Through Scylla and Charybdis Author:George Tyrrell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV SEMPER EADEM (I) THE following review of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Problems and Persons was intended not to solve but to state the apparent dilemma raise... more »d by the conception of the Deposit of Faith as a body of theological doctrines and statements from which other statement might be deduced syllogistically. Either the whole process of theological and scientific development is held down to the categories of that statement and practically paralysed; or the patristic and traditional notion of the Deposit as a " form of sound words " must be abandoned altogether in favour of the notion that it is a Spirit, or Idea, or a perpetuated experience to be expressed by each generation in its own way, but having no sacred or classical form of expression. It seemed to me that Mr. Ward had not grasped this dilemma ; that the " development" admitted by scholastic theology had nothing but the name in common with the "development" of science, and could form no basis of reconciliation between the two; that as long as he admitted or did not deny that the Deposit of Faith was the first chapter of Theology, Mr. Ward's logical place was with the scholastics and not with the liberals—in short, that he had sought buthad not found a via media between scholastic theology and science—between the old theology and the new. My own solution is hinted at in the concluding paragraphs, where I suggest that the sacred " form of sound words" may have other than theological value; that its categories are eternalised merely as illustrative of that other value; and not as philosophically or scientifically valid. I was not yet clear enough to say more; and certainly the distinction between revelation and theology is not merely that between figurative and exact statements of the same truth—a distinction which wo...« less