There is, in man's heart or soul, impressed in indelible characters, a tendency after the infinite, a craving almost infinite in its energy, such is the violence with which it impels the soul to seek and yearn after its object. To prove such a tendency were useless. That void, that feeling of satiety and sadness, which overwhelms the soul, even after the enjoyment of the most exquisite pleasure, either sensible or sentimental; the phenomenon of solitaries in all times and countries; the very fact of the existence of religion in all ages and among all peoples; the enthusiasm, the recklessness and barbarity which characterize the wars undertaken for religion's sake; the love of the marvellous and the mysterious exhibited by the multitude; that sense of terror and reverence, that feeling of our own nothingness, which steals into our souls in contemplating the wide ocean in a still or stormy night, or in contemplating a wilderness, a mountain, or a mighty chasm, all are evident proofs of that imperious, delicious, violent craving of our souls after the infinite. How otherwise explain all this? Why do we feel a void, a sadness, a kind of pain, after having enjoyed the most stirring delights? Because the infinite is the weight of the soul—the centre of gravity of the heart—because created pleasures, however delightful or exquisite, being finite, can never quiet that craving, can never fill up that chasm placed between us and God.
The pretended sages of mankind have never been able to exterminate religion, because they could never root out of the soul of man that tendency. I say pretended sages, because all real geniuses have, with very few exceptions, been religious; for in them that tendency is more keenly and more imperiously felt.
This is the second reason of the prevalence of Pantheism. To promise the actual and immediate possession of the infinite, nay, the transformation into the infinite, is to entice the very best of human aspirations, is to touch the deepest and most sensitive chord of the human heart.
Both these reasons we have drawna priori; we might now prove,a posteriori, from history, how every particular error has either fallen into Pantheism or disappeared altogether. But since this would carry us too far, we will exemplify it by one error—Protestantism.
The essence of Protestantism lies in emancipating human reason from dependence on the reason of God. It is true that at its dawn it was not proclaimed in this naked form, nor is it thus announced at the present time; but its very essence lies in that. For if human reason be made to judge objects which God's reason alone can comprehend, man is literally emancipated from the reason of God.
What does this supreme principle of Protestantism mean, that every individual must, by reading the Bible, find for himself what he has to believe?
Are the truths written in the Bible intelligible or superintelligible; that is, endowed with evidence immediate or mediate, or are they mysteries?
If they be purely intelligible, endowed with evidence mediate or immediate, there is no possible need of the Bible, for, in that case, reason could find them by itself. If they be mysteries, how can reason, unaided by any higher power, find them out? It will not do to say, They are written in the Bible, and reason has merely to apprehend them. Suppose a dispute should arise as to the right meaning of the Bible; who is to decide the dispute? Reason? Then reason must grasp and comprehend mysteries in order to decide the dispute. For none can be judge unless he is qualified thoroughly to understand the matter of the dispute. From this it is evident that to make reason judge of the faith is to make it judge of the mysteries of the infinite, and, therefore, is to emancipate the reason of man from subjection to the reason of God. Hence, Protestantism was rightly called a masked rationalism.
It soon threw off the mask. The human mind saw that it can never be emancipated from the reason of God unless it is supposed to be independent, and it could never be supposed independent unless it was supposed equal to the reason of the infinite.
The result of all this is necessarily Pantheism. And into Pantheism Protestants soon fell, especially the Germans, who never shrink from any consequence if logically deduced from their premises. Such was the latent reasoning of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others, in building up their form of Pantheism.
To understand is to master an object, to mould it so as to fit our intelligence. We can understand the infinite, we can master it. Therefore, we are at least equal to the infinite, 'we are ourselves the infinite,' we ourselves lay it down by a logical process. Hence the astounding proposal which Fichte made to his disciples, that the next day he would proceed to create God, was nothing else but the echo and logical consequence of the cry raised by the unfrocked monk of Wittenberg, proclaiming the independence of reason from the shackles of all authority.
On the other hand, the denial of human liberty and the absolute predestination of the Calvinists give the same result. If we are not free agents, if God can do what he lists with us, we are no longer agents in the strictest and truest sense of the word. Now, every substance is an act, amonos, a force; if, then, we are not agents, we are not substances, and hence we become qualities, phenomena of the infinite substance. All this as regards doctrine. But Protestantism ran into Pantheism by another road almost as soon as it arose, for the action of the feelings is swifter and more rapid than logic. Protestantism being rationalism in doctrine is necessarily naturalism with regard to the soul; and by presenting to the soul only nature, its authors left the craving after the supernatural and the infinite thirsty and bleeding. What was the consequence? Many Protestant sects fell into mysticism, which is but a sentimental Pantheism, a species of interior theurgy. History is too well known to render necessary any proof of these assertions. These are the consequences at which active minds must arrive when, in their researches, they do not meet with truth.
As to those minds which are not active, or not persevering in their inquiries, they fall into indifference, which is but a scepticism of the soul, as doubt is the scepticism of the mind.
Now, the question arises, What is the best method of refuting Pantheism? Many have been the refutations of Pantheism, but they are limited to pointing out the absurd consequences following from it, which consequences, summed up, amount to this: that Pantheism destroys and makes void the principle of contradiction in all the orders to which it may be applied; that is to say, it makes void that principle in the ontological order or order of realities, in the logical order, etc.
But, notwithstanding the truth and force of this refutation, we do not know that it has converted a single Pantheist. From the fact that Pantheism is more prevalent at the present time than ever it was, we should conclude that it has not. We say this with all the respect and deference due to those who have exerted their talents in the said arena.For we know that some of the noblest intellects have brought their energy to bear against this mighty error. But, if we are allowed to express our opinion, we say that all former refutations have been void of effect for lack of completeness, and a determination on the part of their authors to limit themselves to the abstract order, without descending to particulars, and to the order of realities. The result was, that while Pantheism, without any dread of consequences, applied its principles to all orders of human knowledge, and to all particular questions arrayed under each order, and was, as it were, a living, quickening system—false, indeed, in the premises, but logical and satisfactory in the consequences resulting from those premises—the refutations of it, confined within the limits of logic, were a mere abstraction; true, indeed, and perfectly satisfactory to any one who could apply the refutations to all the orders of human knowledge, but wholly deficient for those who are not able to make the application. We think, therefore, that a refutation of Pantheism should be conducted on the following principles:
1st. To admit all the problems which Pantheism raises, in all the generality of their bearing.
2d. To examine whether the solution which Pantheistic principles afford not only solves the problem, but even maintains it.
3d. If it is found that the Pantheistic solution destroys the very problem it raises, to oppose to it the true solution.
These are the only true principles, as far as we can see, which will render a refutation of Pantheism efficient. For, in this case, you have, in the first place, a common ground to stand upon, that is, the admission of the same problems; in the second place, if you can prove that the Pantheistic solution of the problems destroys them, instead of solving them, it will be readily granted by the Pantheist for the sake of the problems themselves. When you have done all this, you do not leave the mind in doubt and perplexity, but you present to it the true solution, and it will then be ready to embrace it.
A refutation conducted upon those principles we have attempted in the articles we now publish.
We take Pantheism in all its universality and apparent grandeur; we accept all its problems; we examine them one by one, and we show that the Pantheistic solution, far from resolving the problems, destroys them; and we substitute the true solution. In a word, we compare Pantheism with Catholicity; that is, the universality of error with the universality of truth—the whole system of falsehood with the whole system of truth. We make them stand face to face, and we endeavor to exhibit them so plainly that the brightness and splendor of the one may thoroughly extinguish the phosphoric light of the other. We show the Pantheist that, if he ever wants a solution ofhisproblems, he must accept Catholicity, or proclaim the death of his intelligence.
To do this it will be necessary for us to compare Pantheism and Catholicity in all orders; in the logical order, in the ontological order or the order of reality; and under this order we must compare them in the moral, social, political, and aesthetic orders. The truth of the one or the other will appear by the comparison.
It is true we undertake a great task; great especially as regards the positive part of the refutation. For it embraces the whole of theology; not only with relation to what is commonly regarded as its object, but in the sense of its being the supreme and general science, the queen of all sciences, the universal metaphysic in all possible orders.We own that we have felt the difficulty of such a task, and many times have we abandoned it as being far above our strength. But a lingering desire has made us return to the work. We have said to ourselves: Complete success and perfection are beyond our hope, but we can at least make the attempt; for, in matters of this kind, we think it well to reverse the wise maxim of the Lambeth prelates, and rather attempt too much than do too little.
The glowing wreaths that 'mid curled locks repose,Through night of pleasure worn,Myrtle and jasmine, orange-flower and rose,Fall shrivelled by the morn.The simple immortelles for loved ones twined—With many a tear and sigh,Hung round the cross—the rain-compelling windAnd winter snows defy.Thus gilded friendships, knit by pleasure brief,Fade when joy's scenes have passed;But duller links, annealed by burning grief,Through checkered years shall last.The Lamp.
The glowing wreaths that 'mid curled locks repose,Through night of pleasure worn,Myrtle and jasmine, orange-flower and rose,Fall shrivelled by the morn.The simple immortelles for loved ones twined—With many a tear and sigh,Hung round the cross—the rain-compelling windAnd winter snows defy.Thus gilded friendships, knit by pleasure brief,Fade when joy's scenes have passed;But duller links, annealed by burning grief,Through checkered years shall last.The Lamp.
Translated From Le Correspondant.
[Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Delivered on the occasion of a profession of Catholic faith and the first communion of an American Protestant lady, in the chapel of the convent of "Les Dames de l'Assomption," at Paris, July 14th, 1868]
"Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo," "I will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord." —Psalms.
Madam and my sister in Jesus Christ:
It is you who have given me the text and the subject of this exhortation. It is you who, overflowing with gratitude toward him who has called you from darkness to his admirable light, have asked me to forget this audience and to think only of you and of God, and to speak only of his loving-kindness which has been manifested in every event of your life. I will obey you; and, taking this life in its three divisions which mark time, I will endeavor to speak in simple truth, and the pious confidence of an overflowing heart, of the mercies of God over your past, your present, and your future career.
The history of Christian souls is the most marvellous and yet the most hidden of all histories. The more exterior events which agitate society find only in these interior histories their true sense and their highest reason; and when we shall read these entire in the book of life, and by the light of eternity, we will find therein the unanswerable justification of the providence of God over human affairs, and the true titles of the nobility of mankind in the blood and by the grace of Christ. "We will sing eternally the mercies of the Lord!"
And first, madam, what were these mercies of your past life? Or, to be better understood, what were you? What have you been until now? I acknowledge some embarrassment in giving an answer to my own question. Although born in the bosom of heresy, you were not a heretic. No, by the grace of God you were not a heretic; and nothing shall force me to give you this cruel name—justly cruel—against which cries out all the knowledge I have of your past. One of the doctors—the most exact and the most severe—of Christian antiquity, Saint Augustine, refuses in several of his writings to class among heretics those who, born outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church, have kept in their hearts the sincere love of truth, and are disposed to follow it in all its manifestations and in all its requirements. [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: See particularly the letter xliii. of the edition of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur: "Qui sententiam suam, quamvis falsam atque perversam, nulla pertinaci animositate defendunt, praesertim quam non audacia praesumptionis suae pepererunt, sed a seductis atque in errorem lapsis parentibus acceperunt, quaerunt autem cauta sollicitudine veritatem, corrigi parati, cum invenerint;nequaquam sunt inter haereticos deputandi."]
