The Encyclical of His Holiness Pius X on the Doctrine of the Modernists

This is a Latin and English version of Pascendi with a commentary afterwards. It is an excellent presentation of this most important Encyclical. A deplorable and dishonorable tendency common enough in every age of the history of Christianity, but especially conspicuous at the present hour, leads certain minds to avow loudly their allegiance to the Catholic Church and to parade their professions of loyalty to her institutions in order that they may the more effectively rend her unity by heresy and schism. They may not all be equally conscious of the drift of their agitation or of the depth and dangers of their treason. Carried away by their enthusiasm for mistaken methods of reform, held in bondage by their subserviency to false systems of philosophy, viewing history and institutions in the warm glow of sentiment and emotion instead of in the cold, white light of intelligence, they are tossed about by every wind of doctrine, after having cast to the waves the guidance. of reason, authority and tradition. Their books and pamphlets are generally written in a captivating style, because most of their statements derive substance, form and color from incandescent imaginations and are confessedly exempted from conforming to the laws either of inductive or deductive logic. It has been well said that while God in the beginning created men in His image, men now create Him in their image. The Modernists' conception of Him, His attributes and our relations to Him are a factitious product, a sort of Stromata, to borrow the title of one of Clement of Alexandria's works, formed out of the most heterogeneous philosophical theories. The idea of Contingency associated with the name of M. Boutrox, Herbert Spencer's Relativity, Newman's principle of Development, Loisy's Kenotic hypothesis, the Pragmatism of Professor James and Blondel's Philosophy of Action are blended together in a manner that recalls the ingredients of the caldron by which the witches foretold the fortunes of Macbeth in the cave on the blasted heath. But the unifying, controlling and organizing principle of their system is to be sought in Kant's teaching concerning the limitations of Our Reason and the authority of Conscience. The following passage, written more than four years ago by the Rev. William Turner, S. T. D., in his "History of Philosophy," exactly describes the dependence of Modernism on the Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant: