And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar
system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular
parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has
opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre
of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world,
Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds,
like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. Japan
pours her art upon us, and her equal claim to hold a chosen
people—“pursuing,” as its Emperor’s oath declares, “a policy
co-extensive with the heavens and the earth.” Egypt unrolls the teeming
scroll of her immemorial dynasties. The four hundred millions of China
lie on our imaginations like a nightmare in yellow, and we perceive that
the maker of man hath a predilection for pigtails. India opens out her
duskily magnificent infinities and we are grown familiar with Brahma and
Vishnu, with Vedas and Buddha-Jâtakas. Persia reveals to us in the Zend
Avesta of Zoroaster a strangely modern gospel, glimmering through
grotesque images of space and time. Mohammed is no longer an Infidel,
and we recognise the subtlety alike of the Motekallamin and the Arabic
Aristotelians. We respect the Norse Gods and the great Tree Yggdrasil.
The Teutonic divinities have reappeared in every part of the civilised
earth and their operatic voice is heard with more reverence than any
other god’s. Even the old Peruvian civilisation solicits us, that
successful social order of the Incas. The stellar swirl of worlds is a
crude puzzle in quantity beside these mental worlds which the peoples
have spun for themselves like cocoons.
But not only the peoples. Each creature that has ever lived, from the
spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself its own cosmos. Microcosm we
cannot call this cosmos, since that implies the macrocosm drawn to
smaller scale, and this—like all creations—is a mere selection from
the universe, excluding and including after its own idiosyncrasy.
Autocosm is the word we need for it—a new word, but a phenomenon as old
as the first created consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never
perfectly repeated itself since that day. For no two autocosms have ever
been precisely alike. In the lower orders of being the autocosm may be
substantially identical throughout all the individuals of the species,
but as we mount in the grade of organisation, the autocosm becomes more
and more individual. And even the large generic autocosms, how variously
compounded—the scent-world of dogs, the eye-world of birds, the uncanny
touch-world of bats, the earth-world of worms, the water-world of
fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing-mice, the flesh-world of
parasites, the microscopic world of microbes. These worlds do not need
untrammelled orbits, they intersect one another inextricably in an
infinite interlacing. Yet each is a symmetric sphere of being, a rounded
whole, and to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos. One
creature’s poison is another creature’s meat, one creature’s offal is
another creature’s paradise, and our cemetery is a nursery aswarm with
creeping mites. If on the one hand Nature seems a wasteful housekeeper,
scattering a thousand seeds that one may bear, on the other hand she
appears ineffably ingenious in economising every ort and oddment, every
cheese-paring and scum-drop as the seed-plot of new and joyous
existence. Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through
every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible
and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature
rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that
achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the
boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe
indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can
weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. This is what happens to your
Shakespeares and your Schopenhauers; this is the “Everlasting Nay” of
“Sartor Resartus.” Life is become
“A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Such an autocosm is the shirt of Nessus. Hercules must tear it off or
perish. And we are all the time changing our autocosms. That is the
meaning of experience. Only the fool dies in the same cosmos in which he
was born, and a great teacher or a great statesman changes the autocosm
of his generation.
Here be the true weavings with which Time’s Shuttle is busy, these
endless patternings and re-patternings of mental worlds, adjusted to
ever-changing creatures, and ever-shifting circumstances. The birth and
death of planets is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which
in the human world is known as movements of thought and religion,
growths and decays of language, periods of art and politics. History is
the clash of autocosms, and every war is a war of the worlds.
As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm fades out with the
buzz and tingle of the electric cars that engirdle the great old
building, and the massive walls of the mediæval autocosm shut me into a
glowing gloom of unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated
by the sound of soft bells. Only the dominating figure on the cross
seems out of tone; this blood is too violent for peace. What a paradox
that the Christians are such dominant races—perhaps they needed this
brake. But even without the blood, the cruciform dusk of the interior is
in discord with the lace-work of the exterior, recalls the sombreness
below the glittering Renaissance. All this multitudinous microscopic
work is waste, all this wealth of fretwork and final, for it is only at
a distance, when the details have faded into the mass, that this mass
appears noble. And this, too, is like the Catholic autocosm, with its
rococo detail and its massive magnificence.
