Part 8

Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but _de non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio_. It is William James who of all philosophers in the world would argue our fates regulated by superior beings with whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The analogy has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the dog have solid proof of our existence, they see and hear us, and we share with them a large segment of existence. Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness. They divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the same fire, nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in the face and deny our kinship. But who save Gulliver hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken of his meals? Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity. The range of thought which circumscribes ours must at the same time partially coincide with it, and though our thoughts be not wholly their thoughts, their thoughts must needs be partially ours.

God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not finitely less. Even a God without humour would be—to that extent—man’s inferior. Matthew Arnold’s gibe of the “magnified non-natural man” is groundless. I do not become a magnified non-natural dog because I have attributes in common with my terrier. The God of theology is already divested of man’s matter; deflate Him likewise of man’s spirit, and what remains? In robbing their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a transcendental nullity who can neither be comprehended by His creatures nor comprehend them.

Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise and sterilise them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox. “_Amas, nec æstuas_,” cries St. Augustine, “_zelas et securus es; pænitet te et non doles; irasceris et tranquillus es_.” God repents, but without regret; He is angry but perfectly tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we endow Him at the same time with its opposite, as who should say a white negro. But such violent assaults upon the unthinkable yield no prize either of understanding or of satisfaction.

If “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” be not that same love which a noble man may feel for his fellow-creatures of every order of being, if it be a love that is at the same time indifference, or even hate, then it may equally be expressed as “the hate which moves the sun and the other stars” (and which is at the same time love). Or it may find far honester expression as the agnostic’s unknowable—the X that moves the sun and the other stars. If God’s justice be not man’s justice, then it is no justice. It _must_ be our justice—if it is justice at all—our justice, only occupied and obscured by innumerable pros and cons to us unknown, and extending over times and spaces beyond our ken, so that were we placed in possession of all the evidence we should applaud the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God under illusion of broadening Him—or rather they broaden Him so tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpability, whose accidental evaporation would scarcely be noted. It was a more consistent mystic who said: “God may not improperly be styled nothing.”

So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us back to our noble selves and our own door-step. The sun is still there to give us light by day, and the moon and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor is it less their function to nourish us with beauty and with mystery.

“When Science from Creation’s face Enchantment’s veil withdraws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws!”

Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet. The laws are neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely visions yield their place. Their loveliness is as abiding as the laws which produce them. ’Tis true that at first Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the “goddess excellently bright.” The moon, the beautiful moon of poets and lovers, lay betrayed—a dead planet, a scarred desolation, seamed with arid ravines and pitted with a pox of craters. Is then the moon of the poets a delusion which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No, by her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores the glamour. The moon has all the beauty she appears to have. The loveliest woman’s face, viewed through a magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed and pitted. But here ’tis the lens that is accused of falsification, ’tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion—a face was meant to be seen at a certain distance and with the natural eye. Even so—and the moon chose _her_ distance with admirable discretion.

The synthesis of everyday reality is always man’s central verity. The peering unnatural scientific vision of the moon has the lesser truth, is but a spectral rim of the whole-orbed reality. ’Tis the poet’s moon that is the full moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if he in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if he forgot that in logic as in landscape all views depend on the point at which you place yourself. It is only from the true point of view that the earth remains the centre of the universe.

OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS

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.”