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 TOLERATION

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TOLERATION

grants legal tolerance to all the religious denomina- tions within its boundaries, either through its written constitution, through special charters, or at least through prescriptive right based on long tradition. This tolerance may under certain circumstances amount to the principle of equality of rights or parity, even to the full enjoyment of all civil rights, entirely regardless of one's rchgious belief. Since the modern State can and must maintain towards the various relig- ions and denominations a more broad-minded attitude than the unyielding character of her doctrine and con- stitution permit the Church to adopt, it must guaran- tee to individuals and religious bodies not alone interior freedom of beUef, but also, as its logical correlative, to manifest that belief outwardly — that is, the right to profess before the world one's religious convictions without the interference of others, and to give visible expression to these convictions in prayer, sacrifice, and Divine worship. This threefold freedom of faith, pro- fession, and worship is usually included under the general name of religious freedom. Tolerance and religious liberty are not, however, interchangeable terms, since the right implied in state tolerance to grant full or limited religious liberty involves the fur- ther right to refuse, to contract, or to withdraw this freedom under certain circumstances, as is clear from the history of toleration laws in every age. Nor is the idea of parity identical with that of religious liberty. For the maintenance of a state Church from public funds (e. g. the Established Church of England) is an offence against parity as regards the dissidents, who must meet their rehgious needs out of their own means, but it does not affect the general re- ligious hberty, which is enjoyed by the dissidents in the same degree as by the members of the state Church.

Political intolerance finds its harshest expression in the forcible imposition of a religion and its worship, which reached it s chmax in the drast ic polit ical maxim of the Reformation epoch : ' ' Cuius regio, illius et religio ' '. Since external profession and Uturgical worship are but the spontaneous expression of faith, it is plain that state compulsion in the matter of worship is a griev- ous attempt to tyrannize over conscience and tends to breed hypocrisy. Neither political nor ecclesiastical authority can exercise a physical control over interior conviction, since into the secret sanctuary of the mind only the Deity can enter, and He alone can compel the heart. Hence, the principle of Roman law: "De in- ternis non judical prajtor." But, inasmuch as the Church and she alone, with her authority to teach and the power of the keys, may legislate even for con- science, she and only she is justified in making a par- ticular faith obligatory in conscience; consequently she may bring to bear upon interior conviction an ethical compulsion, to which corresponds the obligation to beUeve on the part of the subject. The State on the other hand cannot extend its jurisdiction to religion until this has become visibly embodied in external profession and worship. There are several ways in which the State may interfere. It may either adopt a friendly attitude towards a certain religion and make it the state reUgion (e. g. the medieval religious States, and certain modern States which have estab- lished Churches); or it may adopt a hostile attitude towards a certain religion, which it may eventually endeavour to suppress by the employment of force and the infliction of penahies, as e. g. the pagan Roman Empire tried to suppress Christianity. But the State may also remain neutral, confining itself to sim- ple tolerance, e. g. as did Constantine the Great and Liciniu.s in the Tolerance Edict of Milan, a. d. 313. The modern con.stitutional State adopts as a basic principle, not mere tolerance towards the various re- ligious bodies, but complete rehgious freedom; this principle finds its truest and most consistent e.xpres- sion in the United States of America.

II. The Inadmissibility of Theoretical Dog- M.\Tic Toleration. — As already said, this kind of tolerance implies indifference towards the truth and in principle, a countenancing of error; hence it is clear that intolerance towards error as such is among the self-evident duties of every man who recognizes ethi- cal obligations. Inasmuch as this dogmatic intoler- ance is a prominent characteristic of the Cathohe Church, and is stigmatized by the modern spirit as obstinacy and even as intolerable arrogance, its ob- jective justification must now be established. We will begin with the incontestable claim of truth, to universal recognition and exclusive legitimacy. Just as the knowableness of truth is the fundamental pre- supposition of every investigator, so also are its final attainment and possession his goal. Error itself, as the opposite of truth, is intelligible only when there is an unchangeable norm of cognition by which the thinking mind is ruled. He who sees in the develop- ment of human sciences only one vast graveyard con~ taining thousands of tombstones erected over truth, preaches the death of all science — that is, the scepti- cism which was avowed in antiquity by the Middle Academy of .\rcesilaus and by later Greek Pyrrho- nism, and which the sceptics of all the succeeding cen- turies down to the mgenious Pierre Bayle (d. 1706) have taken for their model. Recent Pragmatism (W. James, Schiller, and others), which denies the eternal, necessary, and unalterable character of truth, is only a dreary relapse into the scepticism of the sophist Protagoras, against which Socrates raised the banner of truth and virtue. The mutabihty of truth with the passage of time is also a thesis of Modernism. In the Decree "Lamentabih" of 3 July, 1907, Pius X condemned the Modernistic proposition: Veritas non est immutabilis plus quam ipse homo, quippe quae cum ipso, in ipso et per ipsum evolvitur (Truth is no more unchangeable than man, since with him, in him, and by him it is evolved). (Cf. Denzinger-Bannwart, "Enchiridion", 11th ed., Freibiu'g, 1911, n. 2058.) The final consequence of this suicidal system led F. Nietzsche to intellectual Nihilism: "Nothing is true, everything is allowed." The transference of this destructive scepticism to the domain of religion breeds religious indifferent ism, which is no less unrea- sonable and immoral, since it also sins against the sacredness of truth.

Nowhere is dogmatic intolerance so necessary a rule of life as in the domain of religious belief, since for each individual his eternal salvation is at stake. Just as there can be no alternative multiplication tables, so there can be but a single true rehgion, which, by the very fact of its existence, protests against all other rehgions as false. But the love of truth requires each man to stand forth as the incorruptible advocate of truth and of truth alone. While abstract truth, both profane and religious, asserts itself victoriously through its impersonal evidence against all opposition, its human advocate, engaging in per.sonal contest with adversaries of flesh and blood like himself, must have recoiu-se to words and writing. Hence the sharp, yet almost imjjersonal clash between opposing views of life, each of which contends for the palm, because each is thoroughly convinced that it alone is right. But the very devotion to truth which supports these convictions determines the kind of polemics which each believes himself called on to conduct. He whose .sole concern is for truth itself, will never be- smirch his escutcheon by lying or calumny and will refrain from all personal invective. Conscious that the truth for which he fights or in good faith believes he fights, is, by reason of its innate nobihty, incom- patible with any blemish or stain, he will never claim licence to abuse. Such an ideal champion of truth is fittingly designated by the English word "gentle- man". He may, however, by a fair counter-stroke parry an unjust, malicious, and insulting attack, since