And round the Cathedral, as I said, rages the modern order—is not Milan
the metropolis of Italian science and do not all tram-roads lead to the
Piazza del Duomo?—and a ballet I saw in La Scala danced the carmagnole
of the new world. “Excelsior” was its jubilant motto, the ascent being
from Cathedrals to Railway Bridges and Balloons. A Shining Spirit of
Light (_Luce_) inspired Civiltà and baffled the priestly powers of
darkness (_Tenebre_), while ineffably glittering coryphées proclaimed
with their toes “Eureka!”
But ah! my dear Corybants of Reason, an autocosm may be habitable and
even comfortable in despite of Science. Its working value is independent
of its containing false materials, or true materials in false
proportions. And yet, my dear devotees of Pragmatism—that parvenu among
Philosophies—its utility does not establish its truth. A false coin
will do all the work of a true coin so long as it is not found out.
Nevertheless there exists a test of coins independent of their power of
gulling the public. And there exists a name for those who continue to
circulate a coin _after_ they know it to be false. The Pragmatist may
apply his philosophy to justify past forms of belief and action, now
outmoded, but he will do infinite mischief if he tries to juggle himself
or the world into such forms of belief or action _because_ they lead to
spiritual and practical satisfactions.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to _believe_!
Nay, it is doubtful whether satisfaction can come as the sequel of any
but a genuine and involuntary belief. There is much significance in the
story of the old Welsh lady who desired the removal of the mountain in
front of her window and complained to her pastor that all her prayers
had been unable to move it a single inch. “Because you have not _real_
faith,” was the glib clerical reply. Whereupon, resolved to have “_real_
faith,” the old lady spent a night of prayer on her knees opposite the
mountain. When morning came, and she rolled up the blind, lo! the
mountain stood as before. “There!” she exclaimed. “_Just as I
expected!_”
This pseudo-faith is, I fear, all that the Pragmatist can beguile or
batter himself into, for if he has real faith he needs no Pragmatism to
justify it by.
I grant you—indeed I have always pointed out—that there is a large
area of the autocosm given over to artistic, moral and spiritual truths
which are their own justification. But it is only where there is no
objective test of truth that Pontius Pilate’s question may be answered
with the test of success and stimulation. Wherever it is possible to
compare the autocosm with the macrocosm, contradiction must be taken as
the mark of falsity, and either our notion of the macrocosm must be
amended, or our autocosm. Of course in the last analysis the macrocosm
is only the autocosm of its age, but it is the common segment of all the
individual autocosms. And while they are liable to shrivel up like
pricked bladders, the objective universe can only expand and expand.
Despite La Scala and its dædal Modernism, it was, I fear, the Catholic
autocosm which fascinated me most in Italy, with its naïve poetry, its
grossness, its sublimity, and its daring distortions of the macrocosm.
The very clock-wheels in their courses fight against reality. Read in
the great church of S. Petronio the directions on the two clocks of
Fornasini, one giving the solar time in the antique Italian style—when
the hour varied with the daylight—and the other the mean time of the
meridian of Bologna. “Subtract the time on the Italian clock from 24
o’clock, add the remainder to the time indicated on the other clock, but
counted from 1 to 24 o’clock. _The time thus obtained will be the hour
of Ave Maria!_” The hour of Ave Maria! Not some crude arithmetical hour.
Not the hour of repose from work, not the hour of impending sunset, but
the hour of the vesper bell, the hour of Ave Maria! How it circumlaps,
this atmosphere, how it weaves a veil of pity and love between man and
the macrocosm.
It is nearly three and a half centuries since Italy helped to break the
power of the Paynim at Lepanto, yet the belief that the Madonna (who
could not free her own land from the Turk) was the _auxilium
Christianorum_, is as lively as on the day when the bigoted Gregory XIII
instituted the Feast of the Rosary to commemorate her victory. At Verona
I read in a church a vast inscription set up at the tercentenary of the
battle, still ascribing the victory not only to the “supreme valour of
our arms steeled by the word of Pius V,” but also to “the great
armipotent Virgin.” Saints that I had in my ignorance imagined remote
from to-day, shelved in legend and picture, retired from practical life,
are, I found, still in the full exercise of their professional
activities as thaumaturgists; and scholastic philosophers whose systems
I had skimmed in my youth as archaic lore, whom I had conceived as
buried in encyclopædias and monastic libraries, blossom annually in new
editions. There is the Angelic Doctor—Preceptor as he was styled on the
title-pages—whom I had thought safely tucked away in the tenth canto of
the “Paradiso.” In the Seminario Vescovile of Ferrara I beheld the bulky
volumes of his “Summa Theologiæ” in the pious hands of the fledgeling
priests, in a class-room whose ceiling bears the sombre frescoes with
which Garofalo had enriched the building in its palmy days as a Palazzo.
