Venerable Fulton J. Sheen
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It
is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error,
virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun
with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. The man who can make up
his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot;
but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost
time, is called tolerant and broadminded. A bigoted man is one who refuses to
accept a reason for anything; a broadminded man is one who will accept anything
for a reason—providing it is not a good reason. It is true that there is a
demand for precision, exactness, and definiteness, but it is only for precision
in scientific measurement, not in logic. The breakdown that has produced this
unnatural broadmindedness is mental, not moral. The evidence for this statement
is threefold: the tendency to settle issues not by arguments but by words, the
unqualified willingness to accept the authority of anyone on the subject of
religion, and, lastly, the love of novelty.
Voltaire boasted that if he could find but ten wicked words a day
he could crush the “infamy” of Christianity. He found the ten words daily, and
even a daily dozen, but he never found an argument, and so the words went the
way of all words and the thing, Christianity, survived. Today, no one advances
even a poor argument to prove that there is no God, but they are legion who
think they have sealed up the heavens when they used the word “anthropomorphism.”
This word is just a sample of the catalogue of names which serve as the excuse
for those who are too lazy to think. One moment’s reflection would tell them
that one can no more get rid of God by calling Him “anthropomorphic” than he
can get rid of a sore throat by calling it “streptococci.” As regards the use
of the term “anthropomorphism,” I cannot see that its use in theology is less
justified than the use in physics of the term “organism,” which the new
physicists are so fond of employing. Certain words like “reactionary” or “medieval”
are tagged on the Catholic Church and used with that same disrespect with which
a man may sneer at a woman’s age. Mothers do not cease to be mothers because
their sons grow up, and the Mother Church of the Christian world, which began
not in Boston but in Jerusalem, is not to be dispossessed of her glorious title
simply because her sons leave home. Some day they may be glad to return and
their return will be the truest “homecoming” the world has ever seen.
Not only does the substitution of words for argument betray the
existence of this false tolerance, but also the readiness of many minds to
accept as an authority in any field an individual who becomes a famous
authority in one particular field. The assumption behind journalistic religion
is that because a man is clever in inventing automobiles, he is thereby clever
in treating the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity; that a
professor who is an authority on the mathematical interpretation of atomic
phenomena is thereby an authority on the interpretation of marriage; and that
am an who knows something about illumination can throw light on the subject of
immortality, or perhaps even put out the lights on immortality. There is a
limit to the transfer of training, and no one who paints beautiful pictures
with his right hand can, in a day and at the suggestion of a reporter, paint an
equally good one with his left hand. The science of religion has a right to be
heard scientifically through its qualified spokesmen, just as the science of
physics or astronomy has a right to be heard through its qualified spokesmen.
Religion is a science despite the fact that some would make it only a
sentiment. Religion is not an open question, like the United Nations, while
science is a closed question, like the addition table.
Religion has its principles, natural and revealed, which are more
exacting in their logic than mathematics. But the false notion of tolerance has
obscured this fact from the eyes of many who are as intolerant about the
smallest details of life as they are tolerant about their relations to God. In
the ordinary affairs of life, these same people would never summon a Christian
Science practitioner to fix a broken windowpane; they would never call in an
optician because they had broken the eye of a needle; they would never call in
a florist because they hurt the palm of their hand, nor go to a carpenter to
take care of their nails. They would never call in a Collector of Internal
Revenue to extract the nickel swallowed by the baby. They would refuse to
listen to a Kiwanis booster discussing the authenticity of a painting, or to a
tree‐surgeon settling a moot question of law. And yet for the all‐important
subject of religion, on which our eternal destinies hinge, on the all‐important
question of the relations of man to his environment and to his God, they are
willing to listen to anyone who calls himself a prophet. And so our journals
are filled with articles for these “broadminded” people, in which everyone from
Jack Dempsey [a famous boxer at the time] to the chief cook of the Ritz Carlton
tells about his idea of God and his view of religion. These same individuals,
who would become exasperated if their child played with a wrongly colored
lollipop, would not become the least bit worried if the child grew up without
ever having heard the name of God.
Would it not be in perfect keeping with the fitness of things to
insist on certain minimal requirements for theological pronouncements? If we
insist that he who mends our pipes knows something about plumbing and that he
who gives us pills knows something about medicine, should be not expect and
demand that he who tells us about God, religion, Christ, and immortality at
least say his prayers? If a violinist does not disdain to practice his musical
scales, why should the modern theologian disdain to practice the elements of
religion?
