Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

In 1903, when Pius X ascended the papal throne, he did so believing that ‘the number of enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly’. He said he was convinced that only believers could be ‘on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval’.74 He therefore took it upon himself to continue Leo’s fight against modernism, and with renewed vigour. In Lamentabili, his decree of 1907, he condemned sixty-five specific propositions of modernism, including the biblical criticisms, and reasserted the doctrine of the principle of the mystery of faith. Yet more books were placed on the Index and candidates for higher orders were obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, in a form of words which required their rejection of modernist ideas. Lamentabili reasserted the role of dogma one more time, in the famous phrase: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’