And the theology has decayed far less than the frescoes. Still, that
which we look upon as the faded thought of the Middle Ages, serves as
the fresh bread of life to these youthful souls. Little did I dream when
I first saw Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture of _The Triumph of St. Thomas_, or
Taddeo Gaddi’s portrayal of his celestial exaltation over the
discomfited Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes, that I should see with my
own eyes scholars still at the feet of the _Magister studentium_ of the
thirteenth century. Well may the Pope undaunted launch his Encyclicals,
and the _Osservatore Romano_ remark that “the evolution of dogma is a
logical nonsense for philosophers and a heresy for theologians.”
Pascal summed it up long ago: “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees,
Falsehood beyond.” What is true in the Piazza of St. Peter grows false
as you pass the Swiss Guards. Catholic truth, like the Vatican, is
extra-territorial. Why should it concern itself with what is believed
outside? Even the Averroist philosophers taught that their results were
true only in philosophy, and that in the realm of Catholicism what the
Church taught was true. And though “impugning the known truth” be one of
the sins against the Holy Ghost, the known truth and the Church truth
show scant promise of coinciding. And the triumph of St. Thomas
continues, as saint no less than as teacher. “Divus Thomas Aquinas” I
found him styled in Perugia. His _Festa_ is on March 7, as I read in a
placard in the Church of S. Domenico in Ferrara.
“Festa dell’ Angelico Dottore
S. T. d’Aquinas
San Patrono delle Scuole Cattoliche.”
On the day of the Festa there is plenary indulgence for all the
faithful. There was another indulgence “per gli ascritti alla Milizia
Angelica.” But whether the Angelic Militia are the pupils of the Angelic
Doctor I am not learned enough to say.
His even earlier saintship, St. Antony, not only continues to dominate
Padua from his vast monumental Church, and enjoy his three June days of
Festa in his nominal city, but his tutelary grace extends far beyond. In
the Church of San Spirito in the Via Ariosto of Ferrara, the famous
preacher to the fishes was—after the earthquake of 1908—the target of
three days of prayer. The house Ariosto built himself in the fifteenth
century stands in the same street, but Ariosto’s world of mediæval
chivalry is shattered into atoms while St. Antony still saves Ferrara
from earthquake.
Yes—allowing Messina and Reggio to be annihilated—the Saint in 1908
said to the seismic forces, “So far and no farther,” and ’tis not for
me, whose umbrella he recovered on the very day I mocked at his
pretensions, to resent his preferences. Three days of thanksgiving (mass
in the morning at his altar and prayers and Benediction in the
afternoon), “per lo scampato flagello del Terremoto,” rewarded his
partiality for Ferrara. The town keeps doubtless a morbid memory of
earthquakes, for from an old German book printed at Augsburg by Michael
Manger, I learn that the terrible _Terremoto_ of 1570, “in Welschland am
Po,” started in Ferrara on a 16th in the night and lasted till the 21st,
during which time two hundred people perished, and many houses with a
dozen churches, monasteries and nunneries were destroyed in Ferrara
alone. Why St. Antony nodded on that occasion is not explained. Nor why
he should have limited his protection to the Jews, not a man of whom was
injured. Perhaps he had not yet recognised the claim of Ferrarese
Christianity upon him. There is a wistful note in the prayer placarded
in the Ferrarese church of San Francesco. “O great saint, commonly
called the saint of Padua, but worthy to be called the saint of the
world. . . . You who so often pressed in your arms the celestial
Bambino!”
Happy Paduans, to whom this chronological prodigy is securely attached,
who indeed hastened to build a Cathedral round him in the very year of
his canonisation (1232). Here amid crudely worked flowers, crutches,
photographs and other mementoes of his prowess, the faithful may find
remission of their sins or expiation of the faults of their dead. For
what limit is there to his intercessory power? Let me English the prayer
hung up in his chapel. Every religion has its higher and more sophistic
presentation, but it is well to turn from the pundits to the people.
