Religion
Religion essential to society--Paramouncy of the
spiritual--Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism;
Protestantism--Christ's teaching: its truths and
imperfections--The doctrines of the new faith: God;
Progress; Immortality--The criteria of Truth: the
conscience; tradition--Humanity--The need of unity;
authority; church and state; the new church.
Mazzini's life was one piece of almost perfect consistency and
continuity. Save in minor points of policy, it had no turnings, no
conversions, no recantations. Alike in theory and practice, it goes on
its straight, undeviating course from his youthful literary essays to
the full-bodied doctrine of _The Duties of Man_ and _From the Council
to God_, from the first days of Young Italy to those of the Republican
Alliance. And its magnificent unity comes of this, that all was
dominated by a scheme of thought, that controlled and correlated each
sphere of human action. Supremely he achieved the harmony of life,
which he never wearied of extolling. He was politician, philosopher,
religious reformer, literary critic; and every side of life completes
the others in a perfect synthesis. At the centre of it all,
controlling, illuminating, energizing, stands his religious faith. To
him religion was "the eternal, essential, indwelling element of life,"
"the breath of humanity, its soul and life and consciousness and
outward symbol," hallowing men's thoughts and actions, ennobling,
consoling, fortifying, the inspiring principle of brotherhood and
social service. Deep in the conscience of each man, inseparable from
life, lies the religious sense,--the sense of the Infinite and
Imperishable, the aspiration to the Unknown and Invisible, the innate
desire to apprehend God in his intellect and love. "If ever you have,"
he once said, "a strange moment of religious feeling, of supreme
resignation, of quiet love of humanity, of a calm insight of duty,
kneel down thankful, and treasure within yourself the feeling suddenly
arisen. It is the feeling of life." And with the sense of the Divine,
there comes to man the yearning to reach after the divine perfection
and the importunate searching for the way. In every age, men have
asked "to know, or at least to surmise, something of the starting-point
and goal of mundane existence"; and religion comes to teach "the
general principles that rule humanity, to sanction the link that makes
men brothers in the consciousness of that one origin, one mission, one
common aim." Man makes that mission and that aim his guiding star in
all his strivings for the good; and in every branch of his activity he
steers his course by his knowledge of God. "From the general formula,
that men call religion, issues a rule of education, a basis of human
brotherhood, a policy, a social economy, an art." It is impossible to
keep it out of politics. It is there "in all questions of the
franchise, of the condition of the masses, of nationality,"--all
intimately linked with the religious thought of the time, all part of
God's providential scheme for man. "I do not know," he says,
"speaking historically, a single great conquest of the human spirit, a
single important step for the perfecting of human society, which has
not had its roots in a strong religious faith." "No true society
exists without a common faith and common purpose; politics are the
application, religion gives the principle." Where this common faith is
not, the mere will of the majority means permanent instability and the
oppression of the rest; "without God, you can coerce, but you cannot
persuade; you may be tyrants in your turn, but you cannot be educators
or apostles."
Without religion, then,--deep, heartfelt, vitalising religion,--there
can be no true community. Materialism had been tried, and had
failed;--failed because it was "an individualist, cold, calculating
doctrine, that slowly, infallibly extinguished every spark of high
thinking or free life, that first plunged men into the worship of
success, then made them slaves of triumphant violence and the
accomplished fact." It killed enthusiasm in the individual; it killed
true greatness in a nation. Bare ethics had been tried, "but no
morality can endure or bring forth life, without a heaven and a dogma
to support it." "No, man needs more than simple ethics; he craves to
solve his doubts, to slake his thirsting for a future; he wants to
know whence he comes and whither he goes." Men had tried philosophy,
and indeed philosophy, that took humanity and not the individual for
its study, was "the science of the law of life"; but by itself it was
a barren rock, where life could find no resting-place. "Heresy is
sacred," but only as the transient stage between a lower and a higher
faith. Philosophy can "analyse and anatomise and dissect," but it has
no breath of life to "decree duty or push men to deeds by giving
ethics a new strength and grandeur." The needs of the age are less
intellectual than spiritual. "What we want, what the people want, what
the age is crying for, that it may find an issue from this slough of
selfishness and doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our
souls may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march
together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one goal." And such
a faith, and only such a faith, will give the solid, strong
convictions and the energy and unity, by which alone society can be
healed. "Any strong faith, that rises on the wreck of the old,
exhausted creeds, will transform the existing social order, since
every strong belief must needs apply itself to every branch of human
activity; because always, in every age, earth has sought conformity
with the heaven in which it believed; because all Humanity repeats
under different formulas and in different degrees the words of the
Lord's Prayer of Christendom: Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in
heaven."
