ABSTRACT
We are likewise well aware of the difficulty of the task thus described. The question was indeed never totally absent from Church history. Theology was never completely without the theme of the legitimate mode of tradition, nor did systematic reflexion in scientific form on the nature of theology and the connexions between the articles of faith and the individual truths of faith ever die out altogether, especially when apologetics on behalf of Church dogma against the sola Scriptura doctrine of Protestantism made this question more urgent in itself. But in the form in which we have to take up the question today, it is still very recent and hence to a great extent lacks clarification. In its present form and urgency it can only have existed since the 19th century. For it is only since the rise of modern historical science and of historicism that we can measure really clearly the difference and the distance between the forms adapted by the history of the spirit in general and the history of religious assertions in particular. The heresies of liberal Protestantism and modernism on the one hand, with their denial of the identity throughout the ages of Church dogma; the insufficiency of much current apologetics on behalf of this identity, on the other hand, conceding only a minor change in verbal formulas – both show how difficult and how little mastered the question still is. If one is honest one will hardly say that ‘Humani Generis’ did more than accomplish one task, a primary one indeed, of the magisterium, namely to warn negatively against a historicist relativization of Church dogma. A really positive and progressive doctrine on the positive legitimacy of such development and its positive modes and possibilities, will undoubtedly be sought in vain in ‘Humani Generis’. The question is all the more difficult today, because we have experienced a remarkable change of fronts in recent years. In the 19th century, Protestant liberal theology reproached the Catholic Church with an unreal and fatal petrifaction of ancient dogma. Now neo-Protestant orthodoxy, with a renovated doctrine of sola Scriptura, charges the Catholic magisterium with an arbitrary search for novelty, which creates new dogmas without any foundation in Scripture. Hence while we formerly had to defend our
understand it today as it has been understood for fifteen hundred years, now on the contrary we have to uphold positively the right of dogma to undergo development. The question is therefore controverted on two sides: namely how authentic identity on the one hand and really genuine development on the other can be reconciled. The problem is undoubtedly very difficult, because it ultimately reaches down to the obscure depths of a general ontology of being and becoming, of the persistence of identity in change – and also comprises the general metaphysics of knowledge and mind, which frames the same questions in searching for truth, with regard to its identity and real historical involvement. On all these questions therefore we must confine ourselves to a few remarks, rather loosely put together, which are only meant as a basis of discussion.