“ORAZIONE A S. ANTONIO DI PADOVA.
“Great St. Antony, the Church glories in all the prerogatives
that God has favoured you with among all the saints. Death is
disarmed by your power; error is dissipated by your light. They
whom the malice of man tries to wound receive from you the
desired relief. The leprous, the sick, the crippled, by your
virtue obtain cure, and the hurricanes and the tempests of the
sea calm themselves at your command; the chains of slaves fall
in pieces by your authority, and the lost things are found again
by your care and return to their legitimate possessors. All
those who invoke you with faith are freed from the evils and
perils that menace them. In fine, there is no want to which your
power and goodness do not extend.”
Here the intermediary has practically superseded the Creator, even if
dulia be still distinguished from latria.
Rimini was likewise safeguarded from the earthquake of 1908, but not by
St. Antony. A saint of its own, the glorious Bishop and Martyr, St.
Emidio, “compatrone della città, protettore potentissimo contro il
flagello del Terremoto,” received the Three Days’ Solemn Supplication,
and the Riminese were adjured in many a placard to repeat their fathers’
glorious outburst of faith before the thaumaturgic images when the city
was delivered from the frightful earthquake of 1786. But on the whole
the saints can scarcely have done their duty by the old towered cities,
for all Italy is full of the legend of toppled towers.
In war-perils it is the Archangel Michael who is the power to approach.
A prayer, ordered by Pope Leo XIII to be said in all the churches of the
world on bended knees after private mass, pleads to that Holy Prince of
the celestial legions to defend us in battle and to thrust Satan and
other roving spirits of evil back to Hell. “Tuque, Princeps Militiæ
Cœlestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem
animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude.
Amen.”
That Satan still has the entry of the Catholic autocosm, I was indeed
not unaware. But I was certainly taken aback to find the Plague still
curable by Paternosters. Yet this is what I was told in a little church
in Brescia devoted to Moretto’s works and monument, and summing up in
letters of gold the whole duty of man.
“Christians!
Bless the most holy name of God and of Jesus,
Respect the Festas,
Keep the Fasts and the Abstinences!
In short, only by Prayer
And Penitence will cease
Great Mortality, Famine
And every Epidemic.”
I had regarded the Salute and the other Plague-Churches of Venice as
mere historic curiosities, and written it down as an asset of human
thought that the Plague of 1630 was due to the filthiness and congestion
of the Levantine cities. That when 60,000 Venetians died—“uno
sterminato numero” as the tablet in the Salute says—the Venetian
Republic should with vermicular humility erect a gorgeous church in
gratitude for the Death-Angel’s moderation—this might pass in 1630,
like St. Rocco’s neglect in performing only the few desultory miracles
recorded in the wooden bas-reliefs of his choir. In the seventeenth
century one might even adore the angel of Piero Negri’s staircase-fresco
of _Venice Relieved of the Pest_, tardily as he came to relieve those
ghastly visions of the plague-pit which Zanchi has painted, facing him.
But that in 1836 Venice should have decreed a Three Days’ Thanksgiving
to the “Deiparæ Virgini salutari” for salvation from “the cholera
fiercely raging through Europe” shows that two centuries had made no
change in the Catholic autocosm, nor in the caprice of its Olympians.
Venice had already passed under the Napoleonic reign of pure reason, and
in an old poster of the Teatro Civico I read an invitation to the
citizens to “democratise” the soil of the theatre by planting here the
Tree of Liberty and dancing the _graziosissima Carmagnola_. But
revolutions, French or other, leave undisturbed the deep instinct of
humanity which demands that things spiritual shall produce equipollent
effects in the physical sphere.
“E pur si muove,” as Galileo said a hundred and thirty years after his
death. The Catholic autocosm and the objective macrocosm begin to rub
against each other even in the churches. Quaintly enough ’tis over the
popular practice of spitting that science and religion come into
friction. The priest who convoyed me through the Certosa of Pavia seemed
to regard his wonderful church as a glorified spittoon, and notices in
every church in Italy make clear the universality of the offence. But
whereas at Pavia you are asked “For the decorum of the house of God do
not spit on the pavement,” in Brescia the deprecation is headed: “Lotta
Contro la Tuberculosi,” as though the most penitent and pious might be
rewarded for church-going by consumption. The Cremona and Lucca churches
compromise: “Out of respect for the house of God and for hygiene please
do not spit on the pavement.” In Verona the formula is practically the
same: “Decency and hygiene forbid to spit on the pavement.” In Bologna
the modern autocosm was, I gather, even more victorious, for in time of
plague, some frescoes in S. Petronio were whitewashed over. I trust for
the sake of symbolic completeness these were frescoes of St. Sebastian
and St. Rocco, the protective plague-saints.