That which makes heresy is the spirit of pride, of revolt, and of schism, which burst forth in heaven when Satan, separating the angels of light, attempted to remodel, according to his liking, the theology of eternity, and reform the work of God in the world; it is that breath blown from the nostrils of the archangel in wrath to stir up about him his propagandists throughout time. Gentle and humble of heart, you have never breathed that breath. You are not, then, a heretic.
But then, what were you? One day I interrogated one of your most distinguished fellow-countrymen, Protestant by birth, now a Catholic and a priest, and in the outburst of that pious curiosity which is awakened by the history of souls I asked him this same question: "What were you?"
He answered me thus: "I did not belong to any Protestant communion; I had been baptized in the church of my parents, but I had never professed their faith." "You were, then, a rationalist?" said I. "No," responded he smilingly; "we of the United States know nothing of that mental malady of the Europeans." I blushed and was silent an instant, then pressed him to explain further, when he gave me this noble reply: "I was a natural man, seeking the truth with my whole intelligence and heart."
Well, madam, you were like that: you also—a noble, womanly nature—seeking the truth in love, and love in truth. But you were more: you were a Christian; ay, a Catholic.
This is a fundamental distinction without which it becomes impossible to be just toward communions separated from the Catholic Church, and toward the souls which compose them. All religious schisms contain within their bosom two elements entirely contrary: the negative element, which makes it a schism and often a heresy; and the positive element, which preserves for it a portion more or less great of its ancient heritage of Christianity. Not only distinct, but hostile, these two elements are nevertheless brought together in constant combat; the darkness and the light—life and death—meet without mingling, or without either being vanquished; and then results what I shall call the profound mystery of the life of error. As for myself, I do not give to error that undeserved honor to suppose that it can live of its own life, breathe of its own breath, or nourish of its own substance souls who are not without virtue, and peoples who are not without greatness.
Madam, Protestantism, as Protestantism, is that negative element which you have repudiated, and which with the Catholic Church you have condemned and abjured. But the spirit of Protestantism has not been alone in your religious life: by the side of its negations there were its affirmations, and, like savory fruit confined within its bitter husk, you were in possession of Christianity from your infancy.
Before coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism, validly received, and when the hand of your minister poured the water upon your forehead with the words of eternal life, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," it was Jesus Christ himself that baptized you. "Of little importance is the hand," writes Saint Augustine, "whether it be that of Peter or that of Paul: it is Christ that baptizes."
It was Christ who affianced you, who received your plighted faith and pledged you his. The depths of your moral being—that sacred part which in noble souls feels instinctively a repugnance to error—the Word consecrated to himself, and like a chaste virgin he reserved it for the skies! "Virginemcastam exhibere Christo." [Footnote 67]
[Footnote 67: 2 Corinthians xi. 2.]
Christian by baptism, you were also one by the gospel. The Bible was the book of your infancy; and therein you have lisped at once the secrets of this divine faith, which is of all time because it comes from eternity, and the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which is of all lands because it prevails over the globe in civilizing it. Without doubt the principle of private judgment, so-called—the principle under which you have formerly lived—is the source of numberless errors; but again, let us render thanks to God, besides the Protestant principle, with the Protestants themselves there is the Christian principle. Besides private judgment, there is the action of that supernatural grace received in baptism, and the mysterious sense, of which Saint Paul speaks, "We have the mind of Christ," [Footnote 68] and of which Saint John said, "Ye have unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." [Footnote 69] When we have read together that Scripture which has separated our ancestors, I was agreeably surprised to find that we understood its every page in the same sense, and consequently in reading it alone, and out of the Church, you have not read it without the spirit of the Church.
[Footnote 68: "Nos autem sensum Christi habemus." (i Cor. ii. 16.)]
[Footnote 69: "Sed vos unctionem habetis a Sancto, et nostis omnia. … Et non necesse habetis ut aliquis doceat vos: sed sicut unctio ejus docet vos de omnibus, et verum est, et non est mendacium." (i John ii. 20, 27.)]
Again, my child: with Baptism and the Holy Scriptures, with the sacrament and the book, you had prayer; that interior, invisible, ineffable, and withal common property; that language pre-eminently of the soul to God, and of God to the soul; that personal and direct communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven.
In what, then, were you wanting? I remember what you once said to me when you were still a Protestant: "You, monk as you are, and I, Puritan that I am, are, nevertheless, of the same blood royal." You spoke truly, not because you were Puritan, but because you were Christian: we were of the same blood, both royal and divine. You were a child of the family like myself; but your cradle was carried away in a night of storm by imprudent hands from the paternal mansion—that mansion of which your eyes could no longer retain the image, of which your lips knew not the name, but which you reclaimed by your tears, by your cries, and by all the emotions of your soul. What you needed, my daughter, was to find it again, to weep upon its threshold, to embrace its old walls, and to dwell therein for ever.
You found it at Rome, in the temple of Saint Peter, the vastest and the most splendid which man has ever built to his God; but vast and splendid above all to the eyes of faith, because it is to them the image of the universal brotherhood of the children of God upon the earth. "To gather together in one the children of God that were dispersed." [Footnote 70] Coming from the great dispersion of souls, which is the work of man in Protestantism, you contemplated at last their supreme unity, which is the work of God in Catholicity. Deeply impressed and suddenly moved, you looked about you—it is your own touching account that I repeat here—you looked about you for a priest of your own tongue; not to confess to, for you did not then believe in its necessity, but to whom you could unburden your soul, and to whom you could tell your joy at having found at last a hearthstone for the heart, ahome!—word so dear and sacred to your race and more necessary in the religious than in the domestic life. "This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it." [Footnote 71]
[Footnote 70: "Ut filios Dei, qui erant dispersi, congregaret in unum." (John xi. 52.)]
