Part 9

I had regarded the Salute and the other Plague-Churches of Venice as mere historic curiosities, and written it down as an asset of human thought that the Plague of 1630 was due to the filthiness and congestion of the Levantine cities. That when 60,000 Venetians died—“uno sterminato numero” as the tablet in the Salute says—the Venetian Republic should with vermicular humility erect a gorgeous church in gratitude for the Death-Angel’s moderation—this might pass in 1630, like St. Rocco’s neglect in performing only the few desultory miracles recorded in the wooden bas-reliefs of his choir. In the seventeenth century one might even adore the angel of Piero Negri’s staircase-fresco of _Venice Relieved of the Pest_, tardily as he came to relieve those ghastly visions of the plague-pit which Zanchi has painted, facing him. But that in 1836 Venice should have decreed a Three Days’ Thanksgiving to the “Deiparæ Virgini salutari” for salvation from “the cholera fiercely raging through Europe” shows that two centuries had made no change in the Catholic autocosm, nor in the caprice of its Olympians. Venice had already passed under the Napoleonic reign of pure reason, and in an old poster of the Teatro Civico I read an invitation to the citizens to “democratise” the soil of the theatre by planting here the Tree of Liberty and dancing the _graziosissima Carmagnola_. But revolutions, French or other, leave undisturbed the deep instinct of humanity which demands that things spiritual shall produce equipollent effects in the physical sphere.

“E pur si muove,” as Galileo said a hundred and thirty years after his death. The Catholic autocosm and the objective macrocosm begin to rub against each other even in the churches. Quaintly enough ’tis over the popular practice of spitting that science and religion come into friction. The priest who convoyed me through the Certosa of Pavia seemed to regard his wonderful church as a glorified spittoon, and notices in every church in Italy make clear the universality of the offence. But whereas at Pavia you are asked “For the decorum of the house of God do not spit on the pavement,” in Brescia the deprecation is headed: “Lotta Contro la Tuberculosi,” as though the most penitent and pious might be rewarded for church-going by consumption. The Cremona and Lucca churches compromise: “Out of respect for the house of God and for hygiene please do not spit on the pavement.” In Verona the formula is practically the same: “Decency and hygiene forbid to spit on the pavement.” In Bologna the modern autocosm was, I gather, even more victorious, for in time of plague, some frescoes in S. Petronio were whitewashed over. I trust for the sake of symbolic completeness these were frescoes of St. Sebastian and St. Rocco, the protective plague-saints.

A false cosmos, I said, like a false coin, may be as useful as a true one, so long as it is believed in. As long as the attrition of the macrocosm outside does not wear a hole in the Catholic autocosm, it will keep its spheric inflation. For there is nothing to wear a hole from inside, nothing contrary to pure reason, nothing inconsistent with something else. There is no _à priori_ reason why saints should not control the chain of causation by spiritual forces as engineers and doctors control it by physical forces at the bidding of intelligence. There is no formal ground for denying that penitence puts cholera to flight. It is merely a matter of experience—and even Popes and Cardinals remove to cooler places when the pest breaks out at Rome. There is no conceptual reason why there should not be a Purgatory, nor why masses and alms for the dead (or still more the emotions of love and remorse which these represent) should not enable us to assist the posthumous destinies of those we have lost, nor why our sainted dead should be cut off from all fresh influence upon our lives. It seems indeed monstrous that they should pass beyond our yearning affection. In these and other things the Catholic autocosm gives hints to the Creator and shows how the “sorry scheme of things” may be moulded “nearer to the heart’s desire.” Nor is there any reason why there should not be a Trinity or a vicarious Atonement. These concepts, indeed, explain _obscurum per obscurius_—

“No light but rather darkness visible—”

and seem less natural and more complicated than the Jewish theory of a divine unity and a personal human responsibility. But complexity and incomprehensibility are not proofs of falsity. Tertullian, indeed, in his great lyric cry of faith, would make them proofs of truth. _Certum est quia impossibile est._ And it may be conceded to Tertullian that in a universe of mystery all compact, the word of the enigma can scarcely be a platitude. But there is a limit to this comfortable canon. Impossibility can only continue a source of certitude so long as transcendental theological conceptions are concerned. But when, leaving the tenuous empyrean of metaphysics, the Impossible incarnates itself upon earth, it must stand or fall by our terrestrial tests of historic happening, and the canon should rather run: Providing it has really happened, its mere impossibility does not diminish its certitude. So that, _per contra_, if it never happened at all, its mere impossibility cannot guarantee it. Impossibility is a quality it shares with an infinite number of propositions, and if it wishes to single itself out from the crowd, it must seek extraneous witnesses to character. And if it fails in this quest, its impossibility will not save it. We may believe the _un_proved, but not the _dis_proved. The true interpretation of the universe must be incomprehensible, _my_ interpretation is incomprehensible, therefore _my_ interpretation is true—what tyro in the logics will not at a leap recognise the fallacy of the undistributed middle? Yet on this basis rest innumerable volumes of apologetics.