A false cosmos, I said, like a false coin, may be as useful as a true
one, so long as it is believed in. As long as the attrition of the
macrocosm outside does not wear a hole in the Catholic autocosm, it will
keep its spheric inflation. For there is nothing to wear a hole from
inside, nothing contrary to pure reason, nothing inconsistent with
something else. There is no _à priori_ reason why saints should not
control the chain of causation by spiritual forces as engineers and
doctors control it by physical forces at the bidding of intelligence.
There is no formal ground for denying that penitence puts cholera to
flight. It is merely a matter of experience—and even Popes and
Cardinals remove to cooler places when the pest breaks out at Rome.
There is no conceptual reason why there should not be a Purgatory, nor
why masses and alms for the dead (or still more the emotions of love and
remorse which these represent) should not enable us to assist the
posthumous destinies of those we have lost, nor why our sainted dead
should be cut off from all fresh influence upon our lives. It seems
indeed monstrous that they should pass beyond our yearning affection. In
these and other things the Catholic autocosm gives hints to the Creator
and shows how the “sorry scheme of things” may be moulded “nearer to the
heart’s desire.” Nor is there any reason why there should not be a
Trinity or a vicarious Atonement. These concepts, indeed, explain
_obscurum per obscurius_—
“No light but rather darkness visible—”
and seem less natural and more complicated than the Jewish theory of a
divine unity and a personal human responsibility. But complexity and
incomprehensibility are not proofs of falsity. Tertullian, indeed, in
his great lyric cry of faith, would make them proofs of truth. _Certum
est quia impossibile est._ And it may be conceded to Tertullian that in
a universe of mystery all compact, the word of the enigma can scarcely
be a platitude. But there is a limit to this comfortable canon.
Impossibility can only continue a source of certitude so long as
transcendental theological conceptions are concerned. But when, leaving
the tenuous empyrean of metaphysics, the Impossible incarnates itself
upon earth, it must stand or fall by our terrestrial tests of historic
happening, and the canon should rather run: Providing it has really
happened, its mere impossibility does not diminish its certitude. So
that, _per contra_, if it never happened at all, its mere impossibility
cannot guarantee it. Impossibility is a quality it shares with an
infinite number of propositions, and if it wishes to single itself out
from the crowd, it must seek extraneous witnesses to character. And if
it fails in this quest, its impossibility will not save it. We may
believe the _un_proved, but not the _dis_proved. The true interpretation
of the universe must be incomprehensible, _my_ interpretation is
incomprehensible, therefore _my_ interpretation is true—what tyro in
the logics will not at a leap recognise the fallacy of the undistributed
middle? Yet on this basis rest innumerable volumes of apologetics.
Nay, Sir Thomas Browne himself fell into this “Vulgar Error.”
“Methinks,” he cries, basing himself upon Tertullian, “there be not
impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith . . . I love to
lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an _O altitudo_!” As if
“_O altitudo_” is not pursuable by the simplest pagan, following the
maze of Space and Time. The author of “Religio Medici” confesses that
certain things in Genesis contradict Experience and History, but he
adds: “Yet I do believe all this is true, which indeed, my Reason would
persuade me to be false; and this I think is no vulgar part of Faith, to
believe a thing not only above, but contrary to Reason and against the
Arguments of our proper Senses.” Pardon me, esteemed Sir Thomas. It is
precisely _the_ vulgar part of Faith—_Religio Populi_! It is putting
the disproved and disprovable on the same plane as the unproved and the
unprovable, where alone the ecstasy of the _O altitudo_ may be
legitimately pursued.
The friction between the Bible and Science has grown raspier since Sir
Thomas’s day, and by a new turn in human folly we are told that Science
is bankrupt—with the implication that _therefore_ the Bible is solvent.