Where shall this faith be found,--this living, vitalising faith, for
which the age is groping, for want of which its aspiration and its
efforts are in vain? Does Christianity supply it? Mazzini asked the
question reverently and tenderly. Religion, he says, is above and
independent of creeds, but every creed is sacred, for each has added
to man's knowledge of God and of himself. However incomplete a faith,
so it be a faith indeed, it helps to hallow life. He felt his a
spiritual kinship more with Catholic priest and Protestant pastor, who
lighted earth with broken rays of the divine, than with the sceptic,
who would shut out God and immortality, enthusiasm and love.
Reverently, then, he tested Christianity. For the superstructures,
indeed, that Catholics and Protestants had built upon the Christianity
of Christ, he felt respect and sympathy, but little love. He had his
special grievances against the Papacy for the evil work it had done in
his own country, and he hated it, as only an Italian of his day could
hate it. He held it to be irrevocably doomed: doomed, since the
Reformation took the North from it;--doomed, "because it has betrayed
its mission to protect the weak, because for three centuries and a
half it has committed fornication with the princes of this world,
because at the bidding of every evil and unbelieving government it has
crucified Jesus afresh in the name of egoism,"--doomed, because it
stood apart from the great humanitarian movements of the century, the
freeing of Greece and Italy, the emancipation of the blacks;--doomed
for the root sin, of which these were but consequences, that it had
become "a phantasm of religion," "without faith or power or mission."
It had missed the meaning of Christ's teaching; it had sinned against
the Holy Spirit, and there was no forgiveness for it. "God will
provide for the abominated idolatry, God, who breaks all idols that
were and are and shall be." Sometimes he was confident, that, before
the century was out, the Papacy would be extinct. And yet, in spite of
all, he respected what had been a great fact in the history of
religion. Like every strong belief, it had in its time done high
service for humanity, it had had its share of the noble and sublime
and potent. "I remember it all and bow myself before your past." And
die though it must, he would it should die nobly, "like the sun in
the great ocean," rejoicing that God's great design bade it make place
for a more perfect faith.
For Protestantism his feeling was colder both in its sympathies and
antipathies. His Catholic training, his craving for formal unity, made
it difficult for him to read it sympathetically; and he saw it chiefly
in its defects,--its exaggeration of the individual, its rejection of
tradition, its sectarianism, its "indefinite dismembering of the
common thought." He recognised somewhat, though imperfectly, the
political and social work, which was indissolubly bound up with
Puritanism; "'God and the People,'" he said in one of his letters to
English working men, "were the inspirers of your Cromwell." As
Catholicism had one side of the truth in its respect for tradition, so
Protestantism had the other in its assertion of individual
interpretation, and in this it had apprehended the essence of
Christianity more truly than Catholicism had done. But though
Protestants were slowly learning the value of tradition, the
preeminence of Humanity over man, they still magnified the individual,
till their creed had become a doctrine of material and spiritual
selfishness, which must logically develop into pure materialism. He
charged it with inspiring the inhumanity and anarchy of the
_laissez-faire_ economy. It had made the salvation of the individual
soul the end of life; and thus it had sundered religion from society,
and dwarfed the all-embracing plan of God to the puny borders of a
loveless pietism.
But when Mazzini passes from Catholicism and Protestantism to Christ,
his attitude is one of infinite reverence and love. His close
knowledge of the Gospels, his native kinship with their spirit, had
brought him very near the mind of Christ, and he spoke of Him in
beautiful and tender words. Christ's "was the soul most full of love,
of holiest virtue, most inspired by God and by the Future, that men
have ever hailed upon this earth." He "came for all; he spoke to all
and for all. He lifted up the People and died for it." "I love Jesus,"
he once wrote in a private letter, "as the man who has loved the most
all mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins and Helots
or Parias." "In Jesus," so he wrote to the Oecumenical Council, "we
worship the Founder of an age that freed the individual, the Apostle
of the unity of law,--that law which he understood more fully than did
any of the generations before him,--the Prophet of the equality of
souls: and we bow ourselves before him, as the man who among all we
know of loved the most, whose life, an unexampled harmony between
thought and practice, proclaimed the holy doctrine of sacrifice,
henceforth to be the everlasting foundation of all religion and all
virtue; but we do not cancel the woman-born in God, we do not raise
him where we cannot hope to join him; we would love him as the brother
who was better than us all, not worship him and fear him as pitiless
judge and intolerant tyrant of the future." In Christ's teaching he
found many of the moral and social truths that were dearest to him.