[Footnote 71: Psalm cxxxi. 14.]
I have tried, madam, to tell what was your past, and how the mercy of God prepared you in it by his far-reaching hand for the marvels of the present. What is now this marvel? It is the mystic marriage with Jesus Christ, by the communion with his real body and with his real blood, in the sacrament of his true church. Affianced of God in baptism, you become his spouse in the Eucharist. "Oh! blessed are you to have been called to the marriage feast of the Lamb." [Footnote 72]
[Footnote 72: Apocalypse xix. 9.]
It is not without a touching motive that you have chosen the 14th of July to consummate this solemn act. This is the anniversary of your marriage—of that marriage sundered by death. You have made your entry into the Catholic Church the epoch of a great transformation in your spiritual life: you have chosen the day most appropriately, desiring that this date, so full of the remembrances of tenderness and grief, should mark your entire union with your crucified Lord, to be no more separated for ever.
How beautiful is he—in his blood, and through your tears—this Spouse of Calvary, and how lovely, and how truly is he made for you, my daughter! It is not
"Patience on a monument smiling at grief:"
it is love transported with sorrow and reposing in death.
I remember well the day when I met you for the first time in the parlor of my humble convent. The Catholic crucifix you already wore upon your breast, and from time to time your eyes were turned toward that other cross suspended against the wall, and which presided over our interview, full of light and full of tears, with an expression which revealed your whole soul—all that it still lacked—all that it already foresaw.
I would exaggerate nothing, and above all I would offend no one; but can I not say that the orbit wherein, ordinarily, Protestant piety moves is the divine, rather than God himself? It is conscience, with its steel-like temper, which is at the same time evangelic and personal. It is respect for truth—the instinctive taste for what is moral and religious. All these are what I call the divine: it is not God. It is the glorious ray of the sun, but it is not that resplendent disk. Where, then, is the elevation of the soul to the living God? "My soul has thirsted for the strong and living God; when shall I come, and appear before his face?" [Footnote 73]
[Footnote 73: Psalm xli. 3.]
Where is the habitual communion of the heart and its works with the Word made flesh? and the tears poured out like Magdalen at his feet? and the bowed head—like that of John—upon his breast? and all that which the book of theImitationso well calls the familiar friendship of Jesus? Where, in a word, is that Real Presence which, from the holy sacrament, as from a hidden fountain, flows forth to the true Catholic, like a river of peace, all the day long, fructifying and gladdening his life? It was this Emmanuel—this God with us—who awaited you in our church, and in the sacrament which attracted you with so much power even when you but half-believed in it. As in the ancient synagogue, you found in your worship only symbols and shadows; they spoke to you of the reality but did not contain them, they awakened your thirst but did not quench it. Weak and empty elements which have no right to existence since the veil of the temple has been rent asunder and the eternal reality discovered."Old things have passed away, and all things are become new." [Footnote 74] Oh! blessed are you to have been admitted into the nuptial chamber of the Lamb.
[Footnote 74: 2. Cor. v. 17.]
However, madam, if Christ has taken captive your heart, it is the language of the prophet: "Thou hast beguiled me, O Lord, and I am beguiled: thou hast been stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed." [Footnote 75] But he has respected all the rights of your reason and of your liberty. That which you have resolved, that which you are about to accomplish, you have weighed well and long in the balance of investigation, study, reflection, and prayer; and I owe you this justice to say that you have carried your reflection to the utmost scruple, and completion almost to delay—so much have you feared, in this great religious act, any other argument but of personal conscience; to such a degree have you persisted in rejecting the shadow of any human influence, or the shadow of the influence of imagination or sentiment.
[Footnote 75: Jer. xx. 7.]
It is thus, however, that Jesus Christ would have you to himself. Spouse of love, he is at the same time the Spouse of truth and liberty, and this is why, in drawing souls to him, he never deceives nor constrains them. He is the eternal Word, begotten of the reason of God the Father; born in the outpouring of infinite splendor, he remembers his origin, and when he comes to us it is not under cover of our gloom, but in the effulgence of his light. And because he is the truth he is also liberty. He bows with respect [Footnote 76] before the liberty of the soul, his image and daughter, and forgets the language of command that he may only employ that of prayer.
[Footnote 76: "Cum magna reverentia disponis nos." (Sap. xii. 18.)]
As in the sacred song, he says: "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the nights." [Footnote 77]
[Footnote 77: Canticle v. 2.]
"Here am I." He says again in the Apocalypse, "I stand at the door, and knock: if any one shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in, and will sup with him, and he with me." [Footnote 78] He never forces an entrance into the heart; he enters it only when it is opened for him. How tender and beautiful those words that prove that with God as with man there is the same love and the same tenderness! True love respects as much as it loves, and disdains triumph at the expense of liberty!
[Footnote 78: Apocalypse iii. 20.]
Is this all, however? For his love is jealous and liberty is not enough; there must be the combat and the sacrifice. What were the desperate conflicts, free though you were, that rendered your decision so difficult and so painful? I may not speak of them. Family, friends, country: I have seen these sacred wounds too near to dare to touch them. I will only say that I was ignorant until now of what it costs even to the mind most perfectly convinced, and to the strongest will, to leave the religion of their mother and of their country!