Poor old autocosms! They are _both_ bankrupt, alas! Neither the ancient
Bible nor the twentieth century Science can pay twenty shillings in the
pound. Not that the Bible cannot meet its creditors honourably, nor that
Science will not be permitted to go on dealing. The salvage from both is
considerable. But neither can afford an autocosm in which the modern
intellect can breathe and the modern soul aspire.
Nor was such work ever within the capacity of Science. She, the handmaid
of religion, forgot her place when she aspired to the pulpit. And
religion, with Time and Space and Love and Death for texts around her,
stepped down from hers when she persisted in preaching from withered
parchments of ambiguous tenor and uncertain authorship. What can be more
pathetic than the joy of orthodoxy when the pick strikes some Old
Testament tablet and it is discovered that there really was an Abraham
or a Lot. As well might a neo-Pagan exult because the excavations in
Crete prove that the Minotaur really existed—but as a fighting bull to
which toreadors imported from conquered Athens sometimes fell victims.
Not even Lot’s wife supplies sufficient salt to swallow Genesis with.
The Old Testament autocosm is dead and buried—it cannot be dug up again
by the Palestine Exploration Fund. It is no longer literally true, even
in the Vatican, where, if I understand aright, only the miracles of the
New Testament still preserve their authenticity.
“Things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will
be,” as the much-deluded Butler remarked. Wherefore, though you imagine
yourself living in your autocosm, you are in truth inhabiting the
macrocosm all the time and obnoxious to all its curious laws and
inflexible realities. It is as if, playing cards in the smoking-room of
a ship and fancying yourself at the club, you should be suddenly
drowned. Only by living in the macrocosm itself can you avoid the stern
surprises which await those who snuggle into autocosms. Hence the perils
of the Catholic autocosm for its inhabitants. For in the real universe
pestilences and earthquakes are not due to the wrath of God. The
physical universe proceeds on its own lines, and the religious motives
of the Crusaders did not prevent a Christian host from dying of the
putrefying infidel corpses which it had manufactured so abundantly. Nor
did heaven endorse the theory of the Children’s Crusade—that innocence
could accomplish what was impossible for flawed manhood. The poor
innocents perished like flies, or were sold into slavery. These things
take their course as imperturbably as Halley’s comet, which refused to
budge an inch even before the fulminations of Pope Callixtus III. Nor is
the intermission of earthquakes or pestilence to be procured by the
intercession of the saints or by the efficacy of their relics. A phial
of the blood of Christ was carried about in Mantua during the plague of
1630, but there were not enough boats to carry away the corpses to the
lakes. It was those marshes round Mantua that should have been drained.
But it is in vain God thunders, “Thus and thus are My Laws. I am that I
am.” Impious Faith answers, “Not so. Thou art that Thou art not.”
Pestilence—we know to-day—can be averted by closing the open cesspools
and opening the sunless alleys of mediævalism; malaria can be minimised
by minimising mosquitos, and earthquakes can be baffled by careful
building after the fashion of Japan, which, being an earthquake country,
behaves as such. After the Messina earthquake the Japanese Government
sent two professors—one of seismology and the other of architecture—to
study it and to compare it with the great Japanese earthquake of 1891,
and they reported that although the Japanese shock was greater and the
population affected more numerous, the number of Italian victims was
_four hundred and thirty times_ as great as the number of Japanese, and
that “about 998 out of 1000 of the number killed in Messina must be
regarded as having fallen victims to the seismologically bad
construction of the houses.” But where reliance is placed on
paternosters and penitence, how shall there be equal zeal for
antiseptics or structural precautions? The censer tends to oust the
fumigator, and the priest the man of action. “Too easily resigned and
too blindly hopeful,” says the _Messagero_ of Rome, commenting on the
chaos that still reigns among the population of Messina.
“Trust in God and keep your powder dry” was the maxim of a Protestant.
Cromwell but echoed the Psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord my strength,
which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” This is the
spirit that makes the best of both cosms. The too trustful denizen of
the Catholic autocosm with his damp powder and his flaccid fingers risks
falling a prey to the first foe.