"Does not every word of the Gospel breathe the spirit of liberty and
equality, of that war with evil and injustice and falsehood, that
inspires our work?" The cross was the symbol of "the one true immortal
virtue, the sacrifice of self for others." "Unity of faith, love for
one another, human brotherhood, activity in well-doing, the doctrine
of sacrifice, the doctrine of equality, the abolition of aristocracy,
the perfecting of the individual, liberty,--all are summed up in
Christ's words, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as
thyself,' and 'Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your
servant.'" Christ's teaching had inspired each struggle for truth from
the Crusades to Lepanto, had destroyed feudalism, was destroying now
the aristocracy of blood; Poles and Greeks had marched to freedom's
battles under the flag of Jesus and His mother. And, above all, Christ
gave the promise of indefinite religious progress,--a promise, which
closed the mouths of those who would arbitrarily pin men to a fixed
doctrine. 'The Spirit of truth shall abide with you for ever, ... and
shall teach you all things.' "On the eve of his accepted sacrifice,
when his mighty love for his brethren lit up the darkness of the
future, he had sight of the continuous revelation of the Spirit
through humanity." This was the 'eternal gospel' of the mystics of the
middle ages; and Christ's promise stood true to-day. "God forgive
you," he wrote to a Catholic friend, "you do not understand
Christ,--Christ who died that humanity may some day free itself to
rise to God by its own strength."
He paused anxiously before he declared himself no Christian. His
temperament and outlook on life were essentially Christian; he tried
to read new meanings into Christian doctrines; words of Christian
prayer came naturally to his lips; Christmas Day was "sacred" to him.
Several times in early life he cherished schemes of reform within the
church; for some years he doubted how far religious development could
be built on Christian foundations, whether the new church would be "an
application of Christianity" or "a religion to succeed" it. At all
events Christian ethics would remain. "The morality of Christ is
eternal; humanity will add to it, but will not take from it one word."
And for long yet Christianity would abide, the greatest of the creeds.
"This will reach you on Christmas Day," he wrote to an English friend.
"I am not a Christian, I belong to what I believe to be a still purer
and higher Faith; but its time has not yet come; and until that day
the Christian manifestation remains the most sacred revelation of the
ever-onward progressing spirit of mankind."
But that its doctrine and its cult must some day pass, that its ethics
needed supplementing, he had convinced himself, at all events as early
as his Swiss days. He wasted little time in attacking particular
articles of the Christian faith, for analytical criticism was always
hateful to him. But he thought it had certain essential imperfections,
because of which it failed, and was bound to fail to content the
present reach of human knowledge or inspire men's activities. He
charged it, firstly, with not sanctifying the things of earth. The
church taught that the world was evil, life here an expiation, heaven
the soul's true home. At one time he appealed against the church to
Christ's own teaching, to texts that spoke of God's will being done on
earth, of power given to Christ in earth, of the promise that the meek
should inherit the earth. In later life he qualified this reading of
the gospel. Jesus, "a soul blessed with such mighty love and perfect
harmony between thought and action," could not fail to realise the
harmony of earth and heaven. But "while he stood and stands alone,
supreme over all other great religious reformers in everything that
concerns the heart and affections, his intellectual grasp did not
extend beyond the requirements of a single epoch." At the time in
which he lived, he "saw no possible mission for the sake of the
brethren whom he loved, save by moral regeneration, by creating a
country of freemen and equals in heaven. He wished to show mankind how
it could find salvation and redemption in spite of and in opposition
to the world." Great Christian statesmen and thinkers of a later
time,--Gregory VII. and Thomas Aquinas,--had tried to bring the
temporal under the spiritual law. But they had failed, and the normal
Christianity of the day was fatally divorced from religion and
politics and art and science. It left the bigger part of life without
God's law to guide it. It told men to renounce the world, when their
duty was to live in it and battle in it and better it.
Christianity again came short, because it left out of ken the
collective life of the race. The conception was an impossible one at
the time in which Christ lived; and its absence maimed men's knowledge
of God, and shortened their power to attain to the Divine Ideal.
Christianity pointed, indeed, to "salvation, that is perfection"; but
it recognised no instrument beyond "the weak, unequal, isolated,
ineffective strength of the individual." Mazzini's criticism came to
this: Christianity tells each man to perfect himself by his own
strength and God's; but his spiritual growth is conditioned by the
growth of the men around him, and therefore his own perfecting
depends on the progress of the race, the common search for good, that
links all men together and the generations to one another. Mazzini
always regarded the French Revolution as the political expression, the
"daughter" of Christianity, and there the depreciation of the race,
the exaggeration of the individual had borne their necessary fruit of
moral selfishness and social anarchy. Yet again, though Christ had
promised the continuous teaching of his Spirit, ever leading to new
truth, the doctrine of redemption was inconsistent with any theory of
progress. There was no Fall; man had begun at the bottom and had been
tending upwards ever since. Salvation was for men, not from a single,
isolated act, but from the slow, unceasing, inevitable working of the
providential scheme. The individual came nearer the divine, not by
faith in Christ's sacrifice, but by his own works, by sacrifice of
self, by faith in the "ideal that every man is called to incarnate in
himself." And because of these imperfections in its theory of life,
Christianity had ceased to be a vitalising force. For some it had
become an ethical system, for others a philosophy, while men needed a
religion. Politics and art and science had gone their own ways.