Another evidence of the breakdown of reason that has produced this
weird fungus of broad‐mindedness is the passion for novelty, as opposed to the
love of truth. Truth is sacrificed for an epigram, and the Divinity of Christ
for a headline in the Monday morning newspaper. Many a modern preacher is far
less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is his
popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him
straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense, paying compliments to
Catholics because of ʺtheir great organizationʺ and to sexologists because of their ʺhonest challenge to the youth of this
generation.ʺ Bending the knee to
the mob and pleasing men rather than God would probably make them scruple at
ever playing the role of a John the Baptist before a modern Herod. No accusing
finger would be leveled at a divorce or one living in adultery; no voice would
be thundered in the ears of the rich, saying with something of the intolerance
of Divinity: ʺIt is not lawful for
you to live with your brother’s wife.” Rather would we hear: ʺFriend, times are changing! The acids of modernity
are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy. If you're noble sex‐urge to self‐expression finds its proper stimulus and
response in no one but Herodias, then in the name of Freud and Russell accept
her as your lawful wife to have and to hold until sex do ye part.ʺ
Belief in the existence of God, in the Divinity of Christ, and in
the moral law are considered passing fashions. The latest thing in this new
tolerance is considered the true thing, as if truth were a fashion, like the
hat, instead of an institution, like a head. At the present moment, in
psychology the fashion runs towards Behaviorism, as in philosophy it runs
towards Temporalism. And that it is not objective validity which dictates the
success of a modern philosophical theory, is borne out by the statement a
celebrated space‐time philosopher of England made to the writer a few years
ago, when he was asked where he got his system. ʺFrom my imagination,ʺ he answered. Upon being challenged that the imagination was not
the proper faculty for a philosopher to use, he retorted: ʺIt is, if the success of your philosophical
system depends not on the truth that is in it, but on its novelty.ʺ
In that statement is the final argument for modern broad‐mindedness:
truth is novelty, and hence ʺtruthʺ changes with the
passing fancies of the moment. Like the chameleon who changes his colors to
suit the vesture on which he is placed, so truth is supposed to change to suit
the foibles and obliquities of the age, as if the foundations of thinking might
be true for the pre‐Adamites and false for the Adamites. Truth does grow, but
it grows homogeneously, like an acorn into an oak; it does not swing in the
breeze, like a weathercock. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian
his skin, though the leopard be put in bars or the Ethiopian in pink tights.
The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of
truth. Truth maybe contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it
is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults. But for any one to say, ʺSome say this, some say that, therefore there
is no truth,ʺ is about as logical
as it would have been for Columbus, who heard some say, ʺThe earth is round,ʺ and other say, ʺThe earth is flat,ʺ to conclude: ʺTherefore there is no earth at all.ʺ
It is this kind of thinking that cannot distinguish between a
sheep and his second coat of wool, between Napoleon and his three‐cornered hat,
between the substance and the accident, the kind that has begotten minds so
flattened with broadness that they have lost all their depth. Like a carpenter
who might throw away his rule and use each beam as a measuring‐rod, so, too,
those who have thrown away the standard of objective truth have nothing left
with which to measure but the mental fashion of the moment.
The giggling giddiness of novelty, the sentimental restlessness of
a mind unhinged, and the unnatural fear of a good dose of hard thinking, all
conjoin to produce a group of sophomoric latitudinarians who think there is no
difference between God as Cause and God as a ʺmental projectionʺ; who equate Christ and Buddha, St. Paul and John Dewey, and then
enlarge their broad‐mindedness into a sweeping synthesis that says not only
that one Christian sect is just as good as another, but even that one world‐religion
is just as good as another. The great god ʺProgressʺ is then enthroned on
the altars of fashion, and as the hectic worshipers are asked, ʺProgress towards what?ʺ The tolerant answer comes back, ʺMore progress.ʺ All the while sane men are wondering how
there can be progress without direction and how there can be direction without
a fixed point. And because they speak of a ʺfixed point,ʺ they are said to be
behind the times, when really they are beyond the times mentally and
spiritually.
In the face of this false broad‐mindedness, what the world needs
is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions
between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ʺYou owe meʺ and ʺI owe you,ʺ but they seem to have lost entirely the
faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong.
The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms ʺtoleranceʺ and ʺintolerance.ʺ There are some minds that believe that
intolerance is always wrong, because they make ʺintoleranceʺ mean hate,
narrow mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is
always right because, for them, it means charity, broad‐mindedness, American
good nature.
What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience
towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or
inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the
field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies
only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but
never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.
What has just been said here will clarify that which was said at
the beginning of this chapter, namely, that America is suffering not so much
from intolerance, which is bigotry, as it is from tolerance, which is
indifference to truth and error, and a philosophical nonchalance that has been
interpreted as broad‐mindedness. Greater tolerance, of course, is desirable,
for there can never be too much charity shown to persons who differ with us.