But the balance-sheet is not yet complete. For it may be better to live
without sanitation or structural precaution and to die at forty of the
plague or the earthquake, after years of belief in your saint or your
star, than to live a century without God in a bleak universe of
mechanical law. True, the believer has the fear of hell, but by a happy
insanity it does not interfere with his _joie de vivre_. He has had,
indeed, to pay dearly for the consolation and courage the Church has
sold him—since we are at the balance-sheet let this be said too—and
seeing how in the last analysis all this overwhelming ecclesiastic
splendour has come out of the toil of the masses, I cannot help
wondering whether the Church could not have done the thing cheaper. Were
these glittering vestments and soaring columns so absolutely essential
to the cult of the manger-born God?
But perhaps it was the People’s only chance of Magnificence. And after
all the mediæval cathedrals were as much public assembly rooms as
churches.
Dear wrinkled _contadine_ whom I see prostrated in chapels before your
therapeutic saints; dear gnarled _facchini_ whose shoulders bow beneath
the gentler burden of adoration; poor world-worn beings whom I watch
genuflecting and sprinkling yourselves with the water of life, as the
spacious hush and the roseate dimness of the great cathedral fall round
you; and you, proud young Venetian housewife, whose baby was carried to
baptism in a sort of cage, and who turned to me with that heavenly smile
after the dipping and that rapturous cry, “_Ora essa è una piccola
Cristiana!_”—and most of all you, heart-stricken mothers whose little
ones have gone up to play with the Madonna’s _bambino_, think ye I would
prick your autocosm with my quill or withdraw one single ray from the
haloes of your guardian genii? Nay, I pray that in that foreign land of
death to which we must all emigrate, ye may find more Christian
consideration than meets the emigrants to England or America. May your
Christ be waiting at the haven ready to protect you against the
exactions of Charon, to rescue you from the crimps, and initiate you
into the alien life. Only one thing I ask of you—do not, I pray you in
return, burn up _my_ autocosm—and me with it. And ye, gentlemen of the
cassock and the tonsure, continue, unmolested by me, your processions
and your pageants and your mystic operas and ballets, your drinking
ceremonials and serviette-wipings; for, bland and fatherly as you seem,
you are the fiercest incendiaries the world has ever known—the arson of
rival autocosms your favourite virtue. And I am not of those who hold
your power or passion extinct. Even in your ashes live your wonted
fires, and I may yet see the pyres of Smithfield blaze as in the days of
Mary. For to hold the keys of Heaven and Hell is as unsettling as any
other form of monopoly. Human nature cannot stand it. And by every
channel, apert or subterranean, you are creeping back to power, carrying
through all your labyrinths that terrible torch of faith. Already relics
have been borne in procession at Westminster. But perhaps I wrong you.
Perhaps your very Inquisition will make some concession to science and
the age, and electrocute instead of burning.
But though ye burn me or electrocute, yet must I praise your Church for
its three great principles of Democracy, Cosmopolitanism, and Female
Equality. At the apogee of its splendour, in the days before its
autocosm contradicted the known macrocosm, it made a brotherhood of Man
and a United States of Europe, and St. Catherine and St. Clara ranked
with St. Francis and St. Dominic. What can be more wonderful than that
an English menial, plain Nicholas Breakspeare, should rise into Pope
Adrian IV, and should crown Barbarossa at Rome as Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire, or that when this Empire’s fourth Henry must fain go to
Canossa, it was the reputed son of a carpenter that kept him waiting
barefooted in the snow? Contrast all this with the commercial
chauvinism, the snobbery, and the Mussulman disdain of woman into which
Europe has fallen since the “Dark Ages.”
I grant that the Papacy was as far from ensuring a human brotherhood as
the Holy Roman Empire was from the ideal of Petrarch, yet both
institutions kept the ideal of a unity of civilisation alive, and if
they did not realise it better, was it not because two institutions
aiming at the same unification are already a disturbing duality? The
situation under which the Emperor elected the Pope who consecrated the
Emperor, or the Pope excommunicated the Emperor who deposed the Pope and
elected an anti-Pope, was positively Gilbertian, and the grim comedy
reached its climax when Pope and anti-Pope used their respective
churches as fortresses. The old duel persists to-day in the tug-of-war
between Court and Vatican, and the Pope is so little a force for
unification that he still refuses to recognise the unity of Italy. Yet
no ironies of history can destroy the beauty of the Catholic concept.
“I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze
With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendour upon splendour multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante’s side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
“And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O’er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host.”