Christian morality knew not patriotism. Charity was its only remedy
for social wrongs, and charity was impotent to stop the springs of
poverty. Men gave lip-service to Christ's teaching, but it had no
binding influence on their lives. It offered no solution for their
perplexities; it was no longer a faith that could move mountains or
remould the modern world. Its day had gone, and all the efforts of
neo-Christians or Christian Socialists or Old Catholics to make it
answer to modern needs were bound to fail, as the neo-Platonists had
failed in their day to galvanise paganism. "Jesus warned you, when on
earth," he said to "the Anglo-Saxon Christian Socialists," "that you
cannot put new wine into old bottles."
Such was Mazzini's criticism of Christianity, not always consistent
with itself, sometimes confounding Christ's thought with others'
perversions of it, sometimes failing to recognise how many-sided a
phenomenon is Christianity, sometimes inaccurately tracing its actual
results in history and modern life. His attitude towards it may be
summed up thus. He retained its belief in the omnipotence of the
spiritual; its faith in God and in His providential working; its
supreme veneration for the character and moral teaching of Jesus; its
insistence on moral perfection and not material interest as the end of
life; its call to love and sacrifice of self; its belief in
immortality; its aspiration to the Church Universal. He rejected the
divinity of Christ, the doctrine of a mediator, the antagonism between
matter and spirit and the consequent neglect of the things of earth;
its inability to grasp God's law of progress; its non-acceptance
(though the Church had partially recognised it) of Humanity as the
interpreter of that law.
But the new faith, which was to grow out of and supplement
Christianity, must have its doctrines too, its positive basis of
belief. "There is no life in the void. Life is faith in something, a
system of secure beliefs, grounded on an immutable foundation, which
defines the end, the destiny of man, and embraces all his faculties to
point them to that end." Mankind, he said, is weary of negations, of
the hustling conflict of opinions. "We must prepare for it an abode
for the day of rest,--something on earth, where it may lay its weary
head,--something in heaven on which its eyes may stay,--a tent to
shield it from the storm, a spring to quench its thirst in the vast
unbounded desert where it travels." Dogma is essential; it is ever
"sovereign over practical morality," for "morality is only its
consequence, its application, its translation into practice." By dogma
he meant "a body of ideas, which, starting from a fixed point,
embraces all human faculties and employs them for the conquest of a
positive, practical end, which is for the good of the majority; the
exposition of a principle and its consequences in relation to life's
manifestation and operations in the moral and the industrial world,
both for the individual and for society." The thinker apprehends it,
science and society prepare the medium for its adoption, the best and
wisest incarnate it in their lives, then it "enters the soul of the
many and becomes a religious axiom." In other words it is an ethical
and political system, so based on the eternal verities of life, so
penetrated by the spiritual sense of the race, that it ceases to be a
cold and abstract code, and takes the warmth and colour of religion,
compelling men's souls and pushing them irresistibly to social duty.
What then is the body of doctrine for the Church of the future, as
Mazzini conceived it? First, as the root of all, belief in God, "the
author of all existence, the living, absolute thought, of which our
world is a ray and the universe an incarnation"; "a sphere inviolable,
eternal, supreme over all humanity, independent of chance or error or
blind and interrupted operation." God, then, exists objectively, as
maker and ruler of the universe. Man discovers God; he does not
create Him. In his criticism of Renan, Mazzini attacks any theory of
the subjectivity of the Divine. Pantheism (that is, the "materialist
pantheism" of Spinoza, not the "spiritual pantheism" of St Paul and
Wordsworth and Shelley) confounds subject and object, good and evil,
and leaves no place for Providence or human liberty; it is a
"philosophy of the squirrel in the cage," condemning mankind to go for
ever rotating in a circle. Deism is a "sordid" creed, which relegates
God to heaven and ignores his ever-operating life in creation. Mazzini
gives no clue how he would have reconciled an all-creating
Deity,--author therefore of good and evil,--with a beneficent and
loving Providence.
