scholastic could have
written thus, and no informed thinker who intended
to describe the scholastic position could have written
thus. It seems almost certain that the passages I first
quoted — those relating to the normative revelation —
do, in fact, indicate Father Tyrrell's own position.
If this interpretation be correct. Semper Eadem (II)
is clearly in advance — " in a conservative and tradi
tional direction " (p. 200) — of The Right)S and Limits
of Theology.^
Not the least shadow of uncertainty obscures the
^ See Appended Notes, p. 210.

124 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
later and longer Essay entitled Revelation. Therein
Father Tyrrell is unmistakably declaring his own
mind, and therein we find the clearest possible recog
nition that in some way — which we will presently
endeavour to define — the original Christian revelation
is unique. " As the Spirit did not cease with the Apostles,
so neither did revelation and prophecy. But a
peculiar character rightly attaches to that which
was the effect of immediate contact with Christ,
and of the Spirit as it was breathed forth from
his very lips. This has rightly been regarded
as alone classical and normative, as the test by
which all spirits and revelations in the Church
are to be tried. As a fountain cannot rise above
its source, so neither can the waves that circle out
from that central and original disturbance excel
or even equal it in intensity. The revelations of
later ages are to those of the apostolic age as the
studies of followers to the works of a Great
Master" (p. 292).
Nothing, we read, " is more vital to Catholicism
than the criterion of Apostolicity, or than the belief
that Christ and his apostles realized Christianity in
its greatest spiritual fulness. To speak of that Christi
anity as germinal is to turn everything topsy-turvy"
(pp. 294, 295). The apostolic revelation is the "clas
sical self-utterance" of the spirit of Christ — a spirit

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 125
which is said to be in each one of us, " in ourselves "
(p. 292). It has impressed itself upon the Church
with somewhat of the " tyrannical necessity of fact " !
(p. 291), and is, "in some sense," the "criterion"
both of theology and of institutions (pp. 297, 298).
Moreover, it is " final " revelation — not " in the sense
that another Christ, another Incarnation, is inherently
unthinkable," nor "in the sense of excluding any
further revelation in or outside the Church," but "in
the sense that it alone is normative and authoritative
for Christianity, and is the fullest manifestation of
that Spirit by which all subsidiary revelations are to be
tested; and in the sense that it does not admit of
development as theology does " ^ (p. 295).
Plainly, then, "it is of the utmost importance " — ¦
in the interests of both thought and life — to retain this
" natural self-expression " of the apostolic experience
" pure and intact as something sacred " (pp. 290, 291).
Thus to retain it is part of the Church's mission.
She declares " what the Apostles declared " (p. 293).
Her dogmatic decisions ' ' add nothing to, but only
reassert the apostolic revelation " (p. 293). They are
' ' neither theological nor revelational in value, but
merely protective of revelation " (p. 293), and their
' ' sole ' faith-content ' is that part of it of which they
are protective " ^ (p. 293).
^ See Appended Notes, p. 211.
2 "Indeed, we might as well speak of a development of
Christ " (p. 29s).
2 This appears to mean that a dogmatic decision of the
Church has an ultimate claim upon our faith only in so far

126 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
This distinction between Revelation and dogma
completes Father Tyrrell's essay in liberation — his
attempt to liberate "theology, and all the sciences
with which it is necessarily entangled . . . from
bondage to the categories of a past age " (p. 86).
In the Essay on The Rights and Limits of Theology
Father Tyrrell had distinguished the truth of Revela
tion from the truth of the theological and other
sciences as truth of another kind, and had left both
Revelation and the sciences free. But in that Essay,
as he himself admits, he had not distinguished be
tween the apostolic revelation and subsequent dog
matic decisions. He had included both within the
category of Revelation,! ^nd had conceived of Revela
tion "as growing by accretion through dogmatic
decisions" (p. 201).
These conceptions — as we have seen — he afterwards
modified "in a conservative and ttaditional direc
tion " (p. 200). He discovered — what one would have
thought he had known all the time — " that the revela
tions of those who knew Christ personally must natur
ally differ in kind from later revelations, and be
venerated as classical and normative" (p. 200). He
discovered also — and we may not separate the two dis
coveries — that the proper function of the Church's
dogmatic decisions is to protect and reassert, not to
amplify, that primary " deposit of faith." 
as it protects and reasserts some part of the apostolic revela
tion. If it be more than protective and reassertive, then,
in so far as it is more, it has not that claim.
1 Cp. p. 119 of this Letter.

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 127
He still left to Theology and the other sciences the
freedom defined for them in The Rights and Limits
of Theology; he still left Revelation on its higher
plane of truth. His discovery, however, that the
apostolic revelation is unique — different in kind,
"classical," " normative" — led him to a final rejec
tion of all theories of dogmatic development.
The normative revelation, because it is normative,
is final, and dogmatic decisions do but protect and
reassert that unchanging " deposit."
It is. Father Tyrrell tells us, a "patent fallacy to
speak of a development of revelation " (p. 292).
" Whatever advance there may be, and undoubtedly
is, in theological' reflection and analysis, there is no
advance in revelation " (pp. 292, 293).
Here, at length, we have Father Tyrrell's thought
in its " reactionary " ! completeness.
According, then, to Father Tyrrell's second and
better thoughts, the apostolic revelation is unique —
"classical," "normative," different in kind. But
what made it unique? We ordinarily say that the
Christian revelation is unique because it came to men
in and through the unique Incarnation of God. Does
1 Cp. p. 4 :-
"To many, the conclusion in question will at first sight seem
entirely reactionary. For it is a return to the earlier and
stricter view as to the unchanging, unprogressive character of
the apostolic revelation. It is a repudiation of all attempts to
mitigate the supposed difficulties of this severer view by
theories of development, dialectical or otherwise."

128 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Father Tyrrell's account of the apostolic revelation
recognize this uniqueness? One's first impression
is that it does not. Indeed, if you look carefully at
Father Tyrrell's words you will find that the unique
ness he recognizes is not an uniqueness in the Christian
revelation, but an uniqueness in the apostolic experi
ence. He does not separate the Christian revelation
from other revelations : he merely points out that the
apostolic experience was different in kind from later
Christian experience, and is normative for that experi
ence- Revelation, he repeatedly tells us, is "experience,"
not "statement," and the apostolic - revelation sub
sisted not — we gather — in anything objective,! but
in the apostolic experience. The Christian revelation
was a " great collective religious experience " (p. 291),
and in the dogmas of revelation we have ' ' the vestige,
the imaginative impress which Christ made on the
mentality of an age that had known and seen and
touched Him " (p. 291). The revelations which must
be "venerated as classical and normative" are the
"revelations of those who knew Christ personally"
(p. 200), and those revelations, we gather, were
^ In this argument "objective" means "externaL" For
instance, the revelation given in and through the Person of
our Lord is an "objective" revelation. It is, indeed, a revela
tion to the heart and mind of man, but it is not (primarily)
a revelation in the heart and mind of man. The experience
wherein we apprehend it is a revelational experience, but that
which we therein apprehend is not a mere experience but an
"objective" or external fact — the fact, namely, of the In
carnate Life.

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 129
experiences. That normative apostolic experience,
when re-presented to us by the missionary work of the
Christian people, evokes a similar revelational experi
ence in us — " the experience of the prophet " becomes
" an experience for us " (p. 305).
Clearly, we have not yet reached an objective revela
tion. On the one hand we have an original normative
experience — an original state of consciousness, an
original disposition of the heart and will ; on the other
hand we have what may conveniently be called a
derived experience — a derived state of consciousness,
a derived disposition of the heart and will.
Let us now turn to the Essay entitled " ' Theolo
gism ' — A Reply." This was written as an answer to
an article by the Rev. Father Lebreton, S. J. — an
article which appeared in the Revue Pratique d'Apolo-
getique for February 1907, and purported to be a
"general criticism" of Father Tyrrell's "whole
theological attitude" (p. 308).
Here, again, we have the primacy of the apostolic
revelation clearly asserted. On one page that revela
tion is described as " normative " (p. 327), on another
as "central and normative" (p. 350), on another as
" the authentic and normative expression of the Spirit
of Christ" (p. 353). Father Tyrrell assumes, "with
the Fathers, that the revelation given through Christ
and His Apostles . . . contained all that was needful
for the fullest life of Faith, Hope, and Charity"
(p. 324). With the Fathers, too, he holds that "the
9

130 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
death of the last Apostle closed the normative or clas
sical period of Christian inspiration " (p. 324).
" Not that revelation, which is in some degree
a privilege given to every living soul, ceased
abruptly ; but that all such subsequent revelations
need, to be tested and tried by their agreement in
spirit with the normative apostolic revelation.
Their relation to it is that of the work of the
disciples of a school of painting to the work of
its founder and master " (p. 324).
Of that " normative apostolic revelation " the
Church is, "according to Catholic teaching, the
divinely assisted guardian. Depositum custodi, is
the substance and the limit of her teaching-office, and
authority. Her work is to perpetuate, unchanged, in
the consciousness of all generations, that same
revealed construction of the supernatural order by
which the faith, hope, and charity of the apostolic
age was determined and characterized" (p. 327).
Do we here reach an objective revelation — a revela
tion that is something more than an experience, some
thing more than a " psychological phenomenon " ?
One or two passages would incline us to think that
we do not.
Revelation, viewed as experience, is said to be
"the subject-matter of theological reflection"
(P' 353); that "which fills and inspires the spirit of
the prophet " is described as an "experience " (p. 314).

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 131
When we read that the Church perpetuates " in
the consciousness of all generations" the apostolic
" construction of the supernatural order (p. 327), we
recall passages which describe that construction as a
" psychological phenomenon," a content of conscious
ness — that " concrete, coloured, imaginative expres
sion of Divine mysteries " which " lay in the mind of
the first recipients" of the revelation (p. 95) — and
which describe the Christian experience of to-day
as a reproduction of the apostolic experience.
On the other hand suggestions of objectivity are
not absent.
We are told that "Revelation must be ultimately
of things, not of words or symbols of things"
(p. 314). We hear of " the divine authority of Chris
tianity " (p. 316), and we read that the recognition
thereof " is a direct and personal experience given to
the soul by God " (p. 316). The experience " which
fills and inspires the spirit of the prophet " is said to
be a " communicated " experience (p. 314).
The divine authority which we recognize seems to
be something objective; the "communicated experi
ence " points to one who communicates it.
But is not that divine authority an authority in
experience — an authority known to us in some kind
of experience? — and is not the communication of the
prophet's experience part of his experience ? Revela
tion is clearly supposed to come from God, but is not
that derivation part of the revelational experience?
Our knowledge of God, we are told, is never "face to

132 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
face knowledge," but "per speculum, in oenigmate"
(P- 315)- What is that speculum, if it be not our
experience? We read of a Divine agency and a
Divine presence in revelational experience, but is
that agency and that presence anything more than
part of that experience — a content of consciousness,
a "psychological phenomenon"? We recall the
mysticism and subjectivism of Revelation, and we
cannot feel certain that Father Tyrrell, when he points
us to a normative revelation, is indicating more than
a morally useful subjective experience which, under
certain conditions, may become ours.
Yet, you may say, Father Tyrrell unmjstakably
points us to more than experience, for he clearly
points us to Christ. The apostolic experienced was the
experience of those " who had known Christ person
ally " (p. 200), who were in " immediate contact "
with Him (p. 292), and in the apostolic revelation we
have the " impress which Christ made on the men
tality of an age that had known and seen and touched
Him " (p. 291).
True— but "what think ye of Christ?" Was
He merely one of the world's prophets, or was He
God uniquely incarnate — " Perfect God, and perfect
Man : of a reasonable soul and human flesh sub
sisting " ?
Father Tyrrell tells us that "to the author of the
Fourth Gospel" Christ "appears as the Eternal
Logos" (p. 289). But the word "appears" over
states the objectivity. According to Father Tyrrell, the

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 133
"author of the Fourth Gospel" conceived our Lord
to be "the Eternal Logos." "Certain religious
experiences " evoked that " image " in the Apostle's
mind (p. 2^9); in the pro6m to his Gospel he records
his " mental reaction " to those experiences. Once
more we are brought back to something human and
subjective — to a revelational experience, a ' ' psycho
logical phenomenon."
You will remember that, according to The Rights
and Limits of Theology, the mental construction is no
part of the revelational experience properly so-called,
but is something immediately and without delibera
tion consequent thereupon. In Revelation, however,
the mental construction is part of the revelational
experience — is the mental element therein — and is said
to be no less truly " given " or " presented " than are
the "affective and volitional" elements. But, once
more. Father Tyrrell's words are an over-statement.
According to his own account of the revelational
process, the mental construction is not "given " but
"evoked."! "Certain religious experiences," we
read, have " evoked " images of God's " tenderness,
His mercy. His nearness. His Fatherhood " (p. 289).
Those images are part of the natural furniture of the
mind : they are not a supernatural gift. Father
Tyrrell is able to represent them as part of revela
tional experience only because they are not deliber
ately sought out, but are, as it were, called out. The
mental construction is the mind's unreflecting and
1 See Appended Notes, p. 211.

134 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
immediate reaction to the Divine impression. It is
not a Divine. instruction, but a human interpretation
— not less truly an interpretation because seem
ingly spontaneous and without thought. This,
according to Father Tyrrell, is The general character
of all the mental constructions in revelational experi
ence — of those in the apostolic experiences no less
truly than of those in other experiences.
What, then, makes the apostolic experience " clas
sical " and "normative"? We see at once that, if
Father Tyrrell's account of our modern Christian
experience be correct— if that experience be, in some
important sense, derivative from or dependent upon
the apostolic experience — the apostolic experience has
a certain primacy in the series of Christian experi
ences, a primacy (it may be) that justifies Father
Tyrrell's choice of adjectives. Such a primacy, how
ever, although it would make the apostolic experience
unique among Christian experiences, would leave it
undistinguished from the revelational experiences
original in other religions. In other words, it would
make the apostolic experience in some sense unique :
it would not make the Christian religion unique.
You will remind me, however, that, according to
Father Tyrrell, the apostolic experience unmistakably
has another uniqueness, because it alone, among the
world's religious experiences, was the result of " im
mediate contact" with Christ. Even this primacy,
however, will not suffice to make the apostolic experi
ence different in kind from the revelational experiences

THE NORMATIVE REVELATION 135
fundamental in non-Christian religions unless Christ
was different in kind irom other creative masters in
religion, and His influence different in kind irom their
influence. We come back once more to the cardinal
question : " What think ye of Christ?" Father Tyrrell
has brought us within sight of Him, but has told us
nothing about Him.
Here, for the moment, we will stop. Father
Tyrrell's Christology depends upon his Theism, and
we shall approach it presently through a study of his
Theism.