Our Blessed Lord Himself asked that we ʺlove those who calumniate for us,ʺ for they are always persons, but He never told us to love the calumny.
In keeping with the Spirit of Christ, the Church encourages prayers for all
those who are outside the pale of the Church, and asks that the greatest
charity be shown towards them. As St. Francis de Sales was wont to say: ʺIt is easier to catch flies with a drop
of honey than with a barrel of vinegar.ʺ
If some of us who are blessed with its sacred privileges
believed the same things about the Church that her slanderers believe, if we
knew her only through the words of traitors or third‐rate lies of dishonest
historians, if we understood her only through those who were never cradled in
her sacred associations, we would perhaps hate the Church just as much as they
do. The bitterest enemies of the Church, those who accuse her of being
unpatriotic, as Christ was accused of being before Pilate; of being unworldly,
as Christ was accused of being before Herod; of being too dogmatic, as Christ
was accused of being before Caiaphas; or being too undogmatic, as Christ was
accused of being Annas; of being possessed by the devil, as Christ was accused
of being before the Pharisees — these do not really hate the Church. They
cannot hate the Church any more than they can hate Christ; they hate only that
which they mistakenly believe to be the Catholic Church, and their hate is but
their vain attempt to ignore. Charity, then, must be shown to persons, and
particularly to those outside the fold who by charity must be led back, that
there may be one fold and one Shepherd.
Thus far tolerance, but no farther. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant,
and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental
gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all
stability. The government must be intolerant about malicious propaganda, and during
the World War it made an index of forbidden books to defend national stability,
as the Church, who is in constant warfare with error, made her index of
forbidden books to defend the permanency of Christʹs life in the souls of men. The
government during the war was intolerant about the national heretics who refused
to accept her principles concerning the necessity of democratic institutions,
and took physical means to enforce such principles. The soldiers who went to
war were intolerant about the principles they were fighting for, in the same
way that a gardener must be intolerant about the weeds that grow in his garden.
The Supreme Court of the United States is intolerant about any private
interpretation of the first principle of the Constitution that every man is entitled
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the particular citizen who
would interpret ʺlibertyʺ in even such a small way as meaning the
privilege to ʺgoʺ on a red traffic‐light, would find
himself very soon in a cell where there were no lights, not even the yellow —
the color of the timid souls who know not whether to stop or go. Architects are
as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are
intolerant about germs in their laboratories, and as all of us are intolerant
of a particularly broad‐minded, ʺtolerant,ʺ and good‐natured
grocer who, in making our bills, adds seven and ten to make twenty.
Now, if it is right — and it is right — for governments to be
intolerant about the principles of government, and the bridge builder to be
intolerant about the laws of stress and strain, and the physicist to be
intolerant about the principles of gravitation, why should it not be the right
of Christ, the right of His Church, and the right of thinking men to be
intolerant about the truths of Christ, the doctrines of the Church, and the
principles of reason? Can the truths of God be less exacting than the truths of
mathematics? Can the laws of the mind be less binding than the laws of science,
which are known only through the laws of the mind? Shall man, gifted with
natural truth, who refuses to look with an equally tolerant eye on the
mathematician who says two and two make five and the one who says two and two
make four, be called a wise man, and shall God, Who refuses to look with an
equally tolerant eye on all religions, be denied the name of ʺWisdom,ʺ and be called an ʺintolerantʺ God?
Shall we say that the reflected rays of the sun are warm but the
sun is not hot? This we are equivalently saying when we admit intolerance of
the principles of science and deny it to the Father of science, Who is God. And
if a government, with the inflexible principles of its constitution, distant
from the foundation of government by miles and separated from it by lifetimes,
can empower men to enforce that constitution, why cannot Christ choose and
delegate men with the power of enforcing His Will and spreading His
benedictions? And if we admit intolerance about the foundations of a government
that at best looks after manʹs body, why not admit intolerance about the foundations of a
government that looks after the eternal destiny of the spirit of man? For
unlike human governments, ʺthere is no other
foundation upon which men can build than upon the name Jesus.ʺ
Why, then, sneer at dogmas as intolerant? On all sides we hear
it said today, ʺThe modern world
wants a religion without dogmas,ʺ which betrays how little thinking goes with that label, for he
who says he wants a religion without dogmas is stating a dogma, and a dogma that
is harder to justify than many dogmas of faith. A dogma is a true thought, and
a religion without dogmas is a religion without thought, or a back without a
backbone. All sciences have dogmas. ʺWashington is the capital of the United Statesʺ is a dogma of geography. ʺWater is composed of two atoms of
hydrogen and one of oxygenʺ is a dogma of
chemistry. Should we be broad‐minded and say that Washington is a sea in
Switzerland? Should we be broad‐minded and say that H2O is a symbol for sulfuric acid?