He finds the proofs of an actual, objective God, first, in man
himself, in the universal intuition of the Divine. "God exists. God
lives in our conscience, in the conscience of Humanity, in the
Universe around us. Our conscience calls to him in our most solemn
moments of sorrow and joy. He who would deny God before a starry
night, before the graves of his dearest ones, before the martyr's
scaffold, is a very wretched or a very guilty man." The fact that we
aspire to the best and infinite proves that there is a best and
infinite, that is God. And, next, the fact of existence bears witness
to an intelligent creator. "God exists because we exist." "Call it God
or what you like," he once said, "there is life which we have not
created, but which is given." "The Universe displays him in its order
and harmony, in the intelligent design shown in its working and its
law." And this law is "one and immutable." "Everything is
preordained"; "God and law are identical terms"; "'chance' has no
meaning, and was only invented to express man's ignorance." "There can
be no miracle, nothing supernatural, no possible violation of the laws
that rule the Universe"; though he realised how big is the unknown of
nature, and his rejection of the supernatural did not prevent him from
being a mystic. But God is not only intellect but love, not only Lord
but Educator. His law embraces Humanity as well as nature, the moral
as well as the physical world. He manifests himself "in the
intelligent design, that regulates the life of Humanity" and leads man
ever upwards towards perfection. "Everything, from the grain of sand
to the plant, from the plant to Man, has its own law; how then can
Humanity be without its law?"
Mazzini seems to have recognised the difficulty of reconciling the
oneness and eternity of law with an ever-active Providence, which
concerned itself, for instance, with present-day problems of democracy
and nationality. He found a solution in making the law consist in an
inevitable tendency to progress, both in the material and, still more,
in the spiritual world. The law of Progress, which perhaps he
developed from Lessing, is "a supreme formula of the creative
activity, eternal, omnipotent, universal as itself." His 'Progress' is
not equivalent to 'evolution.' He formulated it, of course, before
Darwin's day; so far as I know, he never refers to Darwinism, and
probably never studied it. If he had, it would certainly have been to
condemn it. But he would have attacked it, not from the scientific
side, but on _à priori_ grounds. Progress, he would have said, rules
the material world, but it rules it through the spiritual, by virtue
of an inherent God-implanted tendency and the operation of the human
will. He would have rejected as derogatory to the divine idea an
evolution, which results from the struggle of unthinking and non-moral
forces. He condemned unsparingly, as we shall see, the explanation of
social facts by the bare brute struggle of individuals or the
development of material phenomena. Progress is essentially a moral
phenomenon, and postulates the search, not for self, but for
self-sacrifice. It is "the slow, but necessary, inevitable development
of every germ of good, of every holy idea." Sometimes, indeed, he is
trapped by the ambiguity of 'self-realisation,' and speaks of "the
instinct and necessity, which urges every living being to the fuller
development of all the germs, the faculties, the forces, the life
within it." But it is clear that he is always really thinking of the
development of good alone. God's plan "slowly, progressively makes man
divine." Whither Humanity ultimately goes, we know not; but we know
there is no limit to the march; and every age, every religion, each
new philosophy enlarges its apprehension of the end.
He curiously dovetails personal immortality into the doctrine. For the
individual soul the process of perfecting goes on beyond the limits of
this world. Life "here-down" (as he called it in English) is so short,
so full of imperfection, that the soul cannot in its earthly
pilgrimage climb the ladder that leads to God. And yet intuition and
tradition tell us that the ideal will be reached some day, somewhere;
in words, that almost suggest that he had read the parallel passage in
Wordsworth, he speaks of memory as the consciousness of the soul's
progress up from earlier existences; love would be a mockery, if it
did not last beyond the grave; the unity of the race implies a link
between the living and the dead; science teaches there is no death but
only transformation. He held passionately to his faith in immortality,
and he believed that the dear ones he had lost were watching over him
and bringing his best aspirations. The individual soul, he thought,
progresses through a series of re-incarnations, each leading it to a
more perfect development, and the rapidity of its advance depends on
its own purification. And as the individual has his progress through a
series of existences, so collective man progresses ever through the
human generations. "No, God eternal, thy word is not all spoken, thy
thought not yet revealed in all its fulness. It still creates, and
will create through long ages beyond the grasp of human reckoning. The
ages, that are past, have revealed but fragments to us. Our mission is
not finished. We hardly know its source, we do not know its final end;
time and our discoveries only extend its borders. From age to age it
ascends to destinies unknown to us, seeking its own law, of which we
read but a few lines. From initiative to initiative, through the
series of thy progressive incarnations, it purifies and extends the
formula of Sacrifice; it feels for its own way; it learns thy faith,
eternally progressive." If once we recognised this progressive
evolution of religion and morals, there would be no room for pure
scepticism; we should see that an expired form of faith is not wrong
but imperfect, that it needs not destroying but supplementing. "Every
religion instils into the human soul one more drop of the universal
life."