Nay, Sir Thomas Browne himself fell into this “Vulgar Error.” “Methinks,” he cries, basing himself upon Tertullian, “there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith . . . I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an _O altitudo_!” As if “_O altitudo_” is not pursuable by the simplest pagan, following the maze of Space and Time. The author of “Religio Medici” confesses that certain things in Genesis contradict Experience and History, but he adds: “Yet I do believe all this is true, which indeed, my Reason would persuade me to be false; and this I think is no vulgar part of Faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to Reason and against the Arguments of our proper Senses.” Pardon me, esteemed Sir Thomas. It is precisely _the_ vulgar part of Faith—_Religio Populi_! It is putting the disproved and disprovable on the same plane as the unproved and the unprovable, where alone the ecstasy of the _O altitudo_ may be legitimately pursued.

The friction between the Bible and Science has grown raspier since Sir Thomas’s day, and by a new turn in human folly we are told that Science is bankrupt—with the implication that _therefore_ the Bible is solvent. Poor old autocosms! They are _both_ bankrupt, alas! Neither the ancient Bible nor the twentieth century Science can pay twenty shillings in the pound. Not that the Bible cannot meet its creditors honourably, nor that Science will not be permitted to go on dealing. The salvage from both is considerable. But neither can afford an autocosm in which the modern intellect can breathe and the modern soul aspire.

Nor was such work ever within the capacity of Science. She, the handmaid of religion, forgot her place when she aspired to the pulpit. And religion, with Time and Space and Love and Death for texts around her, stepped down from hers when she persisted in preaching from withered parchments of ambiguous tenor and uncertain authorship. What can be more pathetic than the joy of orthodoxy when the pick strikes some Old Testament tablet and it is discovered that there really was an Abraham or a Lot. As well might a neo-Pagan exult because the excavations in Crete prove that the Minotaur really existed—but as a fighting bull to which toreadors imported from conquered Athens sometimes fell victims. Not even Lot’s wife supplies sufficient salt to swallow Genesis with. The Old Testament autocosm is dead and buried—it cannot be dug up again by the Palestine Exploration Fund. It is no longer literally true, even in the Vatican, where, if I understand aright, only the miracles of the New Testament still preserve their authenticity.

“Things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be,” as the much-deluded Butler remarked. Wherefore, though you imagine yourself living in your autocosm, you are in truth inhabiting the macrocosm all the time and obnoxious to all its curious laws and inflexible realities. It is as if, playing cards in the smoking-room of a ship and fancying yourself at the club, you should be suddenly drowned. Only by living in the macrocosm itself can you avoid the stern surprises which await those who snuggle into autocosms. Hence the perils of the Catholic autocosm for its inhabitants. For in the real universe pestilences and earthquakes are not due to the wrath of God. The physical universe proceeds on its own lines, and the religious motives of the Crusaders did not prevent a Christian host from dying of the putrefying infidel corpses which it had manufactured so abundantly. Nor did heaven endorse the theory of the Children’s Crusade—that innocence could accomplish what was impossible for flawed manhood. The poor innocents perished like flies, or were sold into slavery. These things take their course as imperturbably as Halley’s comet, which refused to budge an inch even before the fulminations of Pope Callixtus III. Nor is the intermission of earthquakes or pestilence to be procured by the intercession of the saints or by the efficacy of their relics. A phial of the blood of Christ was carried about in Mantua during the plague of 1630, but there were not enough boats to carry away the corpses to the lakes. It was those marshes round Mantua that should have been drained. But it is in vain God thunders, “Thus and thus are My Laws. I am that I am.” Impious Faith answers, “Not so. Thou art that Thou art not.”

Pestilence—we know to-day—can be averted by closing the open cesspools and opening the sunless alleys of mediævalism; malaria can be minimised by minimising mosquitos, and earthquakes can be baffled by careful building after the fashion of Japan, which, being an earthquake country, behaves as such. After the Messina earthquake the Japanese Government sent two professors—one of seismology and the other of architecture—to study it and to compare it with the great Japanese earthquake of 1891, and they reported that although the Japanese shock was greater and the population affected more numerous, the number of Italian victims was _four hundred and thirty times_ as great as the number of Japanese, and that “about 998 out of 1000 of the number killed in Messina must be regarded as having fallen victims to the seismologically bad construction of the houses.” But where reliance is placed on paternosters and penitence, how shall there be equal zeal for antiseptics or structural precautions? The censer tends to oust the fumigator, and the priest the man of action. “Too easily resigned and too blindly hopeful,” says the _Messagero_ of Rome, commenting on the chaos that still reigns among the population of Messina.