That is the Catholic autocosm at its loveliest, as seen by the poet of
the Pilgrim Fathers when under the spell of translating Dante. And ’tis,
indeed, no untrue vision of its ideal.
I saw an old statue of St. Zeno in his church at Verona, and the saint,
who began life as a fisherman, appeared as proud of his fish pendent as
of his crozier. Can one imagine a British bishop in a fishmonger’s
apron? Even the Apostles are doubtless conceived at the Athenæum Club as
a sort of Fishmongers’ Company, with an old hall and a ’scutcheon. For
England combines with her distrust of High Church a ritual of High Life,
which is the most meticulous and sacrosanct in the world.
Nor is there any record of a British bishop behaving like St. Zeno when
the Emperor Gallienus gave him the crown from off his own head, and the
saint requested permission to sell it for the benefit of the poor. True,
British bishops are not in the habit of exorcising demons from the
daughters of emperors, but neither are they in the habit of dividing
their stipends among curates with large families.
St. Zeno, by the way, came from Mauretania, and St. Antony was not
really of Padua, but of Portugal. ’Twas a free trade in saints. There
was no protection against protectors. Virgil and Boëthius themselves
enjoyed a Christian reputation. One does not wonder that even Buddha
crept into the calendar by an inspired error. It is heartening to come
on an altar in Verona to St. Remigio, “apostle of the generous nation of
the French,” to find Lucca Cathedral given over to an Irish saint and
honouring a Scotch king (“San Riccardo, Re di Scozia”), and to read of
King Canute treating with Pope John and Emperor Conrad for free Alpine
passes to Rome for English pilgrims. Universities too were really
universal. The Angelic Doctor was equally at home in Naples, Paris, and
Cologne.
What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I found pasted outside
Italian churches: “My God, I offer Thee all the masses which are being
celebrated to-day in all the world for the sinners who are in agony and
who must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus the Redeemer
obtain for them mercy!” True, the poetry of this prayer is rather marred
by the precise information that “every day in the universe about 140,000
persons die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year,” but not so
grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers. Why must this
fine altruism be thus tainted? But alas! Catholicism perpetually appears
the caricature of a great concept. Take for another example the methods
of canonisation, by which he or she who dies “in the odour of piety” may
pass, in the course of centuries, from the degree of venerable servant
of God to the apogee of blessed saintship. What can be grander than this
notion of taking all time as all earth for the Church’s province? Yet
consider the final test. The great souls she has produced must work two
posthumous miracles, forsooth, before they can be esteemed saints. By
what a perversion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on
a par with pills! Surely a true Church Universal should canonise for
goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles. Joan of Arc, who must wait
nigh five hundred years for saintship—did not the miracle of her life
outweigh any possible prowess of her relics?
But despite, or rather because of, this grossness, the walls of the
Catholic autocosm are still stout: centuries of friction with the
macrocosm will be needed to wear them away. The love of noble ritual and
noble buildings, of ordered fasts and feasts, of authority absolute; the
comfortable concreteness of Orthodoxy beside the nebulousness of
Modernism; the sinfulness of humanity, its helplessness before the
tragic mysteries of life and death; the peace of confession, the
therapeia of chance and hypnotism, the magnetism of a secular tradition,
the _vis inertiæ_—all these are pillars of the mighty fabric of St.
Peter. But even these would be as reeds but for the massive prop of
endowments. ’Tis Mortmain—the dead hand—that keeps back Modernism. So
long as any institution possesses funds, there will never be any lack of
persons to administer them. This is the secret of all successful
foundations. The rock on which the Church is founded is a gold-reef. And
it is actively defended by Persecution and the Index, by which all
thought is equally excluded, be it a Darwin’s or a Gioberti’s, a Zola’s
or a Tyrrell’s. Who then shall set a term to its stability?
With such a marvellous machinery at hand for the Church Universal of the
future—so democratic, so cosmopolitan, so free from sex injustice—it
seems a thousand pities that there is nothing to be done with it but to
scrap it. Surely it should be adapted to the macrocosm, brought into
harmony with the modern mind, so that, becoming again the mistress of
our distracted and divided world, moderating the frenzy of nationalisms
by a European cult and a European culture, keeping in their place the
mediocrities who are seated on our thrones, and the democracies when
they stray from wisdom, it could send out a true blessing _urbi et
orbi_. But this, I remember, is an Italian fantasy.