But does not this mean fatalism,--the same fatalism, with which he
charged the Christian doctrine of redemption, the fatalism, with which
he would have charged the evolutionists, had he known them? If the
progress of humanity is preordained, what need for man to use his puny
powers? Mazzini met the difficulty thus. True, evil cannot permanently
triumph, God's progress must go on; but its quicker or slower
realisation is in our hands. "The slow unfolding of history proceeds
under the continuous action of two factors, the work of individuals
and the providential scheme. Time and space are ours; we can quicken
progress or retard it, we cannot stop it." And this, because progress,
being essentially a moral phenomenon, must be realised in the world of
thought and will, before it can be translated into practice. Mazzini
did not seriously concern himself with the metaphysics of determinism;
he took the common-sense position that the will is free; "no
philosophic sophisms," he said, "can cancel the testimony of remorse
and martyrdom." It depends on a man's choice of good or evil, whether
he approaches nearer the ideal in himself, and therefore whether, so
far as his influence lies, progress is realised in society. Thus, in
his strained and inconclusive argument, God's providential working is
reconciled both with human free will and the oneness of law.
Progress, then!--onwards to the great Ideal, the ideal which "stands
in God, outside and independent of ourselves," which as yet we know
but darkly, but which every generation sees more clearly; fixed,
therefore, and "absolute in the Divine Idea," but gradually revealed
to man, "approached" but never "reached" in this life, ever
provisional and shifting for us as knowledge grows. The world is no
mere necessary sequence of material phenomena, but a spiritual stream,
that, swift or sluggish be its course, flows irresistibly to God. The
existing fact is not the law; choice between good and evil, heroism,
sacrifice are not illusions; conscience, the intuition of the ideal,
the power of will, and moral force are ultimate and mastering
spiritual facts. The divine design controls it all, and man has
liberty to help God's plan. And he who knows this, knows that "a
supreme power guards the road, by which believers journey towards
their goal," and he will be "bold with God through God." The
crusaders' cry 'God wills it' is for him, and his are the courage and
consistency and power of sacrifice, that come to those who know they
battle on the side of God. It was this conviction that Mazzini wished
his followers to have, when he pleaded that Young Italy should be as a
religion. For "political parties fall and die; religious parties never
die till they have conquered."
But how shall man search for the ideal, how learn the providential
design? Mazzini has his answer clear: "tradition and conscience,"[35]
or, as we may translate them, experience and intuition, "are the two
wings given to the human soul to reach to truth." First, then, the
individual consciousness and that in a two-fold sense. Truth is truth
only to the individual, when he apprehends it for himself. Sometimes
Mazzini speaks as if he accepted the whole Protestant doctrine of
individual judgment, and in a sense he does. Each man must prove by
his own consciousness every interpretation of God's law, whether it be
true or not. But this gift of judgment only comes by righteousness.
"In moments of holy thought something of the great flood of man's
knowledge of God's law may come to every man." To learn it, he must
"purify himself from low passion, from every guilty inclination, from
every idolatrous superstition"; and truth will come "in the most
secret aspirations of the soul, in the instincts of itself, that hover
round in supreme hours of affection and devotion." But, though Mazzini
does not very clearly distinguish, he seems generally to be thinking
of something more. It is for the consciousness not only to apprehend
and appropriate for the individual truths already known to the race,
but sometimes it is its privilege to spell a new line of God's law.
Glimpses of new truth may come to the collective intuition of a
people. There are times, when "the spirit of God descends upon the
gathered multitudes," and _vox populi_ is _vox Dei_. He would deny the
right of spiritual discovery to a people enslaved by low, material
impulses; but in a nation moved by some great aspiration, when thought
strikes thought, and enthusiasm kindles enthusiasm, there truth will
probably be found. But though in such times of faith and struggle the
people has its "great collective intuitions," though sometimes "the
pale, modest star that God has placed in simple bosoms" comes nearer
truth than genius comes, it is normally for the best and wisest to
discover truth. Only men of holy lives and genius are God's "born
interpreters"; his apostles, those "who love their brethren most and
are ready to suffer for their love, and those on whom God has
bestowed surpassing gifts of intellect, provided that their intellect
is virtuous and desires the good." But even such as these can find
truth only by interrogating the dim silent workings of the people's
mind. Light comes to no man by his own unaided effort; and the
solitary thinker may mistake his own conceit for truth. "Great men can
only spring from a great people, just as an oak, however high it may
tower above every other tree in the forest, depends on the soil whence
it derives its nourishment. The soil must be enriched by countless
decaying leaves."