VI
prophetic truth
We will now resume our inquiry into the nature of
prophetic truth.
The Rights and Limits of Theology left us with
the conception that the truth of prophecy is the truth
of our alleged discovery of the "ought-world," but
the later argument of Revelation led us to infer that
(according to Father Tyrrell's more developed
thought) the truth of prophecy is not the truth of an
"objective" discovery, but merely the truth of a
" subjective " ideal.
There remain, however, many important passages
which we have not yet examined. To these we will
now turn — first of all to the Essay entitled Mysteries
A Necessity of Life.
In that Essay the term prophetic truth does not
occur, but, this fact notwithstanding, the Essay
throws valuable light upon its meaning.
" Mysteries a necessity of life " — what does Father
Tyrrell mean by " mysteries " ? Here is his answer : —
" The mystery which religious dogma formu-
136

PROPHETIC TRUTH 137
lates, purports to be a truth belonging to a plane
of reality above and beyond that which is sub
jected to man's scientific and historic inquiry; a
truth which can be known dimly, but which can
not possibly be known clearly by him under his
present limitations; a truth which, being neces
sarily formulated in the terms of things which
belong to the lower plane, defies exact expression
and perfect intelligibility " (p. 157).
That higher " plane of reality " is the plane of the
"over-natural world." Now, what is the "over-
natural world " ?
In a footnote on page 167 Father Tyrrell tells us
that he uses "over-natural " not "in the theological
sense of 'supernatural,' but for the whole realm of
spirit and freedom as opposed to that physical deter
minism which is the subject-matter of Natural
Science." This does not carry us very far. A plainer hint,
however, is given on page 157, in a passage which
speaks of "man's upward development as spirit and
subject." On page 159 we read of " the progressive
development of subjectivity or personality," and on
page 158 of "the working out of still higher and higher
types of subjectivity which . . . shall approximate
ever more closely to that divine but unattainable limit
in which . . . such distinctions as Subject and Object
no longer obtain, and whose mode of life and being
cannot therefore be properly conceived by us at all,

138 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
but must be expressed analogously in terms proper
to our own order of life and being." !
Elsewhere we read of man's upward aspiration
beyond anything and everything that "the world"
can give, or "can be conceived as ever giving"
(p. i6o), and yet elsewhere of "a Whole" (p. i6i),
a " Whole Life " (p. 164), with which we are said to
be in important ways concerned.
We are nof at the present moment called upon to
examine the philosophical ground of Father Tyrrell's
Essay. The following abridgment of a long para
graph will enable you to form some idea of it, an idea
sufficient, at least, for our present purpose.
" Conscious life is essentially self-expansive in
the direction of a fuller expression of divinity;
it grows irrepressibly towards a fuller and higher
sort of action guided by a deeper and wider com
prehension of that world, by the mastery of which
its spiritual distinctness and free personality is
realized and measured." The "self-expansive
force " of man's life " urges his inquiry not only
outward over the boundless field of the clearly
knowable, but upward into the region of the
dimly knowable ; not only to the furtherance and
extension of that life which he has attained, and
! The passage from which these words are taken sets forth
a doctrine which is said to be "generally assumed," but that
doctrine appears to be, if not Father Tyrrell's own, at least
closely similar to his.

PROPHETIC TRUTH 139
to which his faculties are adequate, but to the
furtherance of that higher kind which he is trying
to attain and to which his faculties are inade
quate — a life infinite in every dimension because
it is the life of the Infinite, and, as such, un
attainable, although indefinitely approachable, by
the finite." " We are impelled by an inborn dis
content to push forward and upward " — to " strive
to live and express an eternal and infinite life ' in
the terms ' and under the conditions of a temporal
and finite life " (pp. 161-163).
Now, we "are constrained to express" this "in
finite life and action " "in terms of the highest of
which we are now capable," but it " necessarily evades
our clear conception, and remains for ever the ' mys
tery ' par excellence, of which all other mysteries are
but determinations or closer definitions " (p. 163).
" If our attempt to live this higher life in terms of
the lower is like fhe attempt to render an orchestral
symphony on a shepherd's reed, our attempt to think
and express it must labour under the same limitation ;
it must take the shape," not merely of parable or
metaphor, but of mystery! (p_ 178). "Every con
struction of the over-world in which our over-natural
life is lived must be mysterious " (p. 178). Our
1 A mystery is said to be "an inaccessible truth squeezed as
far as it will go into the mould of common language, with
out any poetic or figurative intention, but with a desire of
the greatest attainable prosaic accuracy " (p. 178).

140 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
" knowledge of that over- world must be a half-know
ledge clothed in terms of things we know clearly "
(p. i8i). The "whole and the higher part" of the
whole "must be expressed in terms proper to the
lower part" (p. 185). For "practical and necessary
reasons our language first deals with that external
world which is common to the outward senses of all "
(p. 185); "it speaks to the eye and ear in terms of
things outwardly sensible" (p. 185).
" Slowly and laboriously, by comparison and infer
ence, this sensible imagery can be shaped to a rude
symbolism of those inward experiences which cannot
be directly communicated to others " (pp. 185, 186).
The "structure and arrangement" of that symbolic
construction is " determined by the nature of our mind
and of our needs " (p. 176).
Our apprehension of the " over-natural world "
seems to be attributed, without any explanation, to
Faith. When Faith is "conceived as contesting the
same plane of knowledge as Science," it is (we are
told) " really degraded below Science, as though it
were but a secondhand or hearsay knowledge of
things " (p. 180). So to conceive of Faith is, how
ever, to misconceive it, for, in reality. Faith and
Science belong to different planes. Faith, "rightly
^understood," is a " dim vision of the over-world, per
speculum et in oenigmate " (p. 181). Science, how
ever, is knowledge, not of that " over-world " — of the
" realm of spirit and freedom " (p. 167, note), — but of
that lower " realm of observed uniformities which we

PROPHETIC TRUTH 141
call Nature " (p. 180). Conflict between them is pos
sible only so long as this radical difference is ignored,
and they are falsely "supposed to divide the same
plane of knowledge between them," — Faith "giving
a hearsay knowledge of facts outside the range, but
not outside the competence" of science (p. 181).
What, then, is the value of Faith's " dim vision "
— of our symbolic construction of the " over-world " ?
That construction, we gather, " may be only analo
gous to the first gropings of the earliest savagery
after some rude science of Nature " (p. 168). Yet it
is not without practical value. The "truth of the
mental construction is its practical efficiency as a guide
to that absolute world, that Whole in the using of
which our higher life consists " (p. 175). In other
words, the mental construction gives us this practical
rule: "Go here or there, do this or that, and the
grouping and sequence of your experience will be thus
or thus" (p. 176). The "truth of the mental con
struction " is in the serviceableness of this rule.!
The thought of this Essay moves amid general con
ceptions which are not distinctively Christian, but
from a passage near the end we gather that the
Christian " construction of the over-world " is given
us in the dogmas of the creed, and that thereby the
Christian life is guided.
^ Once more we find that Father Tyrrell's final thought
points us, not to what the plain man calls truth — not to
what is sometimes called "objective" truth— but to a certain
experience.

142 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
In Theologism we are once more within the circle
of distinctively Christian thought. Revelation, we
learn, is not a "supernaturally communicated theo
logical science," but " a prophetic presentment of the
realities of time and eternity " (p, 336), " The apos
tolic revelation is precisely that construction of the
supernatural world, and of this world in its super
natural aspect, which is demanded by, and involved
in, the Christian life and the Christian spirit" (p,
326), "The materials of which it is built up are
necessarily borrowed from the mental furniture, the
popular beliefs, the images, the theological, scientific,
and historical conceptions of the people to whom it
was first accorded" (p. 326) — i.e. from "the cate
gories and judgments and conceptions of the contem
porary Jewish and Hellenic mind " (p. 326).
In what does the religious truth of such a construc
tion consist? Plainly, says Father Tyrrell, "in its
adequacy as an inspired, yet avowedly symbolic, pre
sentment of the supernatural order of reality; and,
secondarily, in its consequent efficiency in shaping
and directing our spiritual life in harmony with that
supernatural order " (p . 326) . It is by the ' ' guidance ' '
of the apostolic " construction " that the Christian
life is lived (p. 326).
The " prophetic presentment of the supernatural
order given us in the apostolic revelation " contains
many " categories of Jewish and Hellenic thought "
which are now " largely obsolete " ! (p. 331).
1 On page 328 we are told that the "imagery of which the

PROPHETIC TRUTH 143
These obsolete categories were, however, first used
— so we read — " not in their several proper values,"
but in their "illustrative" value (p. 326), and that
value they are said still to retain (p. 331). For in
stance, we gather that, in Father Tyrrell's opinion, the
dogmas of Christ's descent into Hell and His ascent
into Heaven, if taken "according to their surface-
sense " (p. 345), presuppose an " ancient cosmology "
(p. 327). It is, however, " the illustrative and not the
proper truth of the cosmological category which is
divinely guaranteed " (p. 327).
The questiqn immediately arises : — To what extent
is prophetic symbolism an adequate presentment?
It were easy to reply that, according to Father
Tyrrell, the adequacy or truth of prophetic symbolism
is in its ethical serviceableness, and in nothing else.
This reply, however, would not be quite accurate,
for Father Tyrrell has himself rightly pointed out that
the serviceableness of symbolism is " guarantee " for
its possessing "some kind" of "metaphysical and
representative truth"! (p_ 280). But what kind of
" metaphysical and representative truth " does the
apostolic revelation is woven " contains many " categories,
conceptions, and judgments " which "belonged only to the time
and place of its origin." Some of the "connotations" of its
"images" — "Fatherhood, Sonship, Kingship, etc." — are said
to be "as variable as man's social institutions."
^ Clearly, if a symbolic presentment be a practically useful
guide for the ordering of our lives, it must in some way convey
some true information relative to the nature of our environ
ment.

144 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
prophetic symbolism possess? What contribution
does that truth make to our knowledge ? What is its
value for thought ?
These questions are not directly dealt with by
Father Tyrrell in his reply to Father Lebreton. He
has, however, not been indifferent to them. Materials
for an answer are furnished in The Rights and Limits
of Theology, and also in Revelation, and we find
those materials re-presented in an article now entitled
Prophetic History, but originally named — when it first
appeared in The New York Review (1905) — The Dog
matic Reading of History.
"The Christian tradition," says Father Tyrrell, at
the beginning of the last-mentioned Essay, "incor
porates a certain reading or construction of history
with which modern historical criticism finds itself
frequently in conflict " (p. 242), Must the verdict of
criticism be final, or can faith maintain itself, if need
be, "in the teeth of criticism"? (p, 243). On the
one hand are those who deny, on the other those who
affirm, " that we can settle historical particulars
through divine faith, independently of natural
methods " (p. 244). Between these irreconcilable op
ponents there is, thinks Father Tyrrell, "a plausible
via media which ought to be reckoned with " (p. 244).
What is that via media?
Stated very briefly, it is this : — The dogmatic or
prophetic reading of history is primarily an ethical
reading, which does not set forth " the bare order and
connection of events in time and place " (p. 244), but

PROPHETIC TRUTH 145
uses events to illustrate a preconceived ethical
process. Prophetic history is idealized history, just as the
dramatist's version of history is an idealized version.
In great historical plays, we are told, facts are set
forth " not strictly as they did happen, but rather as
they ought to have happened had the dramatist been
guiding history solely in the interests of drama. We
recognize that interest as a principle of bias, of his
torical falsification, in the cause of greater dramatic
truth. We know that correspondence with the bare
order and external connection of events in time and
place is quite a secondary, subordinate end; that the
dramatic and the historic interests are different and
at times hostile; that it is for the historian alone, by
means of extrinsic criteria, to draw the line between
the matter idealized and the idealization. The result,
therefore, is a substantial, or in globo, correspondence
which renders all inference from dramatic to historical
particulars formally invalid, but allows uS to speak
rightly of these plays as historical " (pp. 247, 248).
"The motive of the 'prophetic' idealization
of history is, of course, religious, and not artistic ;
it is the effect of hope ; of the wish to believe ; of
a too impatient desire to see God's Will already
done on earth as it is in heaven ; to trace His
presence and operation everywhere; to give a
premature completeness to those designs which
are spread out over the immensities of time and
10

146 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
place, far beyond the compass of our narrow
experience " ! (p. 249).
We are told that " in the imperative interests of
truth and therefore eventually of religion itself, this
dogmatic reading of history needs to be continually
opposed and corrected by historical criticism " (p.
249), but " the man of religious faith and hope " feels,
even when a given "prophetic" interpretation is
shown to be factually wrong, that it is " saved in, and
transcended by," the newly discovered historical truth
(p. 248). He rightly believes, we are told, " that the
process of events is shaped ultimately in the interests
of morality and religion, and that ' what ought to be,'
so far as it is judged rightly, is identical with what
is, has been, or will be " (p. 248). Had we a " perfectly
sympathetic understanding " of " that which ought to
be," and " an adequate information as to existing facts
and conditions," it would be possible for us to divine
both the past and the future (p. 246). Prophetic
interpretation, or divination, is " fallible just in the
measure that sympathy with the Divine Will (the
Ought-Judgment) or information as to existing con
ditions (the Fact-Judgment) is defective" (p. 246).
" Every Ought-Judgment," we are told, is "relative
to certain hypothetical facts and conditions, whose
existence and reality is the object of the Fact-Judg
ment " (p. 246).
! Cp. the similar passage on page 232 — quoted on p. SS of
this Letter.

PROPHETIC TRUTH 147
"Prophetic" or a priori history, we read, "can
never yield certainty in matters of detail, but must
always be subject to historical criticism " (p. 247).
This subordination, however, is only because the
"Ought-Judgments" and the "Fact-Judgments"
presupposed by prophecy are never perfectly accurate
and complete! (p. 247).
" By his infidelities to facts," says Father Tyrrell,
" the poet or dramatist gets at the secret heart of life,
at the immanent spirit or will which seeks to objectify
itself in the histories of men and peoples, and yet
never finds adequate utterance therein " (p. 249).
In precisely the same way, we are told, " the ' pro
phetic ' reading of history reaches a deeper order of
truth, npt merely in spite of, but because of, and
through, its partial infidelity to bare fact" (p. 249).
' ' Apologetic zeal, of the old-fashioned discursive sort,
delighted in childishly one-sided arrangements of evi
dence from Nature in proof of the Goodness and Wis
dom of God. However false to external facts, this
idealization was truer to the deeper realities than per
haps a more critical presentment of the available
evidence would have been . ' Good ' people have always
1 If a prophet misapprehend history, wherein is the truth of
his prophecy?
According to Father Tyrrell's later thought, that truth is in
his governing idea— in the idea which inspires and controls his
representation of events. That idea (we shall presently see)
is an ethical idea. Therefore, his prophecy, although not true
with the factual truth of history, has the truth of that ethical
idea.

148 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
delighted in moral rather than in veracious readings
of history ; in moral tales of virtue steadily rewarded
and vice ever put to confusion. They have striven
at all times to interpret history in all its details as
evidence of a moral government, and have tried to
anticipate the Day of Judgment; to construct systems
of Divine Justice out of the chaos of difficulties and
perplexities offered by the spectacle of human life.
" As fact-truth all such results may be ludicrously
inadequate ; as ought-truth or ideal-truth they may be,
and mostly have been, far truer than an exact state
ment of available fact-truth could have been " (pp.
250, 251).
But what ca'n be the " ideal-truth " of "childishly
one-sided" inferences and "ludicrously inadequate"
interpretations? In the cases described by Father
Tyrrell the " ideal-truth " is seemingly an ethical
truth — the truth, namely, that God is good and wise
and just.
Now, bear in mind three things: —
(i) Those invalid arguments are said to have
been " far truer than an exact statement of avail
able fact-truth could have been."
(2) They were " far truer " because of their
" ideal-truth." (3) That " ideal-truth " was the conception (or
some form of the conception) which they had
tried to reach by demonstration, and had failed
to reach.

PROPHETIC TRUTH 149
Itseems clear that " ideal-truth " — the truth which
makes invalid arguments " far truer " than the avail
able valid arguments — must be independent of the
invalid arguments that purport to reach it and fail to
reach it. Let us admit that a pretended but invalid
demonstration of the goodness of God is " far truer "
than an ' ' exact staterrient of available fact-truth ' '
would be. Clearly, this admission is possible only
because, independently of that pretended proof which
is no proof, we already believe that God is good.
What, then, is the value of the invalid demonstra
tion ? It seems to have a twofold value : —
(i) It does, in fact, suffice to persuade un
critical and ill-informed minds.
(2) It does point towards the truth it fails to
reach.
This puts us on the road to an important con
clusion. We are told that, when science has established a
reading of history inconsistent with some prophetic
reading, the "man of religious faith and hope" feels
that the seemingly imperilled prophetic truth is actu
ally "saved in, and transcended by" (p. 248), the
newly established results of science. But what enables
him to feel this? The answer seems clear: — His
belief " that the process of events is shaped ultimately
in the interests of morality and religion " (p. 248).

I50 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
This is the belief, the truth, which was expressed in
the condemned reading and is "saved" in the
new. The inference from all this is obvious : The truth
of prophecy is the truth of an ultimate ethical con
ception. Prophetic readings of history do not illus
trate that conception, and, if one illustration — one
reading — be discredited, another will serve equally
well. This explains the religious man's " comparative
recklessness, his sense of being under rather than
over the religious truth of the matter; his too easy
indifference to the rights of history " (pp. 248,
249). You will say, not unreasonably : " Father Tyrrell
seems to promise us more than Jhis. He proffers a
via media ' between those who deny and those who
affirm that we can settle historical particulars through
divine faith, independently of natural methods '
(p. 244). In the last sentence of his Essay he tells us
that a ' complete indifference to and independence of
all abstractly conceivable results of criticism is impos
sible on the part of a religion that claims to be his
torical ' (p. 253), and what he there says he repeats
in his prefatory note." !
i "Christianity is nothing if not an interpretation of life
and history. To suppose that the commentary could be
indifferent to the very existence of the text is a patent
absurdity ; . . ." (p- 242).

PROPHETIC TRUTH 151
All this, you will say, points to more than the
ultimate veracity of an ethical idea.
Yes, it does. Father Tyrrell seems to promise us
raore than the conclusion we have reached, but do
we not read into his words more than he himself in
tends? Does not his promise seem large merely or
chiefly because we misunderstand his words ? When
you and I say that Christianity is a historical religion,
we mean that it is founded upon certain historical
facts — upon the Person, the work, the Resurrection
of our Lord. Had Father Tyrrell meant this he
would certainly have had to do what he has not
done. He would have had to show that the prophetic
presentment of history is not merely ideal but factual,
and that (in so far as it is factual) it can be maintained,
if need be, " in the teeth of criticism " (p. 243). But
by " historical religion " Father Tyrrell does not mean
what we mean. For him, Christianity is a historical
religion merely because it is " an interpretation of life
and history " (p. 242). Some historical material pro
phecy must have— the Creed must have a certain
"historical core or substance" of "fact-truths"
(p. 252). This " material," this " core," seems, how
ever, to be necessary, not to furnish prophecy with
the truth it sets forth, but to yield illustration of that
truth. Clearly, if prophecy be an idealized reading of
history, it presupposes history. But what history?
Plainly, because prophecy is interpretation, it presup-

152 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
poses, not a history already interpreted, but an unin
terpreted history. It presupposes, that is, not the
evangelical narratives, for these are already its own
interpretation of events, but the events behind the
narratives — ^those events in their obvious and unin
terpreted character. In other words, it presupposes
the Incarnate Life, not as St. Peter construed it, but
as Pilate — or, let us say, Gamaliel — might have
recorded it.
This, then — this fragment of uninterpreted history,
taken in its merely phenomenal character, and not in
the completeness of its Divine reality — is the " core "
of the Catholic Creed, the " prose-truth " ! or the
factual element in the prophetic presentment of the
evangelical events.
That prophetic presentment is an idealized present
ment — a reading of history shaped by the " Christian
' sense of what ought to be '" (p. 252). If any detail
in that presentment be contradicted by the results of
historical criticism, the truth of the prophetic reading
will nevertheless be "saved" in those results, and
will find new expression through them. This will
come about because the truth of a prophetic present
ment is not the truth of historical fact, but merely
that of an ethical conception. It can, therefore, be
illustrated diversely — through almost anything, one is
tempted to say.
¦^ " For the poet the aesthetic value of the Gospels is indepen
dent of their prose-truth ; for the prophet this prose-truth is the
very subject-matter which is transfused and perhaps trans
figured by the glow of his spirit " (p. 233).

PROPHETIC TRUTH 153
What conclusions have we now reached? Appar
ently these : —
(i) The prophetic reading of history is a read
ing governed by an ultimate ethical conception,
by the " Christian sense of ' what ought to be ' "
(P- 253).
(2) That conception is not derived from the
"prose-truth" of history, but is the principle
whereby that " prose-truth " is rearranged and
idealized. (3) If science prove any given prophetic pre
sentment of that " prose-truth " to be unhistorical,
the governing conception of that presentment of
events can be illustrated by another presentment
which will save the "prophetic" truth of the
discredited presentment.
These conclusions, you will say, seem to make pro
phetic truth largely independent of history. Un
doubtedly they seem to, but, according to Father
Tyrrell, is it not largely independent?
In the closing sentence of his Essay on Prophetic
History he rejects only the thought of " a complete
indifference to and independence of all abstractly con
ceivable results of criticism " (p. 253). " Complete
indifference!" "all abstractly conceivable results!"
It may be that historical Christianity could not accept
(for instance) Mr. Meade's biography of our Lord,
or a demonstration that Jesus is entirely mythical,

154 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
but could it not accept almost any result short of these
extremes ?
Again, in The Rights and Limits of Theology we
are told that " the attitude of prophecy towards his
toric and scientific truth can never be so indifferent as
that of poesy and art " (p. 233). Why not? Appar
ently because "prophecy, unlike art, is not merely
contemplative, but is primarily practical and directive
of that life which man lives in history and in nature,
and with reference to God as working in both one and
the other " (p. 233).
Now, clearly, if prophecy be a practically useful
guide, its presentment of history cannot be quite out
of touch with the actual constitution of the world. It
must give us some clue to the nature of our environ
ment. If every detail in the presentment be untrue
to fact, the ethical conception which governs the pre
sentment must be true to fact. If it were not, the
prophetic presentment would be a false guide, not a
useful one. If it be, then the presentment it governs,
even though factually inaccurate, is "substantially
true to fact " (p. 244), and that erroneous statement —
by " its partial infidelity to bare fact " (p. 249) — does
actually set forth a truth which, because it is ethical,
belongs to " a deeper order of truth " than the factual
truth of mere history (p, 249).
Do not these results explain Father Tyrrell's con
tention that we " have no right to look for a precise,
point to point agreement between . . . the ' pro-

PROPHETIC TRUTH 155
phetic ' reading or construction of history, and the
scientific reading of the same " ? ! (p. 244).
It seems clear that, according to Father Tyrrell,
" point to point agreement " is unnecessary, for we
need only such a degree of correspondence with fact
as will make the prophetic reading a trustworthy
guide for the religious life.
Such a correspondence can undoubtedly consist
with much factual inaccuracy. Indeed, can it not con
sist with every imaginable inaccuracy of that kind
except an ultimate and essential inaccuracy of ethical
characterization ? Do not Father Tyrrell's arguments
and illustration lead unmistakably to the conclusion
that prophecy is, or can be, indifferent to everything
factual, except the factual truth of its governing ethical
conception ?
It was, you will remember, precfsely to this point
that we were brought by our study of Revelation.
^ Cp. p. 252 : —
"In dealing with the fact-value of the Messianic predic
tions, in pointing out their subsequent historical verification,
we have always been content with a substantial, or in globo
correspondence between the prophecy and its fulfilment; we
have allowed for the idealisation of the prophetic spirit ; we
have admitted the right of historical criticism to determine the
precise fact-value of those utterances ; we have never dared
to assert a point for point agreement between the enigmatic
vision and the subsequent events."

VII
" pragmatism "
Our inquiries into the nature of prophetic truth
have brought us to this conclusion : — .
Prophetic truth is not, distinctively and immedi
ately, either metaphysical or historical, but practical.
It is primarily serviceable, and its immediate value is
that of a trustworthy guide towards a certain kind of
experience.! Its truth, indeed, is in its serviceable
ness. You will at once ask: "Is not this Pragmatism,
and, if it be, how can it be reconciled with the tradi
tional thought of the Catholic Church?" That
thought, you will say, undoubtedly claims for itself
both the factual truth of history and (within certain
limits) the speculative truth of metaphysic. How, you
will ask, can we reconcile therewith a doctrine which
expressly sets aside that claim, and speaks only of
another kind of truth — of a truth which is neither the
truth of history nor the truth of metaphysic ?
Now, it were easy to reply : " The two things can-
1 Cp. p. 176 : —
"The 'truth' and reality of the scheme would mean: Go
here or there ; do this or that, and the grouping and sequence
of your experience will be thus or thus,"
156

' PRAGMATISM ' 157
not be reconciled. Father Tyrrell is a Pragmatist,
and his doctrine is inconsistent with Catholic truth."
This reply, however, would ignore one very impor
tant aspect of Father Tyrrell's thought.
Unmistakably, Father Tyrrell, like many of us, is
"in sympathy" with Pragmatism, and uses "many
of its terms and principles," and one is not in the
least surprised to learn that " it has pleased certain
hard-worked reviewers " (" with no leisure for micro
scopy ") to "dump" him down "with the prag
matists," and " have done " with him ! (p. 191).
Yet Father Tyrrell is not quite a Pragmatist, and in
his Essay on Pragmatism — first published in Annales
de Philosophic Chr etienne (October 1905) under the
title of Notre Attitude en face du Pragmatisme — he
has endeavoured to make this clear.
What does that Essay show ? Plainly this — that
Father Tyrrell's Theism, although the ground of his
practical trust and the foundation of his thought, is
not pragmatist.
You know the fundamental conception of Prag
matism : Truth is relative to purpose. This does not
mean that truth is not " adoe quatio intellectus et rei,"
but merely that its adequacy is measured or defined
by the purpose which leads to the discovery of it.
According to Pragmatism, truth is discovered by
man's purposeful activity. The needs and interests
of human life move man to activity, and in this
activity he explores his environment. What does he
^ See Appended Notes, p. 212.

158 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
find? His discoveries are practical. They immedi
ately disclose, not the metaphysical essence of his
environment, but the practical relation between his
environment and his life. The truth of any concep
tion thus reached is in its serviceableness — in its value
as a practical guide.
Turn now to Father Tyrrell's Essay. We find in it
clear evidence of his " sympathy " with Pragmatism,
but also (I think) equally clear evidence that, what
ever be pragmatist in his thought, his Theism is not
pragmatist. I reproduce, with slight abbreviation, the most
important passage.
"Truth is from first to last an instrument, or
rather a factor of life, of action ; and so far, prag
matism is unassailable. Life is the test and
criterion of truth, as serviceableness is of any
instrument. But it does not follow that whatever
is immediately or apparently useful to life is truly
so, and therefore true. Nor does truth belong
per prius to particular propositions, but to the
Xvhole mind or world-scheme with which such
particulars cohere, and which they involve or
imply. Such a scheme is truer just in the degree
that it extends our power and control more widely
over experierice as a whole. Ahd this total
experience iricludes far more than the physical
world of our sensations. It embraces the whole
world of human life — aesthetic, ethical, social,

' PRAGMATISM ' 159
political, religious — over which the spirit of man
broods by reflection, feeling, will, and action;
through which it is developed and enlarged in the
direction of deity. It embraces the laws and
uniformities of that spiritual side of the world
to which, as by a new sense, man is referred by
his selfless over-individual life of disinterested
goodness, and to which he subordinates his
separate and individual interest — which is the life
of the Whole in him, so far as he becomes con
scious of himself as an instrument of the universal
Reason or Spirit, That this world-scheme can
ever be adequate, or absolutely true, is impossible.
It must always be an attempt to think the Whole
in terms of the part ; or to treat the part known as
if it were the Whole. But it can be progressively
truer and truer, and this truth is tested by
increased control of experience in its totality. The
pragmatist reasonably protests against the Abso
lute in the sense of an external Something to be
copied by the mind, which Something has no
common measure with our experience, or in the
sense of a Goodness which is transcendentally or
infinitely unlike the goodness of human conduct
and will, and can in no sense be copied or imitated
practically. But truth is none the less an agree
ment with God as with an eternal or absolute
standard; it is an agreement of our mind and reason
with the Mind and Reason with which our given
experience is saturated, not with a Mind out of all

i6o FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
relation to us and our world. For God is the law
of our life and being ; our being is the expression
of God. True life is that which is true to the law
of our Being, true to God; what contradicts that
law is doomed, sooner or later, to sterility and
death. Thus, indirectly, God is the measure even
of our mind, i. e. of our interpretation of experi
ence. In growing towards deity, through the
understanding and control of experience, we grow
true to that Spirit which works not only in us
but in all else, and whose Reason permeates the
world, and is reproduced in us in the measure that
we grow perfect, even as our Father in Heaven
is perfect" (pp. 196, 197).
Obviously, in this passage, the word " God " does
not stand for a conception reached by pragmatic
endeavour, but for a reality given as part of man's
environment. Pragmatism presupposes Man and Nature. The
latter — disclosed to us in sensible experience — is the
environment that our pragmatic endeavour explores,
the given res that pragmatic truth interprets and
re-presents. As a datum in experience, it is a con^
dition, and not a result, of man's pragmatic activity.
It seems clear, from the passage I have quoted,
that Father Tyrrell presupposes, not only Man and
Nature, but also God.
This question, then, immediately arises : — If God be

'PRAGMATISM' i6i
a presupposed reality, in what way is that reality
made known to us? Nature, as I have said, is dis
closed in sensible experience. In what way is God
disclosed? What is the ground of Father Tyrrell's
Theism ?

II

VIII
theism
In his Essay on Revelation, Father Tyrrell tells us
that he is " not prepared to dispute with any who will
deny that while God is transcendent. He is also im
manent ; that the spirit is as sensible of His approach
or distance, of its own harmony or discord with the
Divine, as the body is of its ceaseless and changing
relation to the centre of the earth " (p. 286).
"Not prepared to dispute" — does Father Tyrrell,
then, reject the appeal to sound Reason ? One cannot
think so. Probably he is merely defining, in un
happily chosen words, the circle within which his
argument moves. He wishes to make plain to us the
ultimate conceptions that govern his thought. He
tells us that he holds the creed of Immanentism, and
implies that his argument permits him to presuppose
that creed, and not to prove it.
Let us accept Father Tyrrell's limitation of the
controversy. We will not raise the primary question
— ' ' Does God exist, and (if He exist) is He imma
nent?" We will content ourselves with asking —
" Does Father Tyrrell's account of the religious life
and revelational experience show that God is imma
nent?" 162

THEISM 163
Immediately after refusing to defend the creed he
presupposes. Father Tyrrell gives us a very clear
statement of his thought.
" I assume that all spirits and intelligences
and wills belong to a system of which the Divine
Spirit, the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Will is
the governing and active centre drawing them all
into harmony with itself ; that each seeks its place
and function in this spiritual organism, this
'communion of Saints,' this 'Kingdom of
God '" (p, 286).
You will notice at once that this somewhat Aristo
telian cosmology is not a doctrine of the Divine Im
manence. The spiritual world is, indeed, said to be
a systematic unity of which God is "the governing
and active centre," but there is no suggestion that
God dwells within the particulars He is said to unify.!
What, however, this sentence does not even suggest,
the next plainly asserts : —
" I assume that if man is active in this process
of self-adjustment to God, it i.s by way of response
1 The word "organism" does not carry with it this sug
gestion. Vide the account of organic unity in my Essay on
Patriotism (George Allen & Sons), Chap. II, "The Nation
as a Moral Organism."
The "spiritual organism," like the "social organism," is an
unity of particulars, and its unity does not imply either the
subsistence of particulars in a common ground or the general
indwelling of a substantial principle of unity.

i64 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
to Divine impulses ; but that God is the principal
Agent and Mover, and that He is to be felt, and
felt directly, in every movement of the mind to
wards Truth, in every impulse of the Conscience
towards Right, in every kindling of the heart
towards Goodness" (p. 286).
This recalls Father Tyrrell's earlier assumption in
The Rights and Limits of Theology.
" It may here be assumed that the divine which
is immanent in man's spirit does naturally and
inevitably, at a certain stage of his mental and
moral progress, reveal itself to him, however
dimly, as a vita nuova, a new sort of life, the life
of religion, with its needs and its cravings for
self-adjustment to realities lying beyond the
bourne of time and place."
According to Father Tyrrell the spiritual world is
a systematic unity wherein God is immanent, and His
indwelling activity — always an unifying activity, an
activity drawing men " into harmony " with Himself
— is the essential fact in man's religious life.
How, then, is this unifying and immanent God
manifest in experience? What and where are the
tokens of His presence ?
Man needs, says Father Tyrrell, "to feel himself
linked on to the Alpha and the Omega — to that which
is everywhere and always, and not merely here and
now, like himself" (p. 274).

THEISM 165
" He wants to feel a vested interest in the whole
world and its fate. For there is a timeless, space
less Self in him that revolts against the limits of
his organic individual Self, and cannot rest but in
a conscious relation to the Universal and Eternal,
This is a spiritual need, perfectly distinct from
man's moral need. It is his mystical need; the
need which any sort of religion satisfies to some
degree. In its lowest and meanest forms and
perversions, and prior to all ethical interests what
soever — as mere sorcery, magic, devil-worship,
ghost-worship — religion caters for this groping
instinct. We must not too hastily sweep aside
all this pseudo-mysticism as void of significance.
At least it manifests some discontent with our
finitude, some belief in the transcendental, some
desire to peer through the veil that separates the
Known from the Unknown ; some sense that the
world of clear knowledge is not enough for us,
that the eye is not filled with seeing, nor the ear
with hearing " (p. 274).
In another passage this mystical need is described
as a need for adjustment — for the adjustment of the
"part" to the "whole."
" From the first faint dawn of reason man feels
himself part of a greater Whole, to which he must
adjust himself as a matter of life or death. And
yet he is sensible of infinite blindness and feeble-

i66 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
ness. He stands on a little islet of ' the known '
in the boundless ocean of ' the unknown,' and
his power is precisely coterminous with his know
ledge. Between these two realms of Known and
Unknown, he feels dimly that there is close con
tinuity, solidarity, dependence. Here we have
the root of the universal dualism of earth and
heaven ; visible and invisible ; matter and spirit ;
here and hereafter ; time and eternity. To people
and furnish that Beyond is the first effort of re
ligious imagination— to interpret the limitless Un
known in terms of that infinitesimal fraction of
the Whole which falls under man's clear know
ledge — magnifying, eliminating, adapting, ac
cording to the measure of his cultivation. Quickly
he peoples that Beyond with gods, one or many,
conflicting, or hierarchically unified — gods whom
man must not anger or offend, but please and pro
pitiate so as to have them on his side in the battle
of life ; ... As long as he is contentedly selfish,
idle, animal, cruel, vindictive, vainglorious, his
gods will be the same, and will be pleased by what
ministers to their vices. But when he grows dis
satisfied with himself and strives to become moral,
and spiritual, and inwardly unified, he tends to
wards the conception and worship of one divine
love, which wills and seeks not itself, but man's
moral and spiritual development, and towards the
recognition of the dictate of Conscience as being
in its' absoluteness, its universality, its indiffer-

THEISM 167
ence to self-interests, the Will of the Whole
asserting itself in the consciousness of the part " !
(pp. 272, 273).
The " moral impulse " and the " mystical impulse "
are, says Father Tyrrell, " two closely related essential
factors of man's spiritual constitution which together
make up what for convenience we shall call his ' re
ligious faculty or capacity ' " (p. 275). That faculty or
capacity is said to be " the point d'appui, the hook
by which the supernatural is linked on to the natural "
(p. 276). You will notice, however, that (according
to Father Tyrrell) the actual connection with the super
natural is established in and by the mystical impulse,
not the moral. Conscience, it is true, is said to be
" the Will of the Whole asserting itself in the con
sciousness of the part " (p. 273), but we discover it to
be this only through its connection with the mystical
impulse. That impulse is (according to Father Tyr
rell) an impulse towards a larger life, and it seems to
involve some recognition or apprehension of "a
greater Whole." In the larger life to which Con
science calls him man recognizes the ethical form of
the larger life towards which his mystical impulse
uplifts him, and, in and through that recognition.
Conscience is discovered to be "the Will of the
Whole." Conscience is not self-evidently that Will :
^ This account of man's mystical need makes an interesting
approximation to Mr. Campbell's account of Religion. (See
7s the New Theology Christian? Chap. II.)

i68 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
it seems to be merely an ethical dictate. That dictate
becomes to us " the Will of the Whole " only in and
through an interpreting act of our mystical life.!
It is, then, in and through his mystical impulse that
(according to Father Tyrrell) man apprehends God.
Therefore, it is in man's mystical life, if anywhere,
that we should find tokens of the Divine Presence — of
the Immanent God. What, then, is the nature, what
the content of man's mystical experience?
" From the first faint dawn of reason," says Father
Tyrrell, " man feels himself part of a greater Whole,
to which he must adjust himself as a matter of life and
death" (p, 272), "Man feels himself part "—the
words indicate, not a mere opinion, not merely a
philosophical opinion, but an experience. Father
Tyrrell does not mean merely that man believes or
thinks himself to be " part of a greater Whole " : he
means that man has an experience in which he is
aware of himself as " part of a greater Whole,"
Now, in such an experience, both the " Whole "
and the "part" would be sensibly present, Man
could not feel himself to be "part of a greater
Whole " unless he felt himself to be (to some extent)
that Whole. The " Whole " and the " part " would
both be present within man's feeling of himself. In
other words, in an experience such as that described
by Father Tyrrell, man would feel himself to be essen
tially identical with the substantial principle of the
1 See Appended Notes, p. 213.

THEISM 169
world's unity. His self-consciousness would be a
consciousness of himself as, at one and the same time,
" part " and " Whole "—man and God.
But this, you will exclaim, would be Pantheism.
Undoubtedly the experience described by Father
Tyrrell would be a pantheistic experience, and it could
exist only in a pantheistic universe,
A mere feeling of the Divine Presence immanent
within us would not be a " whole-and-part " experi
ence. " Immanence " means " indwelling," and the
doctrine of the Divine Immanence presupposes an
existential difference between the Indwelling God and
the spirits He pervades.!
Let us suppose that man to have an experience
wherein God is felt to be immanently present within
him. That experience of the Divine Immanence is
not an experience of " the Whole " — for instance, be
cause God dwells within man. He is other than man.
Moreover, because, in that experience, man is not con
scious of "the Whole," he is not conscious of him
self as " a part," for consciousness of " a part," as
such, implies consciousness of " the Whole," and
where the latter consciousness is not present the
former cannot be.
Before man can feel himself " part of a greater
Whole," that " Whole " must in some way be present
i The doctrine of the Divine Immanence is not pantheistic,
although doctrines really pantheistic are sometimes mistakenly
described as doctrines of Immanence.
Cp. Is the New Theology Christian?

I70 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
in man's consciousness of himself — in some way
man's self-consciousness must be a consciousness
of himself as at once "part" and "Whole" — at
once man and God. The Divine Immanence would
not be a sufficient ground for such a consciousness :
only in a pantheistic universe could such a conscious
ness exist.
Now, has man such a consciousness ? Does he, in
fact, feel himself to be "part of a greater Whole"?
I think not. In the literature of religious experience
we have, it is true, many reports of such a conscious
ness, but each of these reports is (I think) more than
a report — is an interpretation of experience, and not
merely a record of experience.
In this case one cannot entirely exclude the appeal
to one's own experience. I, for one, do not "feel"
myself to be "part of a greater Whole." I have,
indeed, experiences which Father Tyrrell would (I
think) describe as " whole-and-part " experiences, but
such a description would be more than a description
— it would be an interpretation, and would attribute
to my experiences a character not apparent in them, a
character not experientially " given " as part of those
experiences. But does Father Tyrrell really mean that man's
"mystical impulse" includes a "whole-and-part"
self-consciousness ? A negative answer would not be
improbable. The statement that man "feels himself part of a
greater Whole " occurs on page 272. On page 274

THEISM 171
there is another account of man's " mystical " experi
ence. " He needs, however vaguely, to feel himself
linked on to the Alpha and the Omega — to that
which is everywhere and always, and not merely
here and now, like himself. He wants to feel a
vested interest in the whole world and its fate.
For there is a timeless, spaceless Self in him that
revolts against the limits of his organic indi
vidual Self, and cannot rest but in a conscious
relation to the Universal and Eternal. This is
a spiritual need, perfectly distinct from man's
moral need. It is his mystical need; the need
which any sort of religion satisfies to some
degree."
This account, you will notice, neither mentions nor
presupposes a "whole-and-part" experience. Un
doubtedly man can " rest " only in God, for only in
God can he find a sufficing ground for his highest
and characteristic life, for his moral aspiration, and
his trust in the better possibilities of his own heart.
But the ' ' whole-and-part ' ' relation is not the only
relation antecedently possible between God and man.
Other relations also are antecedently possible, and
any relation which enabled us effectively to recognize
the Divine love would be sufficient to satisfy our
" mystical need."
According to this second account, our "mystical

172 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
need " arises out of " some discontent with our fini
tude, some belief in the transcendental." Religion,
we are told, satisfies that need by bringing us into
" a conscious relation to the Universal and Eternal "
(p. 274), but we are not told how that "conscious
relation " is brought about. The alleged disclosure
of it in some "whole-and-part" experience has
dropped out of sight.
Turn now to the Essay on Mysteries. That Essay
does not mention man's "mystical impulse," and yet
it seems to describe that impulse.
We read of the "perennial murmur of man's dis
content not only with what ' the world ' can give but
with what it can be conceived as ever giving"
(p. 160). " No spreading out of life over the plane
already attained can quiet its upward aspiration to
wards a higher plane; no fulfilment of the needs that
we can formulate can suffice as long as we are pressed
by others which refuse exact formulation " (pp. 160,
161). The "ends of human life," we are told,
"are of two kinds: those that are clearly definable
as being at least remotely within the compass of our
present powers of understanding and accomplish
ment; which require an extension rather than an ele
vation of our capacities ; which lie, however distantly,
in the plane of our present attainments ; and not in a
higher plane. And then, besides this reaching out in
all directions over the plane in which our faculties
are so perfectly at home, there is an irrepressible and

THEISM 173
universal reaching upwards towards ends that lie on a
higher plane ; towards a mode of action and life which
in some measure is beyond our capacity, which we
cannot coherently formulate or satisfactorily realise;
and which we desire all the more restlessly as we are
less able to interpret or justify our desire" (p. 160).
Does not all this recall that " discontent with our
finitude," that " belief in the transcendental " which,
on another page (274), seem to be characteristic notes
of our mystical life ?
Yet nowhere in the passages I have just quoted is
there any mention of a "whole-and-part" experi
ence.! If those passages be — as they seem to be — a
description of man's mystical impulse, we may say
that that impulse is an expression of the higher and
unfulfilled possibilities of human nature, and does not
include any consciousness of the Divine Presence.
Such an impulse cannot be the immediate ground
of Theism.
You will point out, however, that, even in this
Essay, Father Tyrrell speaks of a " sense of the
Whole" (p. 161), and finds the "source" of our
"ineradicable discontent" in "the consciousness
that the world of our clear perception and competent
action is but part of a whole; that it is not self-ex
planatory; that the ends we can exactly formulate
are worthless except as subordinated to some dim
ends which we cannot so formulate; that our life
seems ultimately governed by some secret universal
1 See Appended Notes, p. 213.

174 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
power, for some secret universal end, and that we
understand but the middle of the matter" (p. i6i).
The originating consciousness here described seems
to be little (if anything) more than a consciousness
that we do not know everything, that our environment
transcends our knowledge of it. Such a " conscious
ness," however, would be an opinion or belief, not
an experience, for there cannot be sensible experience
of a negation — a sensible experience that our know
ledge is not complete. And, indeed, in this Essay
Father Tyrrell clearly seems to be describing primarily
a philosophical opinion, not an experience, and, in
the passages I have quoted, he uses the word ' ' con
sciousness " with the meaning of "opinion" (or
"belief"), not with the meaning of "experience."!
Yet one other point should be noticed before we
pass on to the next branch of our inquiry.
When commenting upon man's alleged conscious
ness of the Whole, I tacitly assumed that such a con
sciousness would be a consciousness of God. It
should, however, be clearly recognized that a con
sciousness of the Whole — if it were nothing more
than a consciousness of the Whole — ^would not he a
consciousness of God. Professor Haeckel believes
that the Universe is a Whole, but his "Whole" is
not theistic, and there seems no reason to doubt that,
if man can have a consciousness of the Whole, he can
have that consciousness in a non-theistic experience.
^ See Appended Notes, p. 214.

THEISM 175
Now, unless a consciousness of the Whole were a
consciousness of God, it could not satisfy our mys
tical need. That need is the need of our unfulfilled
higher nature, and it can be satisfied — how ? Not by
any kind of Whole, but only by a certain kind of
Whole. We need to be assured, not merely that
Reality is a systematic unity of some kind or other,
but that it is of a certain character — of a character
that makes our vocation to the higher life, our voca
tion to the ascetic life of Christian effort, a reasonable
vocation.! Such an assurance is given to us in the
Christian revelation that the Supreme and Sovereign
Reality is Divine Love : ^ it is not given by the
"Whole" of Professor Haeckel's Monism, and yet
that naturalistic Whole is genuinely a Whole.
Father Tyrrell tells us that man ' ' cannot rest but
in a conscious relation to the Universal and Eternal "
(p. 274). The " Universal " and " Eternal " cannot
satisfy the need Father Tyrrell describes unless it be
God.3 Professor Haeckel's fundamental "Sub
stance" is "Universal and Eternal," but it is the
negation of our highest hope and noblest faith.
What conclusions have we thus far reached? We
have seen, I think : —

1 See my Liberal Theology and The Ground of Faith.
2 Cp. A New Way in Apologetic.
8 Therefore, when commenting upon this passage, I sub
stituted "God" for "Universal and Eternal." (See p. 171 of
this Letter.)

176 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
(i) That a consciousness of the Whole, as such,
is not a consciousness of God.
(2) That, were man's alleged consciousness of
the Whole a consciousness of God, it would be
pantheistic. (3) That the alleged consciousness of the Whole
probably points to a philosophical doctrine, and
not to an experience.
(4) That, apart from that alleged consciousness,
man's " mystical " experience is an ethical experi
ence — an experience of the unfulfilled possibilities
of his higher nature — and contains nothing to
warrant the belief that man has therein an imme
diate experience of the Divine Presence.
We have found no token of the Divine Immanence.
We will now turn to the other factors in man's
religious life — to revelational experience and the wit
ness of conscience.
You will remember that Father Tyrrell has given
us two different accounts of man's revelational ex
perience — one in The Rights and Limits of Theology
and another in Revelation. Both accounts, however,
agree in attributing Revelation to a Divine movement
within the human spirit. According to the earlier
account, Revelation is " the self-manifestation of the
divine " in man's inward life (p. 205). According
to the later, God is "to be felt, and felt directly, in
every movement of the mind towards Truth, in every

THEISM 177
impulse of the Conscience towards Right, in every
kindling of the Heart towards Goodness" (p. 286).
Here, at length, one might suppose, we have dis
covered, in human experience, a sure ground for
theistic belief. If God be directly " felt," what more
is necessary to establish Theism ?
The question, however, immediately arises : — Is not
Father Tyrrell here interpreting experience, and not
merely describing it? This question we must (I
think) answer in the affirmative.
I have said that Father Tyrrell has given us two
accounts of revelational experience. According to
one account, that experience is an ethical experience
which includes a discovery of the "ought-world."
According to the other, it is the result of a certain
Divine impression in the human spirit^ and its ethical
content is merely ethical — is a rule of life and a moral
ideal, not the discovery of an " objective ' ' moral
order. Now, an ethical experience, as such, is not a dis
covery of God : it is the discovery bf certain authori
tative ethical conceptions. Again, a discovery of the
"ought-world" — of an "objective" moral order —
is, in itself, no more a discovery of God than is the
discovery of an " objective ' ' physical order.
According to Father Tyrrell, the impression that
causes revelational experience is a Divine impression,
but it seems clear that Father Tyrrell's account of it
is an interpretation, not a mere description. Because
Father Tyrrell's argument presumes Theism, he is
12

178 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
able to think of that causative impression as an act
of God, but his own account of revelational experi
ence makes it plain that the Divine agency is not
obvious.! It is in Revelation that Father Tyrrell describes
man's religious experience as a Divine " impress."
Now, according to that Essay, the truth of a " re
vealed utterance " is, characteristically, prophetic
truth— not the factual truth of science or history.
If, however, God were obviously present, or directly
"felt," in revelational experience, then, in one most
important particular, the truth of Revelation would be
more than prophetic — it would be characteristically
factual. Because — as we gather from Father Tyr
rell's explanations — the truth of a " revealed utter
ance " is not characteristically factual, we infer that
revelational experience is not, and does not include,
a direct experience of the Divine Presence, and that,
when Father Tyrrell tells us that God is to be " felt
directly, " he is interpreting experience and not merely
describing it. He means — " that which is directly
felt is God." This meaning, however, is not obvious
in the experience, buf is inferred to it by Father
Tyrrell's reflective thought.^
Again, in the same Essay, Father Tyrrell tells us
that the "shock" of the Divine "impulse" "fills
the mind with some interpretative image of the agency
at work " (p. 287). In a given case that " interpreta
tive image " may be the conception of a self-revealing
^ See Appended Notes, p. 215. 2 Ibid., p. 215.

THEISM 179
God, but we are unmistakably told in this very Essay
that the characteristic truth of such an ' ' image ' ' is
not factual, but prophetic — is (as we have seen) not
the truth of a metaphysical fact, but merely that of an
ultimate ethical conception.
Yet Father Tyrrell undoubtedly believes that
Theism is more than a prophetic conception — that
" God " is more than the symbol of a merely " prag
matical, provisional, and approximative" truth.
" If I have dwelt (as against scholastic intel
lectualism and rationalism) more frequently on
the affective and voluntary elements of the act of
faith, I have both explicitly and implicitly always
recognized its cognitive character as involving a
presentment of divine realities " (p. 313).
This passage is taken from Theologism — the Essay
wherein Father Tyrrell replies to Father Lebreton.
It is there that Father Tyrrell most clearly reveals the
ground of his Theism.
I reproduce the passages most relevant to our
inquiry : — Father Lebreton
" La foi n'est pas pour nous le sens ou le gout
de Dieu; c'est I'adhfeion libre de notre esprit k
une v^rit^ T6v616e par Dieu " (pp. 311, 312).
" L'objet de notre foi ne sera point ces forces
incertaines et vagues que le sentimeftt religieux

i8o FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
peut entrevoir et postuler, ce seront tous les
dogmes que Dieu nous aura r6v61^s " (p. 312).
Father Tyrrell
"As to the object of Faith, the Divine and
hidden Reality of which revelation gives us a
symbolic presentment, I am sure that M. L. has
no intention of putting himself in opposition to
Catholic tradition as represented by St. Paul
and St. Augustine, and St. Teresa and St. John
of the Cross, and the universal consensus of all
mystics (and indeed of all devout souls), by deny
ing that God makes Himself directly and imme
diately felt through His effects and workings in
the religious experience of every one as a ' Power
which makes for Righteousness.' I am told that
my reviewer in the Bulletin de Lit. Ecclesiastique
(February 1906) repudiates for himself any such
inward experience of God; but rather than admit
such abnormality I prefer to think that his intro
spective self-analysis is at fault " (p. 3i5)>
" When he goes on to say : ' L'objet de notre
foi ne sera point ces forces incertaines et vagues
que le sentiment religieux peut entrevoir et pos
tuler,' he alludes, I presume, to that 'puissance
qui tend vers la justice ' made known to every
soul in those elementary and natural experiences
of the moral Conscience which it is the function
of revelation to explain and develop. Now, that
vaguely apprehended Puissance is God " (p. 317)'

THEISM iSi
" A Power which makes for Righteousness " —
yes, like Father Lebreton, I have no inward experi
ence that (when taken by itself) seems to be certainly
a direct " experience " of God, and yet one knows
that " Power " of which Father Tyrrell speaks — that
quickening breath which renews the strength wasted
by sin, the faith withered by doubt, and transfigures
life with a new purpose and a revived hope. It has
come to us, along its viewless path, now as the bugle-
breeze of a new morn, now as the sweet refreshment
of a summer night, and always it uplifts us — above
our disappointments, above our questionings, above
our sins.!
Whence comes it and what is it ? Is it an uprising
of strength from subliminal depths within us, or is
the world indeed hallowed by the Presence of a Power
holier and more effectual than man's ? To these ques
tions experience gives no answer. We are conscious
of a renewing strength — that strength is the " given "
fact in our experience — but our consciousness of it is
not, and does not include, a consciousness of its
source. Moreover, even if our immediate knowledge of that
strength were a knowledge that it is not our own, we
should not thereby know it to be Divine. Might it
not be merely a passing phase of that inscrutable
Reality in which we live — a temporary grace inci
dentally developed in the course of a process essentially
non-moral ? 1- Cp. A New Way in Apologetic.

i82 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
No, Father Lebreton is right, and once more Father
TyrreU is interpreting,! and not merely describing.
" That vaguely apprehended Puissance is God."
Probably, but it does not directly manifest itself as
God in our experience — it is not self-evidently God.
What is the result of our inquiry? Apparently
this : Father Tyrrell's account of man's religious
experience does not disclose any sure ground for
theistic belief. That experience, indeed, seems to be
essentially an ethical experience. Father Tyrrell, it
is true, repeatedly describes it as metaphysical — ^as a
consciousness of the Whole, as revelational, as a
vague apprehension of God— but it seems probable that
the given facts so described are essentially and merely
ethical facts, and that the description is an interpreta
tion, an interpretation derived from some undisclosed
source. One important inference from this is obvious. If
man's religious experience be essentially and merely
an ethical experience, it is not revelational.
1 You will notice that Father Tyrrell's own words point to
interpretation : —
"God makes Himself directly and immediately felt
through His effects and workings in the religious experi
ence of every one as a ' Power which makes for Right
eousness ' " (p. 315).
If "felt" only "through His effects and workings," He is
not "directly and immediately felt." But, if He be not
"directly and immediately felt," His presence can be dis
covered only by some act of interpretation — by the reflective
thought that infers cause from effect, agent from work.

THEISM 183
A revelational experience is one that discloses the
relation between the hopes, the purposes, the ends of
our higher life, on the one hand, and the world-order
on the other. This assurance would be immediately
and completely given in religious experience itself,
were that experience manifestly an immediate appre
hension or recognition of God. It is, however, very
difficult (if not impossible) to believe that it is ever so
given, for it is very difficult (if not impossible) to
believe that God — the Infinite and All-containing
Absolute — is ever an object or presentation in any
human experience.! On the other hand, such a dis
closure would be sufficingly given were religious ex
perience of such a character that — although not
" manifestly an immediate apprehension or recogni
tion of God" — it yet led us to a trustworthy and
reasonable assurance that Ultimate Reality is effect
ively on the side of our higher life. Our Christian
experience is revelational because it is an experience
of this latter kind. It enables us to trust in the
Divine Love, not because it is " manifestly an imme
diate apprehension or recognition " of that love, but
because (as I have elsewhere endeavoured to show) it
leads us to a trustworthy and reasonable assurance
that, when the Catholic Church bears witness to the
expression of that Love in and by the Incarnation, it
bears true witness .^
^ Cp. Liberal Theology and The Ground of Faith.
2 Cp. A New Way in Apologetic, Liberal Theology and The
Ground of Faith, and Is the New Theology Christian ?

i84 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
In this need for some assurance that Reality <s
Good we have (I think) the highest and most com
plete expression of man's religious need.! For the
best of us the Christian life is an ascetic achievement.
We cannot live that life without self-discipline and
self-sacrifice — without renouncing many things. Is
it reasonable thus to deny ourselves — thus^to "cru
cify the flesh with the affections and lusts thereof " ?
The cosmic order that environs us is not obviously a
moral order. Its physical processes tend to entropy;
the pleasant world will one day become uninhabitable;
history is not clearly on the side of righteousness;
over each one of us is the deepening shadow of ap
proaching Death. Is the " more excellent way " an
attainable way, and, if attainable, is it really " more
excellent " ? Were it not wiser to forget our restless
aspirations, and to be content with the unambitious
pleasures of a merely mundane life ? We have, in
deed, a vision of something nobler — but what is it?
Is it more than an earth-born light, a false dawn that
will never become day ? Is it more than a vanishing
gleam on a background of Infinite Darkness — a gleam
that (for a brief moment) throws a misleading glow
on the heedless rush of things, on their rush to
wards an end that will bring good and ill alike to
nothingness ?
These questions are of the first importance. If
they remain unanswered, our Jstrongest faith will be
! Vide the three works mentioned in last footnote.

THEISM 185
doubtful, our highest possibilities our most painful
burden. How does Father Tyrrell answer these questions?
He does not even seem to perceive them. He points
us, however, to the Immanent God, and we turn hope
fully to seek for tokens of His Presence. What do
we find? In one place, an alleged discovery of the
"ought-world"; in another, a merely ethical experi
ence which ends in an authoritative rule of life and a
moral ideal. The former is not a discovery of God,
and the latter — the latter is not something that reveals
the Presence of God, but the very thing that most
clearly and urgently needs the support of His
Presence.

IX
CONCLUSION
At this point we may bring our inquiry to an end.
I have not given you a full account of Father Tyrrell's
book. I have, indeed, had no wider aim than this —
to set before you its leading conceptions as clearly as
possible. What remains to be said will occupy only
a few brief paragraphs.
(i) Father Tyrrell's doctrine of prophetic truth, his
plea for the freedom of scientific thought and for the
unchangeableness of Christian dogma, all depend
upon a certain conception of Revelation. Revelation,
he tells us, is "experience," not "statement," and
each line of his argument starts with a description of
revelational experience. These descriptions are note
worthy, if only for one thing, — they do not discover
anything that is certainly a mark of the Divine
Presence. This is important, because, if experience
be not revelational, and we nevertheless have received
a Revelation, that Revelation must have come to us
as ' ' statement, ' ' and the very foundation of Father
Tyrrell's Modernism must be false.
Before we can admit that Revelation is " experi-
i86

CONCLUSION 187
ence, ' ' not ' ' statement, ' ' we must be assured that
experience is (in fact) revelational.
This assurance can be given in one or other of two
ways : — (a) By showing in experience itself some
certain tokens of God's presence.
(b) By showing that God exists, and that
experience, although not obviously Divine, does,
in fact, reveal Him.
Father Tyrrell has done neither of these things.
The whole fabric of his thought rests upon one
unproved assertion supplemented by another — upon
the assertion that Revelation is "experience," and
not "statement," supplemented by an assertion of
the Divine Immanence.!
(2) Let us, however, assume Father Tyrrell's
doctrine to be true.
Theism, then, is outside the sphere of prophetic
truth and pragmatic assent. But everything else —
everything else that we ordinarily call Christian
1 It is noteworthy that, when Father Tyrrell distinguishes
revelational experience from ordinary religious experience, he
does so, not by reference to its "objective" source, not by
pointing to marks of the Divine agency, but by a description
of its " subjective " character — to its character as a psycho
logical happening.
"Abruptness, discontinuity with the ordinary process of
knowledge is its usual (perhaps not essential) character
istic " (pp. 268, 269).

i88 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
doctrine — is within that sphere. Now, according to
Father Tyrrell's later thought, the truth of prophecy
is the truth of a causal reference and a moral idea.
' ' Revealed utterances ' ' are valuable because they
indicate an experience which, contained that refer
ence and that ideal. They point us to an anonymous
impression and a moral experience — tliat is all !
(3) Why, then, should we be careful to preserve
' ' revealed utterances ' ' ?
Apparently because of what they indicate and
because of their missionary efficacy — because the
apostolic ' ' utterances ' ' evoke (or share in evoking)
within us a certain experience.
(a) It seems clear that a causal reference and a
moral experience can be effectively preserved in
thought by direct description, and without the
aid of prophetic symbolism.
(b) It seems clear, also, that the experience
evoked in us to-day must differ from the apostolic
experience in at least one important particular.
Our modern experience cannot contain, as our.
experience, the mental constructions of the apos
tolic experience. Those constructions were, ex
hypothesi, reactions of the apostolic mind —
"stocked" with the "forms and categories"
of " Jewish and Hellenic thought " — to a certain
Divine impression. Our minds are differently
stocked, and, whatever be the character of the
Divine impression within us to-day, that impres-

CONCLUSION 189
sion is not the impression which evoked to
apostolic experience. The apostles, for instance,
" knew Christ personally " : we do not. If, how
ever, our derived and secondary experience con
tain not the mental constructions characteristic of
the apostolic experience, what does it contain ?
Apparently it reproduces as our own the ' ' affect
ive and volitional elements" — let us say the
"moral elements" — in the apostolic experience.
Turn to page 305 and consider Father Tyrrell's
account of the "assimilation of the Divine
Word" when it is "communicated" to men
"from outside." "This assimilation," we are
told, "is precisely an act of inward recognition
— a response of spirit to spirit, and not only the
mental apprehension and acceptance of state
ments and meanings. The latter is but the assent
to the word of man falling on the ear y not to the
word of God spoken in the heart and conscience.
Conscience must first appropriate the word,
recognize it as its own, as the explanation of
itself, and so impose it, as it imposes all its
behests, imperiously and absolutely. In other
words, the teaching from outside must evoke a
revelation in ourselves : the experience of the
prophet must become experience for us."
Now, the behests of Conscience are ethical
behests; the subject-matter of its authoritative
judgments is an ethical subject-matter. If a pro
pounded word be appropriated by Conscience,

190 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
be recognized by Conscience " as its own," that
word must be an ethical word, for only of
things ethical is Conscience cognizant. If the
recognitive act of Conscience — wherein Con
science recognizes a propounded word "as its
own ' ' — be a ' ' revelation in us, ' ' that revelation
must subsist in an ethical experience, for only in
such experience is Conscience articulate. If the
assimilative act of Conscience make a certain
propounded experience our own — an " experience
for us " — that experience must be an ethical
experience, for Conscience could not assimilate
anything non-ethical.
(c) To us to-day, then, the mental construc
tions of the apostolic experience — ^What we ordin
arily call the apostolic doctrines — are valuable
because they evoke (or share in evoking) within
us a certain "affective and volitional," a certain
moral, experience.
But is not this " subjective efficiency " closely
conditioned by our belief that those constructions
are (in the plain man's sense) true? Would the
message of the Gospel be morally effective if men
were told beforehand that the statements in it —
the statement, e. g. that God became Incarnate,
and, having suffered death, rose from the grave
in the completeness of the Theandric Person
ality — were but prophetic images that indicate
an anonymous impression and a moral experi
ence ? I think not.

CONCLUSION 191
(3) If the apostolic utterances be what Father
Tyrrell believes them to be, then the things they ap
parently set forth are (I think) what some have called
" facts for faith."
Upon "facts for faith" of this kind! only two
comments seem to be necessary : —
(a) They are not facts at all.
The apostolic utterances are, ex hypothesi, not
statements, but psychological incidents evoked in
the course of a "subjective" experience. They
are merely mental reactions that incidentally and
misleadingly simulate theological assertion —
seem to assert facts. If the Resurrection of our
Lord be a " fact for faith " of this kind, the
dogma of His Resurrection is the expression of
some inner experience, — some say, of the Chris
tian's experience of the present power of Christ.
It does not point to a fact, a real event, in the
order of history : it is not to be understood as a
theological assertion that our Lord actually rose
from the grave.
(b) There is nothing in these " facts for faith "
to attract the faith of any man who discerns their
true character .2
(4) Father Tyrrell tells us : —
1 I do not suggest that ail " facts for faith " are of this kind.
2 For other comments on " fact for faith " see Liberal
Theology and The Ground of Faith.

192 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
(i) That "revealed utterances" are symbolic
and prophetic.
(2) That the later dogmas propounded by the
Church have religious value for us only in so far
as they restate and safeguard the apostolic revela
tion.
This leads to the conclusion that the Church's dog
matic pronouncements are negations of error, and not
definitions of truth.
(a) According to Father Tyrrell, the characteristic
note of the scholastic theology is to be found in the
thought of an unique Revelation of theological truth.
Because that Revelation is unique, it is normal
for those who belong to the later generations of
faith. Because it is a Revelation of theological truth,
we may properly make theological inferences
from it.
For the conception of a revealed theology. Father
Tyrrell substitutes the thought of a revelational ex
perience. Because that experience is unique, it also is
normal for later generations.
Because its mental constructions are " ex
perience," not "statement," they cannot be
developed by inference.
Because the original experience is now inacces-

CONCLUSIQN 193
sible, and because its mental constructions are
symbolic and prophetic, we cannot now further
define the Reality disclosed in Revelation. We
can, at most, preserve the original Revelation
and exclude error.
Once more you will notice that Father Tyrrell's
doctrine goes back to his fundamental thought — to
the thought that Revelation is "experience," not
"statement." (b) Certain theologians, who are not Modernists,
tell us that, because the Church's dogmas were pro
pounded to exclude error, they are to be regarded as
negations rather than as assertions. Others add that,
because the Divine Nature is incomprehensible, there
must always be a wide discrepancy between our
human thought and its Divine Object, and yet others
add that our only intellectual approach to God is vid
negationis. What are we to say to these ? Two things, I
think : — (a) It is undoubtedly true that we cannot fully
understand any given dogmatic utterance of the
Church unless we know what — if anything — it
was intended to exclude. This, however, does
not entail the inference that an excluding dogma
is merely the negation of the thing it excludes.
Take, for instance, the Nicene phrase — " Being
of one Substance with the Father." It is difficult
13

194 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
to believe that this was not intended to tell us
something as well as to exclude something — to
be affirmative as well as negative.
(b) Certainly God is incomprehensible, but He
cannot be wholly incomprehensible, or we could
not know Him to be God. Were Reality com
pletely unknowable. Theism would, at the best,
be merely an unverifiable speculation or a prag
matic idea. Unless ultimate Reality be to some
degree comprehensible we could not know that
It is God. But if It be in some degree compre
hensible, then, to that extent, we can define it —
can make affirmative assertions concerning it. If
it were wholly incomprehensible, we could not
approach it in any way — not even vid negationis.
If we can approach it vid negationis, we know
something about it and can, therefore, approach
it along another way.
(5) The most characteristic elements in Father
Tyrrell's thought are, we have seen, logical conse
quences of his doctrine that Revelation is " experi
ence," not "statement." Is that doctrine credible?
Now, it is easy to imagine a case for which Father
Tyrrell's doctrine might seem adequate. Suppose God
to move obscurely and anonymously within some
savage heart — quickening it into newness of life, but
leaving no token of His presence. That vita nuova
would be a revelation. The revelation, however,
would be "experience," not "statement," for it

CONCLUSION 195
would contain the " subjective " phenomena of the
new life, and nothing else — except, indeed, the causal
reference given to those phenomena by their character
as events.^
Not, however, in this way, did the Christian revela
tion come to men. It is true that, as Father Tyrrell
tells us, some kind and some degree of revelation is
" accorded to most men " ^ (p, 207). It is none the
less true that — as Father Tyrrell also says — the
" great majority " of men " depend for the fulness of
their spiritual life on the assimilation of the Divine
Word communicated to them from outside " (p. 305).
We who stand in the Christian succession depend
"on the assimilation of the Divine Word communi
cated " to us in the Person and Life and Work of our
Lord.3 Consider those to whom that " Divine Word " was
first and most directly "communicated."
Undoubtedly, personal intercourse with our Lord
gave to the first disciples an " affective and volitional "
experience which may fairly be described as " ex
perience," not "statement." It gave them also,
however, certain thoughts concerning our Lord.
Those thoughts were not reactions to an anonymous
impression. They were interpretations of a known
cause, of a Person immediately present, and (because
1 Cp. p. 98 of this Letter.
2 On page 324 we are told that Revelation "is in some
degree a privilege given to every living soul."
8 See Appended Notes, p. 216.

196 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
they were this) they were more than psychological
everits, more than "experience" — they were "state
ments." Moreover, they were theological statements
— theological in content, theological in intention. It
may be that they were "prophetic" as well, but it
was their theological meaning, not their prophetic
value, that made the men who formulated them the
founders of a new religion. The disciples became
Christians, not in virtue of a certain merely " sub
jective " experience, but in virtue of certain theo
logical affirmations — because they believed certain
things to be theologically true.!
The apostolic dogmas, then, go beyond " experi
ence." Because they tell us (or purport to tell us)
something about a Person — something about an
object that is not a psychological content in any
experience — they are clearly " statement." ^
If they be " statement," then — whatever the inade
quacy or contingency of the words wherein they are
expressed — their meaning, at least, may rightly be
made a starting-point for theological inference.
Once more, if this be true, the whole fabric of
Father Tyrrell's Modernism falls to the ground.
(6) Father Tyrrell has put this question to Father
Lebreton : —
" Does the deposit of faith, and do the infal
lible definitions of the Church bind us absolutely
1 Cp. A New Way in Apologetic,
2 See Appended Notes, p. 216.

CONCLUSION 197
to the categories and thought-forms of the age
in which they were formulated?" (p. 321).
When he wrote Theologism he was still "waiting
for a plain answer to this plain question " (p. 320).
I do not know whether Father Lebreton has yet
replied, but I find great difficulty in believing that any
competent and widely-instructed theologian would
answer otherwise than by "No." Theological mean
ings are not so closely tied up with the conceptions
whereby they are expressed that they stand or fall
with the thought-systems from which those concep
tions were taken.!
We do not to-day hold the Hellenic or Philonic
Logos-lehre. Yet the first verse of the Fourth Gospel
has not lost its theological meaning and value.^
(7) We have seeri that Father Tyrrell sets apart the
1 According to Father Tyrrell, Father Lebreton "holds
that ' The Word was made Flesh ' binds both our faith and
our reason to the ' Logos ' category of Philo together with
all its inevitable philosophical implications" (p. 337).
I understand that Father Lebreton does not hold this.
Indeed, if any theologian (competent in philosophy) did hold
this, he would (I surmise) be singular among his peers.
2 I purposely refrain from saying anything about the alleged
conflict between Revelation and Science. The subject is too
large to be discussed in a concluding paragraph.
Something relevant thereto may be found in Liberal
Theology and The Ground of Faith— in the argument therein
set forth, fdr a somewhat old-fashioned conception of the
miraculous, in the notes on Divine inspiration, ahd in the
account of Christian assent.

198 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
apostolic revelation — thei apostolic experience — as
"classical and normative." Our inquiry into the
ground of this alleged primacy brought us face to
face with this question : — "What think ye of Christ?"
That question, which was then left unanswered, we
can now answer.
Father Tyrrell's Theism is (as we have seen) a
doctrine of the Divine Immanence, and his incidental
Christology is governed by that doctrine.
The Divine Spirit is said to be immanent in man
and to be also in Christ. One and the same Spirit,
we gather, is immanent in us and in our Lord — we'
are said to have "the spirit of Christ in ourselves"
(p. 292).
Does this imply Pantheism ? ! The question is
a difficult one, but I incline towards a negative
reply. It were easy to find in Father Tyrrell's book pas
sages that suggest Pantheism, but over against these
we must set other passages of a different character
which seem more important.
The doctrine of the Divine Immanence — when
strictly formulated — is not pantheistic. Moreover,
Father Tyrrell tells us that the Perfect Life, which
(according to him) is the ideal goal of man's mystical
1 Pantheism is (I think) the doctrine that God is the sub
stance of all finite particulars.
I cannot feel certain that Father Tyrrell holds this doctrine.
We are told, indeed, that, "in the depths of our being," our
"spirit is rooted in God" (p. 305). This unmistakably points
to Mysticism, but does not imply Pantheism.

CONCLUSION 199
impulse, is an inaccessible life. This (as we have
seen) seems to exclude Pantheism.!
Undoubtedly, Father Tyrrell believes that God is
in man — although whether by way of mere indwell
ing, or as a part of man's composite nature, is not
clear. This belief, we may admit, is probably a form
of Mysticism, but Mysticism is not always Pantheism.
And now, at last, this longest of long letters comes
to an end. I have omitted many things — many
things both interesting and important — but nothing
(I hope) of primary importance for the purpose I have
had in view. I have tried to make plain the govern
ing conceptions of Father Tyrrell's thought. To do
more than this — to comment upon everything that
invites comment — is impracticable. A modern book
does not afford the large opportunities of the old-
world folios !
Whether you will agree with my exposition of
Father Tyrrell's doctrine, I do not know, and I can
not even surmise whether you will endorse my criti
cism of it. But exposition and criticism alike I now
leave to your charity, and remain,
My dear Mr. Athelstan Riley,
Yours very faithfully,
Hakluyt Egerton.

i Vide the note appended to p. 173 of this Letter.

APPENDED NOTES
p, 6, Father Tyrrell quotes from Mr. Gladstone : —
" In days within my memory, the constant, favourite,
and imposing argument of Roman controversialists was
the unbroken and absolute identity in belief of the Roman
Church from the days of our Saviour until now. No
one, who has at all followed the course of this literature
during the last forty years, can fail to be sensible of the
change in its present tenour. More and more have the
assertions of continuous uniformity of doctrine receded
into scarcely penetrable shadow. More and more have
another series of assertions, of a living authority, ever
ready to open, adapt, and shape Christian doctrine accord
ing tb the times, taken their place " (The Vatican Decrees,
1874).
p. 9, Cp. the following passage : —
" Here, on the very threshold of our inquiry, we en
counter a radical and I think irreconcilable difference
between scholastic and liberal theology. . . . For the
realities dealt with are, in the case of the former con
fessedly beyond, and in that of the latter within the
experience of all men. The teachings of the latter can,
those of the former cannot, be brought directly to the test
of experience, of comparison between ideas and things.
If the heavens, once opened to the Apostles, remained open
for every baptized Christian ; if the same revelation, and
not merely the record of that revelation, were given to
each of us as to them, then we should need no depositurn
fidei, no divinely authorized standard of expression ; we
should be comparatively indifferent to the efforts of past
ages to formulate that vision ; they would be to us as
men's first savage attempts to formulate Nature — the
earlier the worse. But it is rather as though centuries
200

APPENDED NOTES 201
ago men had been struck blind and partially paralysed,
and as if our knowledge of Nature depended on what
was handed down to us from the date of that calamity.
. , . That which is semper idem ... is in the case of
scholastic theology a doctrine, a record of an experience
gone, never to be repeated, preserved for us only in and
through that doctrine " (pp. 113, 114).
p. 12. There would, thinks Father Tyrrell, be "no incon
venience in allowing" that the "later phases" of theology
"may condemn the earlier to obsolescence; or that the Church
of to-day is theologically more enlightened than that of the
Apostles " (p. 12).
His protest is against the implication that "the Church of
to-day" is supernaturally more enlightened than "that of the
Apostles." According to Father Tyrrell, the certainty of theology is
the certainty of human thought — it is not supernatural (cp.
p. 57 of this Letter).
p. 21. Father Tyrrell uses "liberal" as an adjective to two
different substantives — an an adjective to "Catholicism," and
as an adjective to "Theology."
As an adjective to "Catholicism" it "does not qualify the
Catholicism" of the liberal Catholic, but "his general out
look on men and life" (p. 79). Liberal Catholicism is
"nothing more nor less than the Catholicism of a man of
liberal education ; of a broad outlook over the world of the
past and the present — such an education as delivers a man
from parochialism and provincialism of every sort; enables
him to enter into the heart and mind of other races, times,
religions, and civilizations than his own ; to take an outside
ahd objective, as well as an inside and subjective, view of
his own special interest or cause, and, while deepening his
loyalty and devotion to it, preserves him from bigotry, one-
sidedness, and fanaticism " (p. 79).
As an adjective to "theology," however, it has a very
different meaning. Theology is "liberal" in so far as it
discards " the fetters imposed on free thought by the belief
in a supernatural revelation, and in a supernatural interpreta
tion of the same " (p. 134).
p. 25. " By its ' explication ' is to be understood that process
of analysis by which what is from the first actually, albeit

202 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
confusedly, contained within the limits of the deposit of faith,
becomes more distinctly and explicitly recognized, through in
ferences drawn from revealed data, or owing to a growth in
perspicacity on the part of the reflecting mind whose, as it
were, microscopic power is increased by general cultivation.
And by ' applications ' scholastics mean inferences drawn from
the combination of revealed with unrevealed premisses, and
other adjustments of secular to sacred knowledge" (p. ii8).
p. 42. Cp. pp. 205, 2IO, 229.
On page 205 Revelation is said to be a "new sort of life, the
life of religion, with its needs and its cravings for self-adjust
ment to realities lying beyond the bourne of time and place."
On page 210 we read that "what is immediately approved"
in Revelation "is a way of living, feeling, and acting with
reference to the other world."
On page 229 we are told that "a long-continued working of
the religious spirit" will give rise to a "certain system of
conduct and observances by which man's life in reference to
the world beyond is found experimentally to be fostered and
extended." Again, we are told that Christian theology "offers a con
struction of that mysterious world to which the spiritual life
has reference" (p. 218), that Revelation is a "construction
of the other world" (p. 228), is a "knowledge derived from,
as well as concerning, the 'other world,' the supernatural"
Cp- 207).
On page 208 the ideas wherein Revelation is expressed are
said to be a "reaction, spontaneous or reflex, of the human
mind to God's touch felt within the heart."
On page 213 we read of "the felt realities of eternity."
It seems clear from these passages that, in Father Tyrrell's
opinion, there is an objective reference in religious experi
ence itself — given in that experience, and not merely inferred
from it. (By "objective reference" I mean reference to some
reality or realities other than the human spirit — to some
reality or realities which as we ordinarily say, are
"external " to us.)
p, 43. In this Essay the supernatural reference of religious
experience is assumed (see p. 205). The supernatural refer
ence of religious ideas, however, is inferred. Those ideas are

APPENDED NOTES 203
said to refer indirectly to the supernatural order because they
refer — in ways exhibitory and explanatory — to certain effects
of that order.
We shall see presently that in Father Tyrrell's later Essay,
Revelation, the supernatural reference attributed to revela
tional ideas is a direct, not an indirect, reference. Moreover,
— because (according to Father Tyrrell's later thought) revela
tional ideas are integral in a revelational experience which is
an experience of a divine impression, — the supernatural refer
ence of those ideas appears in that Essay, not merely as an
inference from the fact that they are events and therefore
presuppose a cause, but as a thing immediately given in
revelational experience.
(See note on "causal reference," — p. 207 of this Letter.)
p. 46. Cp. p. 235.
Apparently, the assumption by "the spirit" of "current theo
logical notions as congenial vehicles of self-expression " can
only by error be supposed to "seal" those notions "with a
theological finality and certainty."
p. 50. This construction, we read, "has not been excogi
tated a priori, nor revealed miraculously at one burst, nor
addressed immediately to the understanding, but has been
suggested, bit by bit, by the instinctive movements and blind
gropings of the soul after its rest and centre " (p. 218).
(The idea of "groping" recurs more than once in Father
Tyrrell's thought : —
"... we do not first know the world and then live in
it, but conversely by living in it we get to know it; much
as one, blind from birth, comes to construct a plan of
the house he lives in. He feels his way about, groping
at venture; and these successive experiences he builds up
according to some system into a mental structure of co
existent parts . . ." (p. 182).
"Could he read the needs of his own spirit and con
science he would need no teacher. But it is only by
groping, by trying this or that suggestion of reason or
tradition that he finds out what he really wants, what
explains and satisfies that restless discontent of his . . ,"
(p. 277).
The pragmatist implications of this idea are obvious. Grop
ing, if successful, discovers something which satisfies the

204 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
need that impelled man to grope. The "truth" of the dis
covery is in its power to satisfy that need — in its serviceable
ness or "subjective efficiency."
Cp. the account of prophetic truth given in Revelation.)
p. 52. Because revelational experience is said to be a "con
sciousness of right and wrong " (p. 205), it seems probable that
Father Tyrrell believes this discovery of the "ought-world" to
be made by Conscience. But does Consdence in fact disclose
an "objective" order, or does it merely illuminate the proprie
ties and potencies of human nature? This problem — the prob
lem of the relation between our moral vocation and our
environment, between the practical and theoretical judgments
— is one of the characteristic problems of modern thought,
and the fundamental problem for modern religion. (See pp.
175 and 184 of this Letter.) Through Scylla and Charybdis,
however, makes no mention of it. Possibly, for Father Tyrrell,
the problem is solved by Theism, but, in this book — as we shall
presently see — ^Theism is presumed, not demonstrated. Father
Tyrrell tells us, indeed, that revelational experience is a
"revelation of God," but he gives us no sufficient reason for
believing it to be that. On the other hand, it may be that,
for Father Tyrrell, that problem does not exist. Indeed, if
revelational experience be the discovery of an "objective"
moral order, that problem cannot exist, for our iscovery
precludes it.
p. 56. By "cannot be systematized" Father Tyrrell means,
I suppose, "cannot be built up into a ' systematic whole ' of
doctrine." This incapacity is obvious. According to Father Tyrrell,
prophetic conceptions are, in each individual case, chosen from
among "the ideas, forms, and images" wherewith "the
mind is stocked " (pp. 208, 209). Now, no two minds have
the same furniture. One mind is "stocked" with the con
ceptions of Alexandrian thought, another with Messianic
prophecy, another with the symbolism of a sacrificial worship.
Minds so diversely equipped will express revelational experi
ence very differently. The different conceptions used will be
taken from different forms of belief, will imply different Welt-
Anschauungen, will have different origins and different asso
ciations in thought. It will not be possible to bring them
together as parts of one doctrinal system.

APPENDED NOTES 205
It follows from this that the unity of prophetic truth must
be sought, not in the theological and philosophical con
ceptions used to "set it forth on the stage of thought " (p. 208),
but in the revelational experiences it communicates. Those
experiences are characteristically and primarily ethical experi
ences — experiences of a "new sort of life" (p. 205). There
fore the unity of prophetic truth must be characteristically
and primarily ethical — not philosophical or theological.
(Cp. p. 237:—
" . . . we ought, in an ideal state of things to which we
may ever approximate, to find a living and growing creed
or body of dogmas and mysteries reflecting and embody
ing the spiritual growth and development of the com
munity; one, not with the coherence of a logical system
and according to the letter-value of its statements and
articles, but with the coherence of divers manifestations
of one and the same spirit.")
p. 67. Father Tyrrell notes that, if this condition were not
enforced, one might "most reasonably" contend that Revela
tion is "a perfectly normal and universal phenomenon."
This, he thinks, would be to use the word " Revelation "
in "a very reasonable, but an unusual and misleading sense "
(pp. 280, 281).
That "unusual and misleading sense," however, is the sense
that the word bears in at least one of Father Tyrrell's own
Essays — viz. in The Rights and Limits of Theology.
p, 67. If we adopt Father Tyrrell's words in The Rights
and Limits of Theology, and say that, in one sense. Revela
tion is the " manifestation of the divine will " within man's
religious experience, we must, it would seem, say that
" Supernatural Revelation " — " Revelation in the usual sense "
— is some "miraculous" or "supernatural" or "extraor
dinary " manifestation of that will.
p, "71. Cp. the following passage : —
"The theologian therefore looks, or should look, upon
revelation as a part of religious experience, by means of which
he can, to some extent, reconstruct the whole of that experience
(as an object may be reconstructed from its shadow, or an
extinct species of animal from its vestiges" (p. 284).
Here, as in other parts of this Essay, "revelation" means
the " mental or imaginative element " in revelational experience.

2o6 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
From this "vestige" the theologian "can, to some extent,
reconstruct the whole of that experience."
Revelation subsists in the whole of a revelational experi
ence, and not merely in the mental or imaginative element
therein. p. 75. We now see that, when Father Tyrrell tells us that
Revelation is "knowledge," he does not intend us to infer that
it is not "experience."
According to Father Tyrrell's argument in this Essay —
although not according to his earlier argument in The Rights
and Limits of Theology — the Revelation defined as "know
ledge" is an "experience," an impression. The "mental
element" in Revelation — the "knowledge" — is "given by, in
and along with religious experience " (p. 278), is part of a
"complex spiritual experience" which is an "impress" in
"the mind no less than in the heart and will" (p. 282).
p. 75. The preparation differs somewhat from that in The
Rights and Limits of Theology. Instead of a caused experi
ence and a mental construction which sets forth enigmatically
the supernatural cause of that experience, we have a mental
construction and an "affective and volitional" experience
which are both co-elements in one "massive," "complex,"
revelational experience that (in all its parts) is directly caused
by the supernatural order.
The earlier preparation establishes an indirect relation be
tween the mental construction and the "other world"; the
later preparation establishes a direct relation. According to
the earlier thought, the mental construction is the setting forth
of an impression — of an impression "in the heart and will."
According to the later thought, it is itself an impression — an
impression " in the mind."
p. 80. Cp. p. 289 :—
"Thus certain religious experiences have filled the
prophetic imagination with images of the power, majesty,
and transcendence of God. ... To St. Peter Christ is
suddenly brought home with a realisation embodied in
the idea of ' the Messias, ' the Son of the living God. To
the author of the Fourth Gospel He appears as the Eternal
Logos. To St. Paul He is the Second or Heavenly and
Spiritual Adam. In each case the mental reaction to the
same shock of religious experience is somewhat different.

APPENDED NOTES 207
These conceptions, as revealed, have no direct theological
value; ..."
It seems clear that (according to Father Tyrrell) these Christ-
ological "images" were evoked, not communicated.
(Cp. pp. 133 and 211 of this Letter.)
p. 98. By "causal reference" I mean a reference such as
may be said to inhere in every event precisely because it is an
event and, therefore, presupposes a cause.
One ordinarily thinks of this reference as a logical inference
from the character of an event as an event. In this Essay,
however, the causal reference of revelational experience seems
to be, not merely such an inference, but a part of the given
experience. Revelational experience is said to be an "impression." The
word "impression" denotes derivation from some impressing
cause. If such a derivation of revelational experience be part
of that experience — and Father Tyrrell wishes us (I think) to
understand that it is — the causal reference of that experience
is also part of that experience.
(Cp. p. 203 of this Letter.)
p. 100. The absence of this element seems connected with
the characteristic subjectivism of Revelation.
In The Rights and Limits of Theology, where we have an
alleged discovery of the "ought-world," the truth of prophecy
is the truth of that discovery — is the truth of an "objective
reference" to the "ought-world."
In Revelation, where no such discovery is alleged, the truth
of prophecy is characteristically in "subjective efficiency," not
in "objective reference."
(Cp. pp. 93, 103, and 114 of this Letter.)
p. 102. The relation between our human ideals and the
"objective" order of Reality is "one of the characteristic
problems of modern thought, and the fundamental problem
for modern religion."
(See p. 204 of this Letter.)
If Father Tyrrell has shown— as I have attempted to show
in Liberal Theology and The Ground of Faith and elsewhere
^that our human ideals are guaranteed by God, then pro
phetic interpretation would be "objectively" valid. But Father
Tyrrell's account of religious experience does not enable us tb
infer a Divine guarantee. In Through Scylla and Charybdis

2o8 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
Theism is assumed, not demonstrated, and Father Tyrrell's
account of religious experience does not disclose any certain
ground for theistic belief.
p. 103. It seems clear, however, that this is not the only
truth in "prophetic truth."
Revelational experience, we have seen, has a certain "causal
reference." That reference is embodied in the prophetic re
presentation of revelational experience, and the truth of that
reference is part of the truth of prophecy.
Because, however, that "causal reference" is merely a
reference to an unnamed cause, the truth of that reference
does not and cannot cover the prophetic descriptions of that
cause. These are merely prophetic symbols or images, and
their truth is the bare fact that revelational experience has a
cause of some kind.
p. 103. The account given in Revelation of the nature and
value of prophetic truth is verbally closely similar to that
given in The Rights and Limits of Theology. In the latter
Essay, however, the account of prophetic truth is governed
by the thought that man's revelational experience is a dis
covery of an "objective" moral order — an "ought-world."
This thought, as we have seen, is absent from Revelation.
Consistently with thi^ difference between the two essays, we
find two different accounts of the primary value of prophetic
truth. According to The Rights and Limits of Theology, the
value of prophetic truth is primarily in its "objective refer
ence " — in the fact that it embodies our discovery of the
"ought- world." According to Revelation, the value of pro
phetic truth is primarily in "subjective efficiency."
Revelation, moreover, omits an admission which The Rights
and Limits of Theology contains — the admission, namely,
that "prophecy" can never be completely indifferent to
"historic and scientific truth" (p. 233).
It seems reasonable to connect these characteristics of Revela
tion with the more prominent mysticism and subjectivism of
that Essay.
p. 104. Why does Father Tyrrell attribute to "prophetic
vision" a "historical" and "philosophical" content? That
"vision" gives us an "interpretation" of "the world and
history." The facts with which it deals are material for the
science of history, but the prophet does not deal with them
according to the method and principles of that science. Prophecy

APPENDED NOTES 209
and philosophy alike are interpretations, but lhe prophetic inter
pretation is governed (as we have seen) by a moral ideal, the
philosophical by an intellectual or logical ideal. Moreover,
the latter interpretation is a deliberate exercise of reflective
thought, but the former is rather an unreflective reaction —
a spontaneous expression of revelational experience. Clearly,
according to Father Tyrrell, the primary value of the prophet's
vision is neither historical nor philosophical, but "prophetic."
p. 112. In other words, "revealed utterances" have signifi
cance for Theology only through their causal reference to the
"other world." It will be remembered that, according to
Revelation, this causal reference is the only "objective"
element in religious experience.
Some of the most characteristic conceptions and mistakes
of this Essay — the conceptions, namely,
that Revelation is experience, not statement;
that Revelation controls Theology as fact controls
statement, as a "subject-matter" controls the science
which deals with it;
that "revealed utterances" cannot properly be made
the starting-point of theological inference ; —
follow inevitably from this initial and mistaken conception
of religious experience.
p. 113. "Against the possibility of a justifiable collision
between Revelation and theological or scientific thought it is
usually alleged that God, who is the Author of every sort of
truth, cannot contradict Hiraself. This is commonly under
stood as though God spoke the same truths, made the same
statements, with two different voices, or in two different
languages — supernaturally through revelation, naturally
through the instrumentality of man's reason. Plainly there
is something at first sight redundant and superfluous in this
notion, something discordant with Divine methods of har
monious and orderly dispensation. But this impression
vanishes when we recognize that Revelation is not statement
but experience. ' Truth ' is used differently of experience
and of judgment about experience ; and therefore the principle
in question is that which all admit, namely, that no theory is
true which contradicts experience " (p. 285).
It will be apparent that this saves merely the factual
character of "revealed utterances," not their doctrinal truth.
p. 113. We read in The Rights and Limits of Theology that
14

2IO FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
" traditional belief, so far as it is the product of the collective
and continuous experience of the community and has not been
sophisticated by theology" — is "critically valuable, not as an
explanation, but as embodying or implying the phenomenon to
be explained " (p. 231).
This implies Father Tyrrell's later doctrine, the doctrine,
namely, that revelation and dogma constitute the "subject-
matter" of Theology and "control" it as "a science is con
trolled by its subject-matter " (p. 201).
What was merely "meant and implied" by The Rights
and Limits of Theology is, as we have seen, plainly stated
in Revelation. In the earlier Essay — as Father Tyrrell him
self tells us in his preparatory notes thereto — it "needs to be
underlined" (p. 201).
p. 119. This conception of a continuous revelation — of a
revelation wherein no one part is different in kind from other
parts — is very similar to, if not identical with, that conception
of a continuous and universal religious experience which
(according to Father Tyrrell) is a characteristic note of " liberal
theology." (See Semper Eadem (I) and pp. 22-29 *>f this Letter.)
As we have already seen, in Semper Eadem (I) Father
Tyrrell had emphatically rejected "liberal theology." Had he
become "liberal " by the time he wrote The Rights and Limits
of Theology? A negative answer is not obvious.
" Liberal theology " finds its subject-matter in a general
religious experience: the "realities" with which it deals are
"within the experience of all men" (p. 113). The Rights
and Limits of Theology leaves us with a general revelational
experience, and the "realities" presented to our thought by
that experience are no less "within the experience of all men"
than are those dealt with by "liberal theology."
"Liberal theology" is said to be characterized by a "com
parative indifference to the doctrinal forms and categories of
the past " (p. 116). The Rights and Limits vf Theology, how
ever, attributes no primacy to the past — it does not contain the
thought of a past "normative" revelation — and leaves wide
opportunity for a like indifference. If the apostolic revelation
be not "normative," why should we be careful of the apostolic
"forms and categories"?
p. 123. When was Semper Eadem (II) written? Its recog-

APPENDED NOTES 211
nition that the apostolical revelation is "normative" points to
a date later than that of The Rights and Limits of Theology.
On the other hand it contains no hint of the great discovery
of the latter Essay — of the discovery that the dogmas of Reve
lation are true, primarily, with the truth of prophecy.
It leads up to the cardinal question : — " Does the ' deposit
of faith,' and do the infallible definitions of the Church, bind
us absolutely to the proper values of the categories and
thought- forms of the age in which they were framed?" (p.
153). That question is clearly answered in The Rights and
Limits of Theology, but Semper Eadem (II) leaves it un
answered. It does "not pretend to contribute directly towards
a solution of the problem " (p. 154). This suggests that
Semper Eadem (II) is earlier than The Rights and Limits of
Theology. If it be earlier, then the later Essay is clearly a retrogression
from it.
p. 125. "The prophet, like the artistj feels no liberty to
tamper with or improve upon what has been shown him.
Dante did not make his visions; he saw them, and could no
more see otherwise than had they been the common objects of
bodily sense. ' Hogarth excepted, ' writes Lamb, ' can we pro
duce any one painter within the last fifty years . . . that has
treated a story imaginatively? By this we mean upon whom
his subject has so acted that it seemed to direct him — not to be
arranged by him? Any upon whom its leading or collateral
points have impressed themselves so tyrannically that he dare
not treat it otherwise lest he should falsify a revelation ? '
" Some sense of this tyrannical necessity of fact lies at the
bottom of the sacredness with which Christianity has guarded
the apostolic revelation from any sort of modification or
development " (p. 291).
p. 133. This distinction — the distinction between "given"
and "evoked" — Father Tyrrell seems not to think important.
In the following passage the two ideas are used alter
natively, and no preference is indicated.
" I recognize then two fountains of religious truth —
natural and supernatural, reason and revelation, and two
corresponding styles of utterance — the one scientifically
exact, the other prophetic and inspired ; the one under the
control of man's will and calculation, the other given to

212 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
him, or forced from him, by the Spirit qui locutus est per
prophetas " (p. 323).
Yet the distinction seems not trivial. Why is Father Tyrrell
indifferent to it? The explanation is, I think, suggested by
another passage.
"To conceive revelation as necessarily trumpeted from
the clouds is surely to be led astray by the naive symbolism
of Christian art. It is indifferent to the essential idea of
revelation whether the Divine Spirit causes the revealed
truth to spring up in our own minds, or throws a super
natural and revealing light from within on a truth pre
sented to us from without. In both cases the revelation
is from within, is individual and incommunicable " (pp.
314. 315)-
Father Tyrrell is a mystic. He is content with experience
— with a "psychological phenomenon," and cares not whether
it be "given" or "evoked."
p. 157. We find the characteristic note of Pragmatism, not
only in Father Tyrrell's conception that the truth of prophecy
is in its serviceableness, — that life is the criterion of truth, — but
also in his account of the Catholic Church. In his Reflections
on Catholicism — Through Scylla and Charybdis, Chap. II —
the Church's claim upon the allegiance of Liberal Catholics
seems to be based very largely upon the alleged fact that in
the Catholic Church we have the largest and most widely
helpful organization of a certain kind of experience. In Liberal
Theology and The Ground of Faith I have endeavoured to
show that the Church does much more than organize our
experience — to show that, through its presentation of the
"objective" revelation given once for all in the unique Person
of our Lord, it ennobles life with an eternal hope, and a faith
that effectually overcomes the apparent contradictions of
Nature. Father Tyrrell makes no such attempt. He speaks,
indeed, of the Immanent God, but does not show in what way
we apprehend Him or that — as I have tried to show — His
presence is uniquely mediated in and by the Catholic Church.
According to Father Tyrrell, the Catholic Church is a great
experiment in a certain way of living. It is undoubtedly that,
but it is much more than that. To speak of nothing else,
the "objective" revelation which it evidently sets forth con
firms our faith that the experiment it fosters is a reasonable

APPENDED NOTES 213
one. By this confirmation of our faith it meets our deepest
religious need. Were it merely a great ethical experiment,
it would leave that need unsatisfied. Unless we have reason
for believing the experiment of the Christian life to be reason
able, we have little interest in making it.
p. 168. Cp. the following passage, in which Father Tyrrell
describes the results consequent upon the convergence of the
mystical and moral impulses into one stream of religious life : —
" Not merely is religion moralized, but morality is
' religionized, ' and its roots in eternity laid bare. Of the
two results, perhaps this is the more important for life,
which wins a new depth and tone wlien morality imposes
itself explicitly as the Will of the Eternal; as the highest
law of our being because the highest law of all being;
as a life which is common to ourselves and to God, and
is the bond of union between all spirits and the Divine
Spirit. Far from a substitution of morality for religion, we
have here a subsumption of morality under religion ;
though plainly religion here first attains its true character.
Morality relates us unconsciously and implicitly to God,
but the fulness of our spirit-life demands that this self-
relating should be fully conscious and explicit, and it is
religion that makes it so; or rather, such conscious self-
relating to God is an act of religion " (p. 273).
It seems clear from this that what we may call "the Divine
objectivity " of Conscience is not intrinsic in the life of Con
science — in the " moral impulse " — but is derived from the
mystical side of our religious experience.
p. 173. The higher life towards which our "mystical im
pulse" moves us is described as "a life infinite in every
dimension, because it is the life of the Infinite " (p. 161), and,
because it is thus infinite, it is said to be "unattainable."
Cp. the following passages : —
" Furthermore, it is generally assumed that the goal of
the collective effort and struggle of life shall approximate
ever more closely to that divine but unattainable limit in
which such distinctions as Subject and Object no longer
obtain, and whose mode of life and being cannot therefore
be properly conceived by us at all " (p. 158).
" In short, we must strive to live and express an eternal
and infinite life ' in the terms ' and under the conditions

214 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
of a temporal and finite life. The endeavour is inherently
absurd and self-contradictory; its goal is not only unattain
able but unthinkable " (p. 163).
Now we cannot have experience of an unattainable Infinite,
for unattainableness cannot be a datum in experience. It is
a character inferred by thought.
Moreover, were such an experience possible, it would not be
a "whole-and-part" experience. Whatever were our relation
to an " unattainable " Infinite, it would not be a relation of
"part" to "Whole," for the very unattainableness of that
Infinite would place a gulf between us and it which the
"whole-and-part" relation could not bridge.
p. 174. See, for instance, the passage which describes the
"source" of our "ineradicable discontent" — a passage quoted
on p. 173 of this Letter. Father Tyrrell therein speaks of a
"consciousness" that "our life seems ultimately governed by
some secret universal power, for some secret universal end,
and that we understand but the middle of the matter." Such
a " consciousness " must be a judgment of reflective thought :
it cannot be a sensible experience. Consider, too, the follow
ing passage :-^
"If therefore man has a sense of that Whole which
includes and stretches indefinitely beyond and rises above
the area of his powers of distinct knowledge and effectual
mastery, it is because his liberty and self-government are
not limited to a particular area, but are universal — the
liberty of a creature capable of the concept of ' Being ' ;
capable of the concept of a Whole, whereof he and his
proximate surroundings are but part, and through which
alone they can be rightly dealt with; capable therefore of
dealing with the Whole so far as he can adjust himself
to it or oppose himself to it " (pp. 161, 162).
The capacity mentioned is a capacity for a certain kind of
thought, not for a certain kind of experience — a capacity
whereby man, reflecting upon his experience, forms the idea
of a cosmic Whole, and reaches the belief that "he and his
proximate surroundings " are part of that Whole.
Again, in the Essay on Revelation, man's alleged conscious
ness of the Whole seems to be involved in his consciousness
of himself — ^he "feels himself," we are told, to be "part of
a greater Whole" (p. 272). In the Essay on Mysteries, how-

APPENDED NOTES 215
ever, our alleged "sense of the Whole" seems to arise out
of the obvious incompleteness of our knowledge of the world.
Clearly, such a "sense" must be an opinion or belief ^an
inference from experience, and not experience. Incompleteness
cannot be a datum in sensible experience.
(Cp. the comment on "unattainableness," pp. 213-4 ^^ this
Letter.) p. 178. One gathers that, as a datum in experience, the
"impression" is anonymous. It seems, indeed, to correspond
to the logical implication of an unnamed cause.
(See my account of the " causal reference," — p. 207 of this
Letter.) Prophetic truth includes the truth of this experienced " im
pression," but the truth of this alleged experience of agency
seems to amount to little (if anything) more than "the bare
fact that revelational experience has a cause of some kind."
Experience of an anonymous "impression" is not "experi
ence of God," and the "truth " of such an experience will not
suffice to establish Theism.
p. 178. Father Tyrrell repeatedly tells us that Revelation is
"experience," not "statement." This thought is, indeed, the
most characteristic note of Father Tyrrell's doctrine. Yet it
seems unmistakably to imply that revelational experience is
not, and cannot be, a direct "experience of God."
When Father Tyrrell says that Revelation is "experience,"
not "statement," he means (I think) that Revelation is a
purely psychological experience, and has no content that is not
a psychological one.
Were God, however, immediately and obviously present in
revelational experience, the content of Revelation would not be
merely psychological. Revelation, therefore, would be more
than "experience": it would include "statement" or some
thing which (because more than a merely psychological experi
ence) would partake of the nature of "statement."
We infer, then, that if Revelation be "experience" and not
"statement," revelational experience is not and cannot be a
direct "experience of God."
On the other hand — as I have already pointed out — if revela
tional experience be a direct "experience of God," then the
truth of Revelation is, in one most important particular, factual
truth — not merely prophetic truth.

2i6 FATHER TYRRELL'S MODERNISM
p. 195. Cp. p. 286 :—
" It is no mere figure of speech to say that Christ's
whole life and action, no less than His words, constituted
the substance of His Revelation. He was the Truth, and
He lived the Truth no less than He spoke it. ' He that
hath seen Me, hath seen the Father ' ; not merely, ' He that
hath heard me hath heard the Father.' It is a poor thin
rationalism or scholasticism which supposes that words
alone, unsupplemented by the gesture of life and deed
and passion, could ever adequately utter an experience
which is of the entire spirit and not merely of the mind."
Father Tyrrell stops short of expressing the one thought
that seems to me essential — the thought, namely, that the
Christian revelation is primarily, not in words or ifi works, or
in the "gesture of life," but in an essentially unique Person.
Our Lord is a revelation primarily because He is what we are
not — uniquely God and Man.
(See A New Way in Apologetic and Liberal Theology and
The Ground of Faith.)
p. 196. Even reaction to an anonymous impression would (I
think) be "statement" if it purported to explain the impres
sion — to describe the agency at work therein. This, I surmise,
such reactions would always do.
If this opinion be sound, all revelational utterances are more
than "experience," and include "statement."
I have said elsewhere that, when "experience" is con
trasted with "statement," it means something purely psycho
logical and "subjective."
(See p. 215 of this Letter.)
"Statement," I think, denotes something not psychological
or not merely psychological — such as a proposition describing
the external cause of some inner experience. An external cause
is not, or is more than, a "psychological content" in
experience.

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