158. EXPOSITION OF TRADITIONALIST THEORIES.

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A. Ac

cording to De Bonald, the certain assent of the individual not only

to the fundamental truths of religion, but to natural truths, is

based not on their appeal to the individual human reason, but on

the authority which the individual finds for them in the fact that

they are accepted by mankind and delivered to him by his fellow-

men in society. To Rousseau s assertion of the absolute self-suffi

ciency of the individual in isolation from society, De Bonald

opposed not the mere contradictory, " that the individual is not

wholly self-sufficient, that he is partly dependent on the social

milieu" but the contrary counter-assertion, "that without society

the individual is absolutely helpless, that he owes everything he

has, intellectually and morally, to society " : for society is the

vehicle which hands down by tradition the Primitive Divine

Revelation without which no knowledge is possible.

Of this the first and chief proof offered by De Bonald is the

psychological proof based upon the origin of language. Man

is physically incapable of thought without language, without

words pronounced at least mentally. He has, no doubt, in his

nature the power of thinking, but he cannot exercise it without

words in which to clothe his ideas consciously. He could not

attain even to the primordial certitude of Descartes Cogito, ergo

sum, were he not already in possession of words to make his

thought consciously intelligible to himself. Hence the aphorism :

Ilfaut penser sa parole avant de pouvoir parler sa fensce : we must

think our words before we can consciously conceive (or mentally

express to ourselves) our thought. But if this be true it is plain

that man cannot possibly have ever invented language himself:

for to do so he should think the language, but he cannot think

without language. The alternative is that God must have en

dowed our first parents with the gift of rational speech. This

language embodied and expressed the. Primitive Divine Revela

tion, which, therefore, may be described as a natural revelation

in distinction from the subsequent, supernatural revelations of

the Old and the New Law. Tradition is the vehicle of all those

revelations, and to them we owe all we know or can know : for

it will be apparent that even our certitude of our own in

dividual existence rests ultimately on the Authority which

294 THEOR V OF KNO WLEDGE

endowed us with the gift of rational speech through which alone

we can consciously think our own existence.

A second and corroborative argument to prove that all our

certitude, all our knowledge, natural and supernatural, physical

and moral, secular and religious, rests ultimately on this basis of

Divine Revelation, is drawn from such considerations as that

each individual acquires all his knowledge only in and through

and with language, which language he does not invent but

receives or learns from his fellow-men ; that even the truths that

are necessary for physical existence, about food, shelter, clothing,

fire, etc. (15), are transmitted from parent to child ; that even of

mathematical truths we are not really certain until we find them

universally accepted ; that especially the fundamental truths of

religion and morals, the existence of God, the immortality of

the soul, the reality of Divine sanctions for human conduct, etc.,

are de facto accepted only on the Divine Authority of which

tradition is the vehicle, and could not possibly impose themselves

effectively on mankind if God had not revealed and imposed

them, or if individual men were supposed per impossibile to have

at any time discovered them unaided.

Since, therefore, all our spontaneous knowledge has been

communicated to us by our fellow-men, since they are the chan

nel through which it has come to us from God, since the Divine

Authority is our only and all-sufficient ground for accepting it,

the starting-point of all philosophical reflection on this knowledge

must not be a " dubito" but a " credo ". And philosophical re

flection must not take the form of an impossible and impractic

able effort of the individual reason to show any truth to be

attainable by the independent activity of the individual reason ;

rather it must take the form of a recognition ab initio that all

our knowledge has been communicated by God to mankind, and

has been handed down to us through the vehicle of tradition.

In other words, there can be no such thing as a rational phil

osophy apart from Faith, but rather all true philosophy will be

a religious apologetic, a defence of the whole system of divinely

revealed truth.

B. The teaching of De Lamennais is the same in principle as

that of De Bonald. Its main feature is the substitution of the

dictate of the common sense of human nature ("la doctrine du

sens commnn, fondle sur la nature de 1 homme ") for that of the

individual reason (" sens flrt vS," " sens particulicr" " raison indi-

TRADITIONALISM 295

viduelle"}, and the contention that the supreme test of truth is

not the evidential appeal of things to individual intellect but the

common agreement of the human race ("/ consentement commun ")

in accepting and assenting to judgments as true, the verdict of

universal human reason (i.e. of mankind generally) as to what is

true (" la raison generate" : " sensus communis humani generis " :

"concors auctoritas hominum "). In his Essai sur f indifference

en matiere de religion, he claims to trace the prevalent religious

indifference of his time to the pretension that the individual man,

by his own unaided reason, independently of his fellow-men and

of what he learns from them, can attain to truth by the Cartesian

way of following the "evidence" of things, or "what appears

clear " in things. But he cannot : contradictories " appear clear "

to different individuals. The individual reason is fallible : it

must be guided by the collective reason (" la raison gencrale ")

which is the real voice of man s nature, and which alone is

infallible because it is ultimately the voice of the Divine Reason,

being the organon or instrument through which God transmits

from generation to generation the truth which in the beginning

He revealed to our first parents. Certitude, therefore, is not to

be sought in the dictate of the individual mind, but outside it in

the concordant dictate or common assent of the collective mind.

And hence " we must of necessity begin by faith "- 1

The supreme criterion of the truth of any judgment must be

its conformity with the common verdict or assent of mankind.