“Trust in God and keep your powder dry” was the maxim of a Protestant. Cromwell but echoed the Psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” This is the spirit that makes the best of both cosms. The too trustful denizen of the Catholic autocosm with his damp powder and his flaccid fingers risks falling a prey to the first foe.

But the balance-sheet is not yet complete. For it may be better to live without sanitation or structural precaution and to die at forty of the plague or the earthquake, after years of belief in your saint or your star, than to live a century without God in a bleak universe of mechanical law. True, the believer has the fear of hell, but by a happy insanity it does not interfere with his _joie de vivre_. He has had, indeed, to pay dearly for the consolation and courage the Church has sold him—since we are at the balance-sheet let this be said too—and seeing how in the last analysis all this overwhelming ecclesiastic splendour has come out of the toil of the masses, I cannot help wondering whether the Church could not have done the thing cheaper. Were these glittering vestments and soaring columns so absolutely essential to the cult of the manger-born God?

But perhaps it was the People’s only chance of Magnificence. And after all the mediæval cathedrals were as much public assembly rooms as churches.

Dear wrinkled _contadine_ whom I see prostrated in chapels before your therapeutic saints; dear gnarled _facchini_ whose shoulders bow beneath the gentler burden of adoration; poor world-worn beings whom I watch genuflecting and sprinkling yourselves with the water of life, as the spacious hush and the roseate dimness of the great cathedral fall round you; and you, proud young Venetian housewife, whose baby was carried to baptism in a sort of cage, and who turned to me with that heavenly smile after the dipping and that rapturous cry, “_Ora essa è una piccola Cristiana!_”—and most of all you, heart-stricken mothers whose little ones have gone up to play with the Madonna’s _bambino_, think ye I would prick your autocosm with my quill or withdraw one single ray from the haloes of your guardian genii? Nay, I pray that in that foreign land of death to which we must all emigrate, ye may find more Christian consideration than meets the emigrants to England or America. May your Christ be waiting at the haven ready to protect you against the exactions of Charon, to rescue you from the crimps, and initiate you into the alien life. Only one thing I ask of you—do not, I pray you in return, burn up _my_ autocosm—and me with it. And ye, gentlemen of the cassock and the tonsure, continue, unmolested by me, your processions and your pageants and your mystic operas and ballets, your drinking ceremonials and serviette-wipings; for, bland and fatherly as you seem, you are the fiercest incendiaries the world has ever known—the arson of rival autocosms your favourite virtue. And I am not of those who hold your power or passion extinct. Even in your ashes live your wonted fires, and I may yet see the pyres of Smithfield blaze as in the days of Mary. For to hold the keys of Heaven and Hell is as unsettling as any other form of monopoly. Human nature cannot stand it. And by every channel, apert or subterranean, you are creeping back to power, carrying through all your labyrinths that terrible torch of faith. Already relics have been borne in procession at Westminster. But perhaps I wrong you. Perhaps your very Inquisition will make some concession to science and the age, and electrocute instead of burning.

But though ye burn me or electrocute, yet must I praise your Church for its three great principles of Democracy, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Equality. At the apogee of its splendour, in the days before its autocosm contradicted the known macrocosm, it made a brotherhood of Man and a United States of Europe, and St. Catherine and St. Clara ranked with St. Francis and St. Dominic. What can be more wonderful than that an English menial, plain Nicholas Breakspeare, should rise into Pope Adrian IV, and should crown Barbarossa at Rome as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, or that when this Empire’s fourth Henry must fain go to Canossa, it was the reputed son of a carpenter that kept him waiting barefooted in the snow? Contrast all this with the commercial chauvinism, the snobbery, and the Mussulman disdain of woman into which Europe has fallen since the “Dark Ages.”

I grant that the Papacy was as far from ensuring a human brotherhood as the Holy Roman Empire was from the ideal of Petrarch, yet both institutions kept the ideal of a unity of civilisation alive, and if they did not realise it better, was it not because two institutions aiming at the same unification are already a disturbing duality? The situation under which the Emperor elected the Pope who consecrated the Emperor, or the Pope excommunicated the Emperor who deposed the Pope and elected an anti-Pope, was positively Gilbertian, and the grim comedy reached its climax when Pope and anti-Pope used their respective churches as fortresses. The old duel persists to-day in the tug-of-war between Court and Vatican, and the Pope is so little a force for unification that he still refuses to recognise the unity of Italy. Yet no ironies of history can destroy the beauty of the Catholic concept.