Ah! why is it that on that noble soil of the United States our church is still, I do not say unknown, but despised, by so many souls? Would to God it were only unknown! A new apostle will invoke upon her shores the God whom Paul invoked before the Areopagus,ignoto Deo, the church which they love in the ideal, without knowing it in its reality; and, free from prejudices, the sober-minded Americans will receive it better than did the frivolous Athenians.But they think they know us, while they see us through such base report that even our name excites disgust and hatred. How much longer must these sectarian misapprehensions continue? and when will God at last command that the walls of division shall be thrown down? At all events, it depends upon us to prepare for that much desired day, by coming together, not with doctrinal concessions, which would be criminal if not chimerical, but by abandoning our respective prejudices before the better known reality, and by the formation of those kindly relations, while esteem and charity could yet unite those whom diversity of beliefs still separate. As for me, this is my most ardent prayer, and as far as I understand and appreciate the situation of religious affairs in this century, this feeling is invested with a quickened and more pressing character. And since, then, the time has come when judgment should begin at the house of God, [Footnote 79] let us Roman Catholics know how to give the example; let us arise resolutely and give a loyal hand to our separated but well-be-loved brethren.
[Footnote 79: "Quoniam tempus est ut incipiat judicium a domo Dei." (i Peter iv. 17.)]
But what do I say? Is it not you, madam, who have come to us first, surmounting obstacles which I cannot recount? You have overcome them not only with the sweat of your brow, but by the blood of your soul; for, as Saint Augustine so truly says, "there is a blood of the soul." And it is this which you have poured out; you have removed by your heroic hands the hewn rocks which shut you in. Like the daughter of Zion, you have made straight your way and have come. [Footnote 80]
[Footnote 80: "Conclusit vias meas lapidibus quadris, semitas meas subvertit." (Lam. iii. 9.)]
Ah! let me welcome you with these words of your own, in which you expressed the inspiration which was your strength: "My love, my beautiful, calls me: I know his voice, and though I am weak and trembling I will come to him."
Let us finish this song of the loving-kindness of God in your soul. Affianced by baptism, even in the bosom of your involuntary errors, espoused by the Eucharist in the integrity of Catholic faith and charity, what remains for you to complete the cycle of divine love and to consummate your life therein, except to become a mother in the apostolate?
Our Lord was speaking one day to the multitude, when he was told that his mother and his brethren were without and had asked for him. Surveying the people with his look of inspiration, he asked, "Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?" Then stretching out his hand over the listening multitude, he said, "Behold my mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother and my mother." [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: Matthew xii. 49, 50.]
The Pope Saint Gregory the Great, explaining, in one of his homilies, this teaching of the Master, found some difficulty in his saying, "This is my mother." "We are without doubt his brothers and his sisters, by the accomplishment of the will of the Father; but how could any being other than Mary be called his mother?" And the great pope remarks, as soon as a soul by a word, by example, by a spiritual influence, whatsoever it may be, produces or develops in another soul the Word, the God, the Truth, substantial and living, justice and charity, in fact, Jesus Christ—for Jesus Christ is all these—she becomes in a way superior to the reality of maternal conception, the mother of Jesus in that soul, and the mother of that soul in Jesus.
Well, madam, if I mistake not, God reserves for you a part in his choice of this spiritual maternity. It is of those cherished ones of whom I cannot speak—respect and emotion forbid—but you will be their mother in Jesus, their mother in the integrity of their liberty as you have been his spouse in the plenitude of your own. Since there are other souls without number and without name, at least to our feeble minds, but who are counted and inscribed in the book of divine election, and who, by the mysterious power of your apostleship, shall be gathered from the four winds of heaven; for the Lord hath not spoken in vain: "And many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." [Footnote 82] Yes, many, born like you in heresy without having been heretics, ignorant without being culpable, are hastening to the banquet of Catholic truth, to the joys of a refound unity; while, alas! some there are among us, zealous for the letter, but using it to smother the spirit, who will see themselves perhaps excluded from the kingdom of God, for which they do not bring forth fruit. [Footnote 83]
[Footnote 82: Matthew viii. 11.]
[Footnote 83: Matthew xxi. 43.]
Go, then, as a missionary of peace and of light to the land that awaits you, and of which by an especial design of Providence the moral future is almost entirely in the hands of women. You will not regret the public preaching which is forbidden your sex; you will speak in the modest and persuasive eloquence of conversation; you will speak by your person and your entire life, free yet submissive, humble yet proud, austere yet tolerant, carrying the love of God even to aspirations the most sublime, and the love of your fellow-beings to condescensions the most tender.
But I would define more clearly the special character of your apostolate. In recounting to me the history of your soul, with its loves and hates, you have said, "I have hated three things: slavery, the Catholic Church, and immorality." Of the three hates only one remains. Slavery is no more: God has effaced the sign of Cain from the brow of your people with a baptism of blood. As for the Catholic Church, when you came to know it your hate was turned to love, and you have espoused it to battle more efficiently with it against the last enemy; and it is in the firm foundation of her dogmas, replacing the slippery sand whereon your uncertain feet trod; it is in the fecundity of its sacraments, substituted for the sterility of your worship; it is under the guidance of its hierarchy, and in the force of its unity, that you will combat the double immorality which dishonors the Christian world—the immorality of mind, which we in Europe call Rationalism, which you in America call Infidelity; two wounds unlike I know, but two wounds equally mortal: and the immorality of the heart, that which corrupts the senses as the former does thought. These two immoralities are sisters; one attacks the virginity of faith, the other the virginity of love, and both have found in woman a special enemy. To the serpent which crawls on its belly and eats the dust of the earth, the Lord has said from the beginning, in pointing to woman, who is the ideal being springing from the heart of man: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." [Footnote 84]
[Footnote 84: Genesis iii. 15.]
But now, behold the woman above all women! Mary, the young wife, the young mother, going over the hills of Judea to visit her friend, advanced in years, and hopeless as it seemed in sterility. She carries in her womb the infinite weight of the Word, but her step is light like truth, like love. Under the charm of the chaste love of God she greets Elizabeth, who feels at her approach the germ of nature quicken within her breast. "From whence cometh this happiness that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" The children were yet mute, but their mothers prophesy, Elizabeth before John the Baptist, Mary before Jesus Christ. "Already," to speak with St. Ambrose, "already the day of the beginning of the salvation of man had begun," [Footnote 85] and because sin had commenced by woman, regeneration commenced by her.
[Footnote 85: "Serpunt enim jam tentamenta salutis humanae." In Luc.]
It seems to me I see now the Christian woman, espoused of Jesus and his mother, advancing toward this century, bowed down like Elizabeth in the sadness of sterility. The obstacles which have repelled us do not hinder her. She will imbibe in the inspirations of her charity, faith, and hope, which we have too often failed to show; rising like Mary upon the delectable heights, walking in the paths of the spring-time and of the dawn; she will cause to be heard in the ears of the men of this century this cry of the heart which recognizes the presence of Jesus: "Behold, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy." [Footnote 86]
[Footnote 86: Luke i. 44.]
Arise, daughter of Zion, unbind the cords about your neck, you who were captive: "Solve vincula colli tui, captiva filia Sion." [Footnote 87] How beautiful are the feet of those who stand upon the mountain-top, proclaiming peace and bringing the glad tidings of salvation, crying: "The Lord shall reign!"
[Footnote 87: Isaiah iii. 2.]
Santo Spirito is not as well known to strangers as the other large churches of Florence. It is on the south, or less frequented, side of the river, and is so hemmed in, hidden away, and thrust out of sight, by compact masses of tall dwellings and old palaces, that, although just round the corner from the Pitti, it was a month before I found it out. Indeed, I was only then apprised of its existence by the drums of the Sixth grenadiers beating for military Mass.
A piazza in Florence means an acre, more or less, of oblong, open, flat, macadamized, unornamented ground; without tree, or shrub, or flower, or even the picturesque grasses of the deader Italian towns. The Piazza of Santo Spirito is peculiarly bald and insipid. The exterior of the church itself is dreadful; shabbiness and dilapidation unrelieved by a single line of beauty. The cupola, for which Brunelleschi is responsible, is mean almost to vulgarity; almost as mean as the cupola of San Lorenzo. Two such cupolas would ruin any other reputation than his who vaulted Santa Maria del Fiore. The only redeeming feature in the whole quadrilateral is the charming Campanile, or belfry of Baccio d'Agnolo's, which hovers like the dream of a poet over Ser Filippo's prose. The facade of the church is unfinished, and, what is worse, disfigured by the introduction of the scroll, that poorest, falsest, shallowest of architectural devices. The scroll is properly the symbol of the fleeting; a line described through air or water with wand or wheel; the scriptural type of evanescence: "And the heavens shall be rolled away like a scroll." (Isaiah.) "And the heaven withdrew, as a scroll rolled up together." (Revelation.)
How monstrous a violation of all fitness to adopt it as part of the fixed form and outline of an edifice—to fasten the sign of the transient on the front of mansions dedicated to the service of the Eternal! The front is the weakest elevation of the basilica, but the scroll only makes it worse. See how well the matter can be mended by the gold mosaic and linear grace of San Miniato, by the arched colonnades of Pisa, by the pointed buttresses—notthe wretched windows—of Milan. You are in a rage with Ser Filippo and the Renaissance at once.
But enter; push the green baize aside; step fairly in. Heaven, how beautiful! What breadth, what calm, what repose! Round-arched aisles of dark Corinthian columns, not stopping at the choir, but running clean round transepts and apsis, traversing a Latin cross of more than three hundred by nearly two hundred feet. No stained glass—all in transparent shadow, like the heart of a forest. A church built for use, not show; yet lofty, spacious, beautiful, with an atmosphere of its own which is luxury to breathe. Not the gloom of the Duomo, nor the glow of St. Peter's, nor yet the gray of San Lorenzo; the place is haunted by a dim, mysterious gladness.Although in the round style, and comparatively barren of detail, it looks larger even than it is; larger than Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce. Its real magnitude is enhanced by its perfect proportions; a fact which should keep us from flippantly imputing to the same cause the illusive littleness of St. Peter's.
But the grenadiers are marching in, "fifty score strong;" their bayonets are flashing in nave and aisle. You would think the church would never hold them all; yet there is room beneath those brown arches for thrice as many more. As soon as the men are formed, the officers march down the nave amidst complete silence—their breasts covered with decorations won at Magenta and Solferino—and range themselves before the choir. In the transept on their right is stationed their band, much the best in Florence—some forty instruments, admirably led, and nearly as good as the Austrian. Just as the music begins, the chaplain, a handsome, grave young ecclesiastic—followed by two tall grenadiers who serve his Mass—advances from Cronaca's beautiful sacristy; and, without the least appearance of haste, and with the utmost dignity, Mass is said in fifteen minutes. No noise, no shuffling, no whispering, none of the effort and formality of a festa; the charm is that of a ceremony first beheld just as the celebrants are first at home in their parts. The cavalry Mass at Santa Maria Novella is far less imposing; dismounted troopers are always awkward, and their band, in this instance, is a poor one. But it was very fine at La Novella—the two dragoons flanking the altar with naked sabres, else motionless at their sides, flashed forward in swift salute at the elevation.
As soon as Mass was over, the troops dispersed and I was at liberty to explore the church. What a relief to find the pictures covered! it almost reconciled me to Lent. What a delight to find all the details unobtrusive—all the chapels modestly in the background, instead of parading their comparative insignificances. Nothing blank or bald: a broad, single effect like the Sistine Sibyls and Prophets, or the Madonna of the Fish, or the Idylls of the King.
In the ages of faith, the monk, the noble, and the state went hand in hand in erecting and adorning the house of God—in making it gigantic, beautiful, imperishable, complete. Not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, there was a silent compact between the present and the future—an assurance that the inspiration of to-day would remain the inspiration of tomorrow—an abiding conviction that the creed of the sire would remain for ever precisely the creed of the son. In this belief, the founders of the great churches cut out work for three centuries with less misgiving than we should now have in projecting for as many years. The builders of the English abbeys foresaw not the day when the torch and sword and hammer of the descendant would be uplifted to burn, to stain, to shatter a repudiated inheritance; when the rites of new and hostile doctrines would affront the few ancestral temples that were spared. The architects of St. Peter's foresaw not the large revolt for which they were unconsciously paving the way in Germany. Like ourselves, to be sure, they had the record of the past before them. They knew, as well as we, that naught was left of Corinth, and next to nothing of Athens, and little of ancient Rome save her Colosseum and her Pantheon; that the temple of Solomon was ashes; that the obelisks were pilgrims to the West; that thetentedsepulchres of theshepherdkings stood solitary and meaningless in the desert.But, in spite of all this panorama of mutation and decay, they could not subdue the sacred instinct of building for eternity. Christianity was so charged with promise, triumph, and immortality that they fancied her tabernacles as indestructible as herself. There was a joyous trust, too, that "the time was at hand," a confident expectation that those domes and spires would abide till the coming of the Son of man in the glory of his Father with his angels.
But the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and Italian Unification have taught us that the monuments of the new faith, instead of being specially exempt from injury, are peculiarly liable to insult and mutilation. Men and nations have measurably ceased to care or expect to perpetuate themselves through the temple and the tomb. The soul of architecture has received a shock. Her throne is the solitude or the waste. She lurks amidst ruins and relics, the very Hagar of art. She that seemed mightiest has proved weakest; her daintier sisters, sculpture and song, have triumphed where she failed. The statues that adorned her porticoes are upright still, but the porticoes themselves are overthrown. The lay, the legend, the chronicle, committed with plying finger to paper or parchment, are living, while the forms of beauty and grandeur entrusted to marble are broken or beneath the sands. Here and there you meet her skeleton in the wilderness, her white arm upraised in sublime self-assertion; but though the story of Zenobia is immortal, there is scarcely a column of Palmyra standing. The very mummy, with his dry papyrus which a spark might annihilate, may chance to survive his pyramid! Nature has turned against her; matter has played her false. She has toiled a thousand years in granite, iron, cedar—in all that seemed solidest, hardest, firmest: her back is bent with honest toil, her hands are roughened with mallet and chisel; yet the dream of a poet traced on calfskin outlasts the vision embodied in travertine or porphyry. If an earthquake shook the Val d'Arno, the canvas of Giotto would survive his campanile.
What mockery, then, to persist in attempting the indestructible when dissolution or disintegration is the inevitable doom of the material! Time has demonstrated that the more ponderous the instrument of expression, the less easy of perpetuation the art. The obliterated manuscript can be forced to reappear, but no chemistry can reproduce the vanished temple. The greatest forces of the universe are precisely those which are subtlest and least substantial. Steam and electricity are well-nigh impalpable and invisible. It is the spirit, not the body, save as purged and spiritualized by decay, that exists for ever. Away, then, with the unattainable! Away with a miscalledreal!If it, too, is a cheat, may it not be counterfeited with impunity? Away with column of stone, with lacework of fretted marble, with blazonry in oak and walnut! Away with all stubborn, difficult truth, and welcome brick and mortar, lath and plaster, paint and whitewash, gilt and varnish. If the cheap will look as well or nearly as well as the dear, why not use it? It is no falser, onlysoonerfalser. When it wears out or burns up or tumbles down, try it again. Be done with the tower of Babel: its curse clings faster to architecture than to speech. And as for the gigantic, drop it!It is always a disappointment—a disappointment in nature and art, in minster, mountain, stream—a disappointment in all things save the broad dome of the empyrean with its floor of emerald, its ceiling of unfathomed blue or studded bronze, its draperies of shifting, winged, ethereal cloudland.
Yes, art, like the artist, must encounter death. But shall we embrace the mean because sooner or later we must relinquish the great? Shall we forsake the permanent for the transient because the enduring falls short of the everlasting? Shall we inaugurate a reign of sham because the real is not always the perpetual?
"Il pessimo nemico del bene é l'amator del ottimo."
The muses should never pout: each art should reverently accept its limitations. Though the pen is mightier than pencil or chisel, though only the word and the song are privileged to pass intact from age to age, yet a portion of the soul of plastic art may sometimes baffle decay. Even in ruin, architecture is not without its prouder consolations.Ex pede, Herculem. While a bone of her survives, imagination can approximate a resurrection of the departed whole. The malice of her sworn enemies, the elements, is sometimes providentially her salvation; the shrouded lava of Vesuvius embalmed a more vivid presentation of Roman life and manners than lives in the pages of Terence or Plautus. A broken shaft, a fragmentary arch, a section of Cyclopean wall, is at once a poem, a chronicle, and a picture. The ruin is time's authentic seal, without which history were as inconclusive as the myth. The past is a present voice as long as a vestige of its architecture remains. The Column of Trajan is the best orator of the forum now; there is a deeper charm in the living eloquence of the Colosseum than in the dead thunder of the Philippics. [Footnote 88] We are as awed and startled when unexpectedly confronted by some mouldering but still breathing monument of antiquity, as if the form of the deathless evangelist stood bodily before us.
[Footnote 88:"Tully was not so eloquent as thou,Thou nameless column with the buried base!"]
We perfectly understand and sympathize with the modern instinct that recoils from imparting a more than needful permanence to private dwellings. The home of man is sullied with low cares and offices; beneath the screen and shelter of its roof the worst passions are often nourished, the darkest mysteries are sometimes celebrated. In many an ancient manor, there is scarcely a chamber without its legend of sin, scarcely a floor without its bloodstain. But theHouse of Godis the witness of the virtues, not the vices, of humanity; within its hallowed precincts the casual profanity and levity of the few are quite lost in the earnest adoration of the many; the whispers of blasphemy drowned in the ceaseless tide of general thanksgiving; the rebellious beatings of passion hushed in the solemn chorus of penitence and praise. The longer it endures, the holier it becomes. Its aisles are impregnated with prayer, its vaults enriched with ashes of the blest, its altars radiant with the wine of sacrifice. Behind the doors of the palace and the dwelling, time is sure to plant the spectre and the thorn; behind the doors of the cathedral, the angel and the palm.
The primary charm of church architecture is veracity. The interior of Santo Spirito is perfect truth. The columns are, what they claim to be, stone; the balustrade of the choir is, what it claims to be, bronze; the altar what it claims to be,pietra dura.You do not sound a pillar and hear a lie, or scratch a panel and see a lie, or touch a jewel and feel a lie. All is fair, square, honest—not even the minutest lurking insincerity to vex the Paraclete. I soon learned to love Santo Spirito as well as any Florentine; to love it better than the Duomo with its windows of a thousand dyes; better than the bride of Buonarroti With her frescoes of Masaccio, her Madonna of Cimabue's, her Crucifix of Giotto's; better even than Santa Croce with its ashes of Angelo, its Annunciation of Donatello's, its Canova's Alfieri. I used to sit for hours in its spacious choir, undisturbed even by the dull, nasal, inharmonious chanting of the good Augustinians, and listen to the sermons preached by those dim, unending arches.
Translated From The Revue Du Monde Catholique.
God's purposes sometimes reveal themselves in a manner greatly to perplex us. They move contrary to all foresight or to any human logic. Day succeeds to night, light to darkness, hope to despair, without any apparent reason, indeed in spite of reason itself. When all seems lost, then everything is regained, and even death itself appears to live anew. The history of religion is full of such decay and such regeneration.
After the frightful crisis of the eighteenth century, one would have thought the Church entirely abandoned, and that no new breath could revive the fallen ruins which the efforts of a hundred years had accumulated. "The pinnacle of the temple is crumbled, and the clew of heaven comes to moisten the face of the kneeling believer," says, in his theatrical and pseudo-biblical style, the most celebrated enemy of our time. [Footnote 89]
[Footnote 89: M. Renan.]
Many Christians were distressed, and the timid braved with difficulty the universal defection. That which they believed in was denied, that which they adored was burned, and that which they loved was disgraced.
God permits these humiliations, to show us that "the work is all of his hand," and sustained only by him. To the triumphant cries of his adversaries, to the cry of distress from his faithful, he has responded by the glorious miracle which eternally attests his power. Lazarus was in the tomb; he has restored him to life! The Church, said its enemies, was crushed to the earth; he has revivified it. To the eighteenth century, the most impious and corrupt of centuries, he has caused the nineteenth to succeed, which will remain in history one of the most fruitful and beautiful of the Church. To speak properly, the nineteenth century seems to have for its mission the raising of the ruins made by its predecessor.Following it over all the earth, and taking up its work as a counterpart, the present century repairs the breaches made before it and re-establishes at each point the fortresses and ramparts of virtue.
Without doubt the enemy is still vigorous; he is far from being vanquished, and puts forth his last efforts. The nineteenth century is a list where truth and error, good and evil, give themselves up to solemn combat. The ground is cleared, the intermediate questions laid aside, and each party knows well what he wishes and where he goes. Scepticism and materialism never had a more brilliant career; never have truth and Christian virtues shone with greateréclat. In which camp will rest the victory? This is God's own secret, and only from the past may we predict the future. In no age, perhaps, even in its best days, has the Church collected around her so many and such valiant champions. The greatest bishops, the greatest writers, the greatest orators, have succeeded each other for nearly a hundred years, and have formed for their spiritual mother a magnificent crown of science and genius. Speaking in a literary point of view, the age belongs to Catholics; our adversaries, by the side of our apologists, make but a paltry figure.
Works, too, are on a level with the minds that inspire them. Never have they been so numerous, and never so fruitful. Foundations of all sorts, churches, monasteries, orders, missions, schools, hospitals, orphan-asylums, have multiplied in emulation of each other. A small part of the works of our day would suffice for the glory of any epoch. The clergy encourage and direct these movements; they display zeal and self-abnegation; and, devoted to their chiefs, they become more and more devoted to the church. Theéliteof society do them honor by following in their footsteps. Disabused of the unhealthy and destructive ideas by which their fathers were lost, and instructed by a hundred years of experience and misery, the higher classes, in France especially, return with simplicity to the faith and to the Christian virtues. Obedient to the eternal law which regulates society, the lower classes by degrees model themselves according to their example. The centenaryfêtes, the canonizations, the pilgrimages of Salette, Lourdes, and others, are living witnesses of the fervor of the clergy and the public faith.
And, to crown all, the Church never attested its supernatural fecundity by such a number of saints and martyrs. The nineteenth century is the richest in canonizations. When the Church is accused of being exhausted, she replies by showing a new harvest. And what saints! what models! The Labres, the Germaine Cousins, the Marie Alacoques, the Cure's d'Ars! The greatest defiance thrown at our time, and the most violent antithesis of its ideas and instincts, is the actual Christianity in our midst—so hostile to the spirit of the world and the spirit of the age.