In September 1907 the traditionalists finally got what they had been praying for when, from Rome, Pope Pius X published his encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis. This unequivocally condemned modernism in all its forms. Papal encyclicals (letters to all bishops of the church) rarely make headlines now, but they were once very reassuring for the faithful, and Pascendi was the first of the century.85 The ideas that Pius was responding to may be grouped under four headings. There was first the general attitude of science, developed since the Enlightenment, which brought about a change in the way that man looked at the world around him and, in the appeal to reason and experience that science typified, constituted a challenge to established authority. Then there was the specific science of Darwin and his concept of evolution. This had two effects. First, evolution carried the Copernican and Galilean revolutions still further toward the displacement of man from a specially appointed position in a limited universe. It showed that man had arisen from the animals, and was essentially no different from them and certainly not set apart in any way. The second effect of evolution was as metaphor: that ideas, like animals, evolve, change, develop. The theological modernists believed that the church – and belief – should evolve too, that in the modern world dogma as such was out of place. Third, there was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), who argued that there were limits to reason, that human observations of the world were ‘never neutral, never free of priorly imposed conceptual judgements’, and because of that one could never know that God exists. And finally there were the theories of Henri Bergson. As we have seen, he actually supported spiritual notions, but these were very different from the traditional teachings of the church and closely interwoven with science and reason.86
The theological modernists believed that the church should address its own ‘self-serving’ forms of reason, such as the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the pope. They also wanted a reexamination of church teaching in the light of Kant, pragmatism, and recent scientific developments. In archaeology there were the discoveries and researches of the German school, who had made so much of the quest for the historical Jesus, the evidence for his actual, temporal existence rather than his meaning for the faithful. In anthropology, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough had shown the ubiquity of magical and religious rites, and their similarities in various cultures. This great diversity of religions had therefore undermined Christian claims to unique possession of truth – people found it hard to believe, as one writer said, ‘that the greater part of humanity is plunged in error.’87 With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see Pascendi as yet another stage in ‘the death of God.’ However, most of the young clergy who took part in the debate over theological modernism did not wish to leave the church; instead they hoped it would ‘evolve’ to a higher plane.
The pope in Rome, Pius X (later Saint Pius), was a working-class man from Riese in the northern Italian province of the Veneto. Unsophisticated, having begun his career as a country priest, he was not surprisingly an uncompromising conservative and not at all afraid to get into politics. He therefore responded to the young clergy not by appeasing their demands but by carrying the fight to them. Modernism was condemned outright, without any prevarication, as ‘nothing but the union of the faith with false philosophy.’88 Modernism, for the pope and traditional Catholics, was defined as ‘an exaggerated love of what is modern, an infatuation for modern ideas.’ One Catholic writer even went so far as to say it was ‘an abuse of what is modern.’89 Pascendi, however, was only the most prominent part of a Vatican-led campaign against modernism. The Holy Office, the Cardinal Secretary of State, decrees of the Consistorial Congregation, and a second encyclical, Editae, published in 1910, all condemned the trend, and Pius repeated the argument in several papal letters to cardinals and the Catholic Institute in Paris. In his decree, Lamentabili, he singled out for condemnation no fewer than sixty-five specific propositions of modernism. Moreover, candidates for higher orders, newly appointed confessors, preachers, parish priests, canons, and bishops’ staff were all obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, according to a formula ‘which reprobates the principal modernist tenets.’ And the primary role of dogma was reasserted: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’90
Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. Discoveries in the sciences were coming thick and fast in the early years of the century, changes in the arts were more bewildering and challenging than ever. It was good to have a rock in this turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening.
One place they weren’t listening was China. There, in 1900, the number of Christian converts, after several centuries of missionary work, was barely a million. The fact is that the intellectual changes taking place in China were very different from anywhere else. This immense country was finally coming to terms with the modern world, and that involved abandoning, above all, Confucianism, the religion that had once led China to the forefront of mankind (helping to produce a society that first discovered paper, gunpowder, and much else) but had by then long ceased to be an innovative force, had indeed become a liability. This was far more daunting than the West’s piecemeal attempts to move beyond Christianity.
Confucianism began by taking its fundamental strength, its basic analogy, from the cosmic order. Put simply, there is in Confucianism an hierarchy of superior-inferior relationships that form the governing principle of life. ‘Parents are superior to children, men to women, rulers to subjects.’ From this, it follows that each person has a role to fulfil; there is a ‘conventionally fixed set of social expectations to which individual behaviour should conform.’ Confucius himself described the hierarchy this way: ‘Jun jun chen chen fu fu zi zi,’ which meant, in effect, ‘Let the ruler rule as he should and the minister be a minister as he should. Let the father act as a father should and the son act as a son should.’ So long as everyone performs his role, social stability is maintained.91 In laying stress on ‘proper behaviour according to status,’ the Confucian gentleman was guided by li, a moral code that stressed the quiet virtues of patience, pacifism, and compromise, respect for ancestors, the old, and the educated, and above all a gentle humanism, taking man as the measure of all things. Confucianism also stressed that men were naturally equal at birth but perfectible, and that an individual, by his own efforts, could do ‘the right thing’ and be a model for others. The successful sages were those who put ‘right conduct’ above everything else.92
And yet, for all its undoubted successes, the Confucian view of life was a form of conservatism. Given the tumultuous changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the system was failing could not be disguised for long. As the rest of the world coped with scientific advances, the concepts of modernism and the advent of socialism, China needed changes that were more profound, the mental and moral road more tortuous. The ancient virtues of patience and compromise no longer offered real hope, and the old and the traditionally educated no longer had the answers. Nowhere was the demoralisation more evident than in the educated class, the scholars, the very guardians of the neo-Confucian faith.