Chapter 4 No.4

On the one side we have-as our only form and semblance of religion-the Papacy.

I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other dared openly to venture on the problem,-when the boldest contented themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of Catholicism,-I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence of quite another death.

I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.

Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion,-a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to know the cause of this.

All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in falsehood,-not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in indulgences three centuries ago,-not because this or that Pope trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion,-not because they have governed and persecuted men according to their arbitrary will; but because they cannot do other, even if they would.

These evils and these sins are not causes, but consequences.

Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals should be converted;-that the Jansenists, or other Reformers, should recall the misguided Popes to the charity and humility of their ancient way of life,-they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater dignity;-it can never again be what once it was, the ruler and director of the conscience of the peoples.

The mission of the Papacy-a great and holy mission, whatever the fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the contrary-is fulfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power of genius, no miracle of will, can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal governments-of the spirit over matter, of God over C?sar-an organic social fact.

And such was in truth the mission of the Papacy,-the secret of its power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron strength of will,-Gregory VII.,-and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and fifty years afterwards, the gigantic attempt had become but the dim record of a past never to return. With the successors of Innocent III. began the decline of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity. A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred more the servant of C?sar, and had lost one half of Europe.

From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to the thing we now behold it;-disinherited of all power of inspiration over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.

The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed,-from a notion of life since proved imperfect,-from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation,-from a solution of the eternal problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.

The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race.

The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formul? of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.

The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the fall of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were:-

The doctrine of the necessity of mediation between man and God;

The belief in a direct, immediate, and immutable revelation, and hence in a privileged class,-naturally destined to centralize in one individual,-the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate;

The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited faith in the Mediator, for works,-hence grace and predestination more or less explicitly substituted for free-will;

The separation of the human race into the elect and the non-elect;

The salvation of the one, and the eternal damnation of the other; and, above all,

The duality between earth and heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.

In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the individual; it offered the individual a means of salvation in despite of the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him, The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven.

The new formula of life and its law-unknown at that day, but revealed to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity, confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of genius and the grand results of scientific research-may be summed up in the single word Progress,[D] which we now know to be, by Divine decree, the inherent tendency of human nature,-whether manifested in the individual or the collective being,-and destined, more or less speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.

The logical consequences of the new formula are:-

The substitution of the idea of a law for the idea of a Mediator;-the idea of a continuous educational revelation for that of an immediate arbitrary revelation;

The apostolate of genius and virtue, and of the great collective intuitions of the peoples, when roused to enthusiastic action in the service of a truth, substituted for the privilege of a priestly class;

The sanctity of tradition, as the depository of the progress already achieved; and the sanctity of individual conscience, alike the pledge and the means of all future progress;

Works, sanctified by faith, substituted for mere faith alone, as the criterion of merit and means of salvation.

The new formula of life cancels the dogma of grace, which is the negation of that capacity of perfectibility granted to all men; as well as that of predestination, which is the negation of free-will, and that of eternity of punishment, which is the negation of the divine element existing in every human soul.

The new formula substitutes the conception of the slow, continuous progress of the human Ego throughout an indefinite series of existences, for the idea of an impossible perfection to be achieved in the course of one brief existence; it presents an absolutely, new view of the mission of man upon earth, and puts an end to the antagonism between earth and heaven, by teaching us that this world is an abode given to man wherein he is bound to merit salvation, by his own works, and hence enforces the necessity of endeavoring, by thought, by action, and by sacrifice, to transform the world,-the duty of realizing our ideal here below, as far as in us lies, for the benefit of future generations, and of reducing to an earthly fact as much as may be of the kingdom-the conception-of God.

The religious synthesis which is slowly but infallibly taking the place of the synthesis of the past comprehends a new term,-the continuous collective life of humanity; and this alone is sufficient to change the aim, the method, and the moral law of our existence.

All links with heaven broken, and useless to the earth, which is ready to hail the proclamation of a new dogma, the Papacy has no longer any raison d'être. Once useful and holy, it is now a lie, a source only of corruption and immorality.

Once useful and holy, I say, because, had it not been for the unity of moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the Papacy, we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we should not now have been prepared to proclaim the dogma of human equality on earth. And, I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at the present day, because every great institution becomes such if it seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. The substitution of the enslavement for the slaughter of the conquered foe was a step towards progress, as was the substitution of servitude for slavery. The formation of the Bourgeoise class was a progress from servitude. But he who at the present day should attempt to recede towards slavery and servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization, past and future, and a teacher of immorality.

It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to win the city of the future and the triumph of truth, to make war, not only upon the temporal power,-who should dare deny that to the admitted representative of God on earth?-but upon the Papacy itself. It is therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient and unequal to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity.

They who at the present day attack the Prince of Rome, and yet profess to venerate the Pope, and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.

They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of a free Church in a free State are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or destitute of every spark of moral conviction.

The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy the name. It is-like all the programmes of mere liberty-an implicit declaration that the institution against which we are compelled to invoke either our individual or collective rights is corrupt, and destined to perish.

Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it, you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure,-to look forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the positive organic principle destined to govern that normal state. By keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the moral from the political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from earth.

When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of life.

So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma. If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy, such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament, the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into egotism and the adoration of the accomplished fact, and hence, inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.

For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at France.