“I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze With forms of Saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendour upon splendour multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante’s side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.

“And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost; And the melodious bells among the spires O’er all the house-tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host.”

That is the Catholic autocosm at its loveliest, as seen by the poet of the Pilgrim Fathers when under the spell of translating Dante. And ’tis, indeed, no untrue vision of its ideal.

I saw an old statue of St. Zeno in his church at Verona, and the saint, who began life as a fisherman, appeared as proud of his fish pendent as of his crozier. Can one imagine a British bishop in a fishmonger’s apron? Even the Apostles are doubtless conceived at the Athenæum Club as a sort of Fishmongers’ Company, with an old hall and a ’scutcheon. For England combines with her distrust of High Church a ritual of High Life, which is the most meticulous and sacrosanct in the world.

Nor is there any record of a British bishop behaving like St. Zeno when the Emperor Gallienus gave him the crown from off his own head, and the saint requested permission to sell it for the benefit of the poor. True, British bishops are not in the habit of exorcising demons from the daughters of emperors, but neither are they in the habit of dividing their stipends among curates with large families.

St. Zeno, by the way, came from Mauretania, and St. Antony was not really of Padua, but of Portugal. ’Twas a free trade in saints. There was no protection against protectors. Virgil and Boëthius themselves enjoyed a Christian reputation. One does not wonder that even Buddha crept into the calendar by an inspired error. It is heartening to come on an altar in Verona to St. Remigio, “apostle of the generous nation of the French,” to find Lucca Cathedral given over to an Irish saint and honouring a Scotch king (“San Riccardo, Re di Scozia”), and to read of King Canute treating with Pope John and Emperor Conrad for free Alpine passes to Rome for English pilgrims. Universities too were really universal. The Angelic Doctor was equally at home in Naples, Paris, and Cologne.

What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I found pasted outside Italian churches: “My God, I offer Thee all the masses which are being celebrated to-day in all the world for the sinners who are in agony and who must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus the Redeemer obtain for them mercy!” True, the poetry of this prayer is rather marred by the precise information that “every day in the universe about 140,000 persons die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year,” but not so grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers. Why must this fine altruism be thus tainted? But alas! Catholicism perpetually appears the caricature of a great concept. Take for another example the methods of canonisation, by which he or she who dies “in the odour of piety” may pass, in the course of centuries, from the degree of venerable servant of God to the apogee of blessed saintship. What can be grander than this notion of taking all time as all earth for the Church’s province? Yet consider the final test. The great souls she has produced must work two posthumous miracles, forsooth, before they can be esteemed saints. By what a perversion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on a par with pills! Surely a true Church Universal should canonise for goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles. Joan of Arc, who must wait nigh five hundred years for saintship—did not the miracle of her life outweigh any possible prowess of her relics?

But despite, or rather because of, this grossness, the walls of the Catholic autocosm are still stout: centuries of friction with the macrocosm will be needed to wear them away. The love of noble ritual and noble buildings, of ordered fasts and feasts, of authority absolute; the comfortable concreteness of Orthodoxy beside the nebulousness of Modernism; the sinfulness of humanity, its helplessness before the tragic mysteries of life and death; the peace of confession, the therapeia of chance and hypnotism, the magnetism of a secular tradition, the _vis inertiæ_—all these are pillars of the mighty fabric of St. Peter. But even these would be as reeds but for the massive prop of endowments. ’Tis Mortmain—the dead hand—that keeps back Modernism. So long as any institution possesses funds, there will never be any lack of persons to administer them. This is the secret of all successful foundations. The rock on which the Church is founded is a gold-reef. And it is actively defended by Persecution and the Index, by which all thought is equally excluded, be it a Darwin’s or a Gioberti’s, a Zola’s or a Tyrrell’s. Who then shall set a term to its stability?

With such a marvellous machinery at hand for the Church Universal of the future—so democratic, so cosmopolitan, so free from sex injustice—it seems a thousand pities that there is nothing to be done with it but to scrap it. Surely it should be adapted to the macrocosm, brought into harmony with the modern mind, so that, becoming again the mistress of our distracted and divided world, moderating the frenzy of nationalisms by a European cult and a European culture, keeping in their place the mediocrities who are seated on our thrones, and the democracies when they stray from wisdom, it could send out a true blessing _urbi et orbi_. But this, I remember, is an Italian fantasy.

OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCE