Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/554

 which in a lesser degree has been and still is shared by all the saints. The truth of revelation being thus 'not the truth of theological statement, but that of fact and experience,' it is, in Tyrrell's view, 'a patent fallacy to speak of a "development" of revelation as though it were a body of statements or theological propositions,' and the sole legitimate function of theology is ' the protection and preservation of revelation in its original form and purity.' Even to the dogmatic decisions of councils he therefore allows only a 'protective' value, as reassertive, by no means as ampliative. of revelation (Through Scylla and Charybdis, pp. 200 seq., 273-4, 291-3 seq.).

The actual doctrinal system of the church he regards as a 'pseudo-science' begotten of the ’dogmatic fallacy ' by which the 'figurative,' 'artless,' 'symbolic' and rather 'pragmatical' than 'speculative' utterances of revelation are tortured into a spurious logical exactitude and then employed as premisses of deductive reasoning. This system, 'full blown in all its hybrid enormity,' he dubs theologism (ib. pp. 204, 210-12, 231, 234 et seq.). Nor does he shrink from affirming that in regard to the mysteries of the Trinity in unity, the Incarnation and the Real Presence, the refinements of scholastic metaphysics are even further from the truth than the simple faith of the peasant (ib. pp. 97-103).

But after all Tyrrell finds himself unable to dispense with development. Some measure of doctrinal development he admits, but it is determined not by the subtle speculations of the schools, but by ’the spirit of Holiness' (Lex Orandi, pp. 209-13 ; Lex Credendi, pp. 1-3, 9-10). He also recognises a development, not dialectical but morphological, of the Christian idea as distinguished from the Christian revelation ; and thereby, in common with Newman and M. Loisy, he maintains the essential identity of the modern catholic church with the church of the apostles ; while as against the liberal protestant view of Jesus as merely the ideally just man, and of the Kingdom of Heaven as merely the reign of righteousness in men's hearts, he insists on the predominance of the 'otherworldly' over the ethical elements in the gospel. Neither in his ethics nor in his 'otherworldliness 'was Christ, indeed, original. The ethics were common to' the prophets, psalmists, and saints of the Jewish people, not to speak of the pagan moralists and saints,' the 'otherworldliness' was but 'the religious idea in a certain stage of development along a particular line,' i.e. the line of Jewish-^apocalyptic eschatology, e.g. the Book of Enoch {Christianity at the Cross-Roads, pp. 30-51, 65 et seq., 91). It is the emphasis that Jesus laid on the otherworldly idea, and his sense of oneness with God that effectually distinguish Him from all other religious teachers (ib. pp. 66, 80, 81). Moreover, the Christian idea, as conceived by Tyrrell, has in it the potentiality not only of indefinite development but inexhaustible symbolism, for he contends that 'its meaning' is to be 'rendered by each age in its own terms' (ib. pp. 137, 214). And in such 'rendering' he makes some rather startling experiments. Thus the Messiahship of Christ is symbolic of certain spiritual experiences of Jesus and His followers, 'transcendent realities' that defy theological definition. Hence it follows that the atonement is a corollary of the compiunion of saints (ib. pp. 178-184 et seq., 199 et seq.). And again, though the JaeUef in the physical resurrection and ascension of Christ was founded only on certain phenomena of the subjective order which the apostles in accordance with their apocalyptic prepossessions misconstrued and 'intercalated into those of the physical series,' yet the subjective phenomena thus fallaciously objectified were 'signs and symbols of Christ's spiritual transformation, of the fulness of His eternal and transcendent life,' and by consequence 'of the eternity and plenary expansion of that super-individual life that Ues hid in the depths of our being ' (ib. pp. 145-6, 150-3).

As to the character of the future life Tyrrell is in the main faithful to the idea in its traditional form. He prefers 'the conception of eternal life as a super-moral life, as a state of rest after labour, of ecstatic contemplation of the face of God' to the Tennysonian 'glory of going on,' and regards even 'the bric-a-brac, rococo Heaven of the Apocalypse of St. John' as 'a truer symbol of man's spiritual aspirations than the cold constructions of intellectualism' (ib. pp. 78, 150, 207).

'The compendium of all heresies' was the pope's sorrowful verdict on modernism ; and the apophthegm is no less just than felicitous ; for, as frankly avowed by Tyrrell himself, modernism is but the critical spirit of the age in the specific form in which it has tardily manifested itself within the Roman church (ib. p. 10).

By Tyrrell's untimely death, modernism suffered a serious if not irreparable loss. He was unquestionably the leader of the