We cannot verify all the dogmas of science, history, and
literature, and therefore we are to take many of them on the testimony of
others. I believe Professor Eddington, for example, when he tells me that ʺEinsteinʹs law of gravitation asserts that ten principal coefficients of
curvature are zero in empty space,ʺ just as I do not believe Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes when he tells
me that ʺthe cockroach has
lived substantially unchanged on the earth for fifty million years.ʺ I accept Dr. Eddingtonʹs testimony because, by his learning and
his published works, he has proved that he knows something about Einstein. I do
not accept Dr. Barnesʹs testimony about
cockroaches because he has never qualified in the eyes of the modern world as a
cockroach specialist. In other words, I sift testimony and accept it on reason.
So also, my reason sifts the historical evidence for Christ; it
weighs the testimony adduced by those who knew Him, and the testimony given by
Himself. It fails to be swayed by those who start with a preconceived theory,
rejecting all the evidence against their theory and accepting the residue as
the Gospels. In the search, it comes across such works as those of Renan and
Strauss, which are critical, but it also comes across such works as those of
Fillion and Grandmaison: it knows the name of Loisy, but it also knows
Lagrange; it knows the theory of Inge, but it also knows DʹHerbigny. And this reason finally leads
me to accept the testimony of Jesus Christ as the testimony of God. I then accept
these truths — truths which I cannot prove, as was Professor Eddingtonʹs statement about Einstein — and these
truths become dogmas.
There can thus be dogmas of religion as well as dogmas of
science, and both of them can be revealed, the one by God, the other by man.
Not only that — these fundamental dogmas, like the first principles [elements]
of Euclid, can be used as raw material for thinking, and just as one scientific
fact can be used as the basis of another, so one dogma can be used as the basis
for another. But in order to begin thinking on a first dogma, one must be
identified with it either in time or in principle. The Church was identified
with Christ in both time and principle; she began thinking on His first
principles and the harder she thought, the more dogmas she developed. Being
organic like life, not institutional like a club, she never forgot those
dogmas; she remembered them and her memory is tradition. Just as a scientist must
depend on the memory of the first principles of his science, which he uses as
the ground for other conclusions, so too the Church goes back into her
intellectual memory, which is tradition, and uses former dogmas as the foundation
for new ones. In this whole process she never forgets her first principles. If
she did she would be like the undogmatic dogmatists of the present day, who
believe that progress consists in denying the fact, instead of building on it;
who turn to new ideals because they have never tried the old; who condemn as ʺobscurantistʺ the truth that has a parentage, and
glorify as ʺprogressiveʺ a shibboleth that knows not either its
father or its mother. They are of the school that would deny the very nature of
things: free the camel of his hump and call him a camel; shorten the neck of a
giraffe and call him a giraffe; and never frame a picture, because a frame is a
limitation and therefore a principal and a dogma.
But it is anything but progress to act like mice and eat the
foundations of the very roof over our heads. Intolerance about principles is
the foundation of growth, and the mathematician who would deride a square for
always having four sides, and in the name of progress would encourage it to
throw away even only one of its sides, would soon discover that he had lost all
his squares. So too with the dogmas of the Church, of science, and of reason;
they are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build, not like straw,
which is ʺreligious experience,ʺ fit only for burning.
A dogma, then, is the necessary consequence of the intolerance
of first principles, and that science or that church which has the greatest
amount of dogmas is the science or the church that has been doing the most
thinking. The Catholic Church, the schoolmaster for twenty centuries, has been
doing a tremendous amount of solid, hard thinking and hence has built up dogmas
as a man might build a house of brick but grounded on a rock. She has seen the centuries
with their passing enthusiasms and momentary loyalties pass before her, making
the same mistakes, cultivating the same poses, falling into the same mental
snares, so that she has become very patient and kind to the erring pupils, but
very intolerant and severe concerning the false. She has been and she will
always be intolerant so far as the rights of God are concerned, for heresy,
error, untruth, affect not personal matters on which she may yield, but a
Divine Right in which there is no yielding. Meek she is to the erring, but
violent to the error. The truth is divine; the heretic is human. Due reparation
made, she will admit the heretic back into the treasury of her souls, but never
the heresy into the treasury of her wisdom. Right is right if nobody is right,
and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need, as
Mr. Chesterton tells us, ʺnot a Church that is
right when the world is right, but a Church that is right when the world is
wrong.ʺ
The attitude of the Church in relation to the modern world on this
important question may be brought home by the story of the two women in the
courtroom of Solomon. Both of them claimed a child. The lawful mother insisted
on having the whole child or nothing, for a child is like truth — it cannot be
divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to
compromise. She was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of
broadmindedness.