Without faith in this common dictate we can be certain of noth

ing : individual reason can only doubt. But nature forces us

to believe. The use of reason and of language implies many

invincible beliefs, e.g. belief in the connexion of language with

thought ; and the necessity of language for thought implies the

intellectual dependence of the individual on the community, on

society, on the human intercourse which teaches him all he knows

(cf. De Bonald). Futhermore, "we have only to open our eyes

to see that in discerning the true and the false we are naturally

guided by the common assent of men ", 2 The existence of God

is proved by this common belief of mankind : a belief which is

the living and abiding witness of God s revelation of Himself to

1 " We must [each] say / believe that God exists before we can reasonably say

I exist." Defense de I essai sur Vindiffi-rence, etc., p. 571 (apitd MERCIER, op. cit.,

64, p. 134).

- Defense, etc., pp. 612-13 apud MERCIER, I.e., p. 138.

296 TtfEOR Y OF KNO W LEDGE

men. Therefore belief in Divine Revelation as the source of the

knowledge expressed and transmitted in the universal assents

of collective human reason is the ultimate basis of all human

certitude.

The system thus barely outlined is defended by De Lamen-

nais with an abundant wealth of argument and illustration, (a)

To prove the impotence of the individual mind, reasoning by it

self and without recognizing the need of faith, he appeals to the

errors and contradictions of philosophers in every age (39, A).

(^) In the conflict of human opinions and beliefs, where, he asks,

are we to turn for an arbiter? To the individual reason? Im

possible. The atheist will claim that his individual reason is as

worthy of consideration as that of the believer. No ; the only

possible arbiter is authority, the authority of the common sense

or assent of mankind. 1 (c) Not only is the acceptance of this

authority a psychological necessity, but it is just as much a psy

chological necessity to believe first in order to use one s reason at

all. When we commence to reflect critically on our convictions,

we find that they all imply belief and came by belief: through in

tercourse with, and belief in, our fellow-men. Many of these be

liefs are invincible, and at first inexplicable. But when we reflect

on their origin and on the grounds of their validity, we find that

they have their only possible source and ground in the unani

mous dictate or voice of the human race speaking authoritatively

to the individual, bearing witness to him of a Divine Teacher,

acting as the organon or vehicle of His teaching, and thus reveal

ing to him that Divine Authority which he is thereupon inevit

ably forced to recognize as the ultimate ground and motive of all

truth and certitude.

C. According to the milder form of traditionalism, sometimes

called semi-traditionalism, an original Divine Revelation, trans

mitted by tradition through human society as its organon, is not

required for natural knowledge and certitude about secular,

mundane, material things : such knowledge lies within reach of

the individual human reason. But for all our concepts of the

1 And that this is the real arbiter we find borne out by the fact that it is the most

highly gifted men intellectually who are the most diffident of the power of the in

dividual mind and the most prompt to consult the common verdict of men generally ;

by the fact that our assent to an " evident " truth is strengthened by our knowledge

that men generally assent to it ; and by the fact that men regard it as folly in the

individual to set up his ipse dixit in opposition to the common conviction. Cf.

Defense, etc., pp. 589, 625-6 apud MEKCIER, op. cit., p. 136.

TRADITIONALISM 297

immaterial, spiritual, moral, and religioiis domain of realities, 1 for

attaining to the knowledge of God, immortality, the moral law

and a future life, the individual mind is absolutely and essentially

dependent on the Divine teaching thus communicated to it

through society. It is from such Divine source that each in

dividual de facto acquires these convictions, through belief in

the testimony of society transmitting this deposit of revealed

truth. When the individiial is enlightened by the possession of

these truths through faith, he can then indeed accomplish the

task of formulating a rational demonstration or proof of them,

and, a fortiori, of showing that no reasoning or argumentation

of atheists, agnostics, or unbelievers can avail to disprove them.

But he could not accomplish this task had his individual reason

been left isolated and thrown on its own native resources, had

it not been illumined, developed, " informed," by the " social

teaching," the " institutio socialis" through which it first acquired

its heritage of moral and religious concepts and convictions.

In the "social formation" of the individual mind, the process thus held

to be necessary to enable the individual mind to reach a reasoned or demon

strated knowledge and certitude of God s existence, human immortality, etc.,

language was held to be not indeed an endowment that essentially implied a

Divine Revelation (as De Bonald had contended), but to be an essential con

dition for the use of reason, an indispensable excitant for provoking, stimulat

ing, calling forth intellectual thought.

A more important and debatable point concerning the " institutio

socialis " which those writers claimed to be necessary for the individual man

before he could rationally prove tt\& preambula fidei God s existence (and

Veracity) and the fact of Revelation or reach a reasoned certitude con

cerning them, was this : Did such " institutio" such didactic and educative

(doctrinal and moral) influence of society on the individual, essentially involve,

in the minds of those writers, or does it essentially involve in reality, that

mankind should have been taught, enlightened, instructed ab initio by a

positive Divine Revelation ? so that unless or until such Revelation were

made to mankind the human race could never attain or have attained (by the

unaided power of reason) to a knowledge of the Creator, of man s own de

pendence on the Creator, and of his consequent moral and religious duties

towards the Creator ? And on such a hypothesis, would such knowledge be

only a "natural " knowledge, and the religion based on it a "natural " re

ligion ? as distinct from the " supernatural " knowledge, which, according to

the teaching of the Catholic Church, was de facto communicated to man in

the original, the Mosaic, and the Christian Revelations, and from " super

natural " religion based on the teaching or content of those Revelations. This

point will recur for consideration at a later stage (163).

1 Vestiges of ontologism are found mingled with this later form of traditionalism.

298 T/fEOR V OF KNO WLEDGR