On 'mere Catholicism'

The doctrine of the ‘Great Church’, as it stood on the eve of 1054, includes, first of all, the main fabric of Trinitarian and Christological dogma, including, of course, the beliefs in our Lord’s virginal birth, bodily Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven; the presuppositions of Christian soteriology known as the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin; belief in Christ’s atoning Death as objectively bringing within our reach that salvation which we could never have earned for ourselves; the doctrines of the Sacraments as the means of grace, of the Real Presence and the Eucharistic sacrifice; of the grace of Orders and the necessity of the episcopal succession from the Apostles; of the Church’s absolving power in Penance; of Confirmation and Unction; of the Communion of Saints; and of the last things, Heaven and Hell, and the intermediate state, and the Last Judgment. There is surely enough information here to satisfy even the most passionate cravings for dogmatic authority; the map is surely definite enough for even the most timorous sailor to steer by.

On the other hand, it is equally important to remember what is not included in this body of teaching. The doctrine of the Holy Undivided Church of the seven general councils does not include the Filioque … it does not include, as a matter of necessary belief, the view that purgatory involves pain, however probable this view may appear in itself to be; though it concedes a primacy of honour to the Bishop of Rome, it does not attribute to him either a supremacy of jurisdiction or a personal infallibility; whilst it affirms the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, it leaves open the question of the precise way in which this inspiration acted, thus enabling Catholic theologians to move with ease in the worlds of biblical and historical scholarship; whilst it maintains the objectivity of our Saviour’s sacrifice for sin, it does not tie us down either to the Cappadocian, the Anselmian, the Lutheran, or any other particular method of conceiving its modus operandi; whilst its developed Eucharistic doctrine is, no doubt, amply consistent with the later Western cultus of the Reserved Sacrament, it cannot be said to compel or necessitate this cultus. And it is entirely free from the mass of fantastic “pious opinions” elaborated by the Schoolmen and their successors on the basis of a pre-critical exegesis and an implicit faith in Aristotelian logic. We are not required by it to believe that hell is situated in the centre of the earth, that the fire of hell is material, that Noah was accustomed to relieve the tedium of life in the Ark by meditating on the Immaculate Conception, or that Elijah is still living, in his physical body, in some remote corner of this actual concrete universe.

In the teaching of the Undivided Church we have a faith, strong and definite enough for all the practical necessities of life, sufficiently hard and closely wrought to resist the corrosive influences of agnostic criticism, and yet elastic enough to find room within its sheltering folds for the infinite diversity of temperaments with which God has endowed His human creatures – not merely for the dévot or the charcoal-burner, but for the keen-eyed scientis, the single-minded historian, the lover of freedom for its own sake, the rugged, prosaic, and unimaginative types of humanity. It is capable of appealing, and has appealed, just as much to the northern or Teutonic races as to the Latin and Celtic inhabitants of the Mediterranean world. The exactness of its definition is just enough to secure it against the risk of evaporation – a fate which the sixteenth-century versions of Christianity are undergoing before our eyes; and yet it is not so rigidly crystallized in forms peculiar to a past epoch as to resist the fullest integration with the thought and accumulated knowledge of the present. A frank acceptance, on the part of Christian thinkers, of all that the Undivided Church believed - and a no less frank willingness to drop, as necessary credenda, any later opinions which it can not be shown to have believed – would be fraught with the happiest auguries for the reconciliation of the principles of supernatural Authority and free human Reason.

- Dr N. P. Williams, ‘Our Position: Authority in Matters of Belief’, Report of the First Anglo-Catholic Congress, 1920