But the untested intuition, whether of man of genius or people, is by
itself no sufficient criterion of truth. Every heresy has its martyrs.
There is a more unerring interpreter of God's law, known imperfectly
to Catholicism, but neglected by Protestantism and the individualist
schools of the day,--the consciousness of the race, checked and
corrected and perfected by each succeeding generation, the "common
consensus of humanity," "the tradition, not of one school or one
religion or one age, but of all the schools and all religions and all
the ages in their succession," for "no one man or people or school can
presume to discover all the law of God." The seeker after truth will
find it most surely in "the severe study of the universal tradition,
which is life's manifestation in Humanity." Humanity (the conception
of which he seems to have derived from Vico and Herder), "the living
word of God," "the collective and continuous being," is "the only
interpreter of God's law." "Humanity," said a thinker of the last
century,[36] "is a man who is ever learning. Individuals die; but the
truth they thought, the good they wrought, is not lost with them;
Humanity garners it, and the men who walk over their graves, have
their profit from it. Each of us is born to-day in an atmosphere of
ideas and beliefs, that are the work of all Humanity before us; each
of us brings unconsciously some element, more or less valuable, for
the life of Humanity that comes after. The education of Humanity grows
like those Eastern pyramids, to which each passer-by adds his stone.
We pass, the travellers of a day, called away to complete our
individual education elsewhere; the education of Humanity shines by
flashes in each one of us, but unveils its full radiance slowly,
progressively, continuously in Humanity. From one task to another,
from one faith to another, step by step Humanity conquers a clearer
vision of its life, its mission, of God and of his law." And here
again comes strength. "It matters little," he replied to Carlyle,
"that _our_ individual powers be of the smallest amount in relation to
the object to be attained; we know that the powers of millions of men,
our brethren, will succeed to the work after us, in the same
track,--we know that the object attained, be it when it may, will be
the result of _all_ our efforts combined." But he who would have this
strength, must needs respect Humanity's tradition, must recognise that
the race is more likely to be right than his own poor intellect. He
turned angrily on the "barbarian" schools, that would sweep away the
past, and create Humanity anew on some arbitrary plan. Humanity spurns
builders of utopias; and preachers of new principles, the masses
fervent for some new idea, must prove their beliefs by the infallible
test of tradition. Mazzini hardly recognised how difficult and vague
and diverse might be the detailed interpretation of tradition, and he
was never very modest in making his own inductions. He believed that
history proves that there are certain "immortal elements of human
nature,"--education, fatherland, liberty, association, family,
property, religion; and the theorist, who offends any one of these, is
in conflict with God's law. In the conjunction, then, of these two
criteria and no otherwise stands the discovery of the truth. Neither
suffices without the other; and therefore Catholicism and
Protestantism, each of which had apprehended one alone, are
incomplete. Tradition by itself leads to stagnation; intuition alone
to chance and anarchy. But "where you find the general permanent voice
of humanity agreeing with the voice of your conscience, be sure that
you hold in your grasp something with absolute truth,--gained and for
ever yours."
It will be noted that Mazzini parts himself from the intuitive school,
when he admits experience as the surer criterion of truth, when,
again, he says that the intellect is necessary to verify the instincts
of consciousness. On the other hand he is a pure intuitionist in his
conception of the function of genius, for genius meant with him
something other far than 'the infinite capacity of taking pains'; it
was a God-given, almost mystical faculty, that saw truth by its own
natural, unaided light, that possessed her forcibly, not wooed her
timidly. He is an intuitionist again when he holds, as obviously he
does hold, that it is for the pure in heart to see God, that religious
and ethical enquiry depends for its results on the cultivation of the
moral sense, and therefore more on the moral than on the intellectual
development of the enquirer. And, even when he sides with the opposite
school, it does not mean that he trusts to any scientific process of
ratiocination. He has more confidence in the unconscious reasoning, by
which the race has gathered its experience, and which allows no room
for the errors of the solitary thinker. He did not neglect
metaphysics, but he was little influenced by them, and he would have
sided with 'the vulgar' against 'the philosophers.'
