Religion and Sentiment. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri

There is no doubt that the religious phenomenon involves our whole being, rational faculty and feeling. Our Catholic faith affects everything we are, and it could not be otherwise.

But we must be very careful about suffocating religion in sentiment, which very often results in sentimentalism. While we can accept that a certain part of the mystical body accentuates this aspect, we cannot ensure that this becomes the prevailing principle that animates our faith.

Blessed Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855) already observed this in his History of Impiety when he said: "Benjamin Constant pretends to demonstrate that the religious sentiment, natural to man, is the principle of all religions, which, in his eyes, are no more than manifestations of that sentiment. Because that sentiment tries to manifest itself, but never succeeds in expressing itself completely, because all the external forms it finds are inadequate for it, and there always remains something immense, something infinite, which cannot be circumscribed, and cannot be represented. Hence, according to Constant, all religions are in a constant state of flux, and none ever attains a stable form. The external forms taken by religious sentiment become too narrow after some time; and then the sentiment discards them, and seeks new ones more dignified and broader, which in their turn it rejects and replaces with better ones.”

In short, we would be condemned to a continuous change and a continuous evolution of our faith, without ever having certainties or firm foundations. And what kind of faith is this? Is it logical to rest one's life on such fragile foundations?

This confinement of the religious phenomenon in the interior of man, the principle of immanence, was one of the cornerstones of modernism and

St. Pius X understood it lucidly and with great intellectual penetration in Pascendi:

"However, this Agnosticism is only the negative part of the system of the Modernist: the positive side of it consists in what they call vital immanence. This is how they advance from one to the other. Religion, whether natural or supernatural, must, like every other fact, admit of some explanation. But when Natural theology has been destroyed, the road to revelation closed through the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. Hence the principle of religious immanence is formulated. Moreover, the first actuation, so to say, of every vital phenomenon, and religion, as has been said, belongs to this category, is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment. Therefore, since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine.”

Now, don't think that the modernists have rejected this principle...not at all! In fact, in the very famous The Programme of the Modernists, published anonymously in response to Pascendi but mainly the work of

Ernesto Buonaiuti one can read:

"It is true that our postulates are inspired by immanentist principles because they all start from the presupposition that the subject is not passive in his cognitive and religious operations but draws from his own spiritual being both the testimony of a superior reality whose presence he perceives, and its abstract formulation. But is the principle of vital immanence that deleterious principle that the Encyclical seems to assume?"

Of course! - I would have answered Buonaiuti and the other authors of the document, because if one affirms that the subject is almost a creator of the religious phenomenon one implies that God is not independent of His creation and is almost an emanation of it. On the contrary, if the universe were not, God would still be God.

This is the problem we face when we reduce religion to religious sentiment, dogma to mutability, doctrine to pastoral fashions.