* * * * *
Mazzini's conception of Humanity was essentially related to his
craving for religious and moral unity. Fighter though he was ever, and
recognising somewhat the value of "the holy conflict of ideas," he did
not see how much in an imperfect age progress depends upon the clash
of creeds and conflict of opinions. He was so weary of debate, so
confident that others must come to the same truth that he had. As far
as humanity had learnt God's law, all should bow to it; and he looked
to a true national education to generate this unity of faith. As unity
was the law of God's universe, so unity was the condition of
humanity's advance. Without it "there may be movement, but it is not
uniform or concentrated." Therefore "the world thirsts for unity,"
"democracy tends to unity," and every great religion must of necessity
strive to be catholic. But now "discord is everywhere,"--creeds that
curse one another, warring states, class hatreds, party bitterness,
the search for truth itself a source of conflict. It is time to end
this wasteful strife, and march together, "reverently seeking the
future city, a new heaven and a new earth, which may unite in one, in
love of God and man, in faith in a common aim, all those, who tossed
between fears of the present and doubtings of the future, now stray in
intellectual and moral anarchy." "We must found moral unity, the
Catholicism of humanity," "the unity of belief that Christ promised
for all peoples," "a unity which binds the sects in one sole people of
believers, and on the churches and conventicles and chapels raises the
great temple, Humanity's Pantheon to God."
The new faith, like the old, must have its visible embodiment.
"Sacred," he said, "is the church, but not a false church." At the
time of the Roman Republic, a liberal cleric warned the Catholics that
"if the church did not march with the people, the people would march
without the church, aye, outside it and against it." "Against the
church, no!" Mazzini replied; "we will march from the church of the
past to the church of the future, from the dead church to the living,
to the church of freemen and equals. There is room enough for such a
church betwixt the Vatican and Capitol." Sometimes he thought that the
new church would have its cult, a cult "which would gather believers
together in feasts of equality and love," where men of saintly lives
would preach plain truths of duty and inspire enthusiasm. And in some
undefined way the authority of the church was to be supreme in the
state. Gregory VII.'s principles, he says, were right, but erred in
the application.[37] "Religion will be the soul, the thought of the
new state." "Power is one; religion, the law of the spirit, sits in
the seat of government; its interpreters, the temporal power, reduce
it to practice." It is true that till men find a common faith, while
the existing church is a church only in name, the state must protect
itself by the separation of the two. But the Cavourian 'free church in
a free state' means religious indifference and "an atheist law"; and a
higher order will terminate "the absurd divorce between the temporal
and spiritual." In his later years it seems to have been a fixed idea
with him to get some kind of state creed recognised by the Italian
parliament. Some day "a few men, reverenced for their doctrine and
virtue, their intellect and love and sacrifice of self," would form a
"supreme Council" for Europe and America, proclaiming new truths and
the common duties of the nations; while under them would sit national
councils to define the several duties of each people. He seems to have
expected that at first these councils would have a voluntary basis
outside the state, but that eventually they would be recognised by law
as the supreme international and national authorities, and, as such
would be the authoritative exponents of tradition and control
education. And with this reconciliation of the spiritual and temporal
the world would find that real authority, of which it stood in need.
For authority in itself was a good and not an evil thing; and on the
wreck of the existing phantasms of authority, another would arise,
democratic, based on the common will, loving liberty and progress,
with virtue to initiate and inspire, the unexhausted fountain of
reform, correlating and organising men's various labours for the
commonwealth. For such an authority "the world is ever searching, and
save in it and through it, it has no life or progress."
That the new religion,--one which in its time must pass too,--would
come, he had no doubt. He looked for the day when a Council of the
best and wisest (whether or not identical with the supreme European
council) would define the articles of the new faith. It might be "a
truly Oecumenical Council of virtuous intellects," or it might spring
from one "free people, which had found brotherhood in the worship of
duty and the ideal." It was the dream of his life that this faith
would issue forth from Rome,--Rome, the only city to whose authority
Europe had bowed, Rome, the seat of the old false religion, whose fall
must come ere the new one could arise. But, whatever were the more
impatient hopes of earlier years, he came to see that the dawn was yet
afar. Long missionary labours must come first. Still, the time, he
thought, was ripe at all events for a "church of the precursors," and
gladly he would have led its builders. In younger days, when the
deliverance of Italy seemed near, he prayed that God would let him
give the rest of life to the greater work. Afterwards, when the new
Italy delayed its coming, and age and weakness came ere the first task
was done, the dream of a missionary call faded slowly away, to be
cherished to the end as the great unfulfilled ambition of his life.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] _Conscienza_; in Mazzini's use of the word, it covers both
'consciousness' and 'conscience.' Mazzini himself translated it by
'conscience' (see below, p. 362), where 'consciousness' would be more
accurate.
[36] Pascal.
[37] In the undated letter, quoted by Signor Donaver in the _Rassegna
Nazionale_, Oct. 1, 1890, he speaks of a reformed Catholic church
becoming "the guide of the State and not its servant"; but I think he
says rather more than he really felt in order to conciliate an old
clerical friend, to whom the letter seems to be addressed.