The Life of Mazzini

by Bolton King

Religion essential to society—Paramouncy of the spiritual—Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism; Protestantism—Christ's teaching: its truths and imperfections—The doctrines of the new faith: God; Progress; Immortality—The criteria of Truth: the conscience; tradition—Humanity—The need of unity; authority; church and state; the new church.

Mazzini's life was one piece of almost perfect consistency and continuity. Save in minor points of policy, it had no turnings, no conversions, no recantations. Alike in theory and practice, it goes on its straight, undeviating course from his youthful literary essays to the full-bodied doctrine of The Duties of Man and From the Council to God, from the first days of Young Italy to those of the Republican Alliance. And its magnificent unity comes of this, that all was dominated by a scheme of thought, that controlled and correlated each sphere of human action. Supremely he achieved the harmony of life, which he never wearied of extolling. He was politician, philosopher, religious reformer, literary critic; and every side of life completes the others in a perfect synthesis. At the centre of it all, controlling, illuminating, energizing, stands his religious faith. To him religion was "the eternal, essential, indwelling element of life," "the breath of humanity, its soul and life and consciousness and outward symbol," hallowing men's thoughts and actions, ennobling, consoling, fortifying, the inspiring principle of brotherhood and social service. Deep in the conscience of each man, inseparable from life, lies the religious sense,—the sense of the Infinite and Imperishable, the aspiration to the Unknown and Invisible, the innate desire to apprehend God in his intellect and love. "If ever you have," he once said, "a strange moment of religious feeling, of supreme resignation, of quiet love of humanity, of a calm insight of duty, kneel down thankful, and treasure within yourself the feeling suddenly arisen. It is the feeling of life." And with the sense of the Divine, there comes to man the yearning to reach after the divine perfection and the importunate searching for the way. In every age, men have asked "to know, or at least to surmise, something of the starting-point and goal of mundane existence"; and religion comes to teach "the general principles that rule humanity, to sanction the link that makes men brothers in the consciousness of that one origin, one mission, one common aim." Man makes that mission and that aim his guiding star in all his strivings for the good; and in every branch of his activity he steers his course by his knowledge of God. "From the general formula, that men call religion, issues a rule of education, a basis of human brotherhood, a policy, a social economy, an art." It is impossible to keep it out of politics. It is there "in all questions of the franchise, of the condition of the masses, of nationality,"—all intimately linked with the religious thought of the time, all part of God's providential scheme for man. "I do not know," he says, "speaking historically, a single great conquest of the human spirit, a single important step for the perfecting of human society, which has not had its roots in a strong religious faith." "No true society exists without a common faith and common purpose; politics are the application, religion gives the principle." Where this common faith is not, the mere will of the majority means permanent instability and the oppression of the rest; "without God, you can coerce, but you cannot persuade; you may be tyrants in your turn, but you cannot be educators or apostles."

Without religion, then,—deep, heartfelt, vitalising religion,—there can be no true community. Materialism had been tried, and had failed;—failed because it was "an individualist, cold, calculating doctrine, that slowly, infallibly extinguished every spark of high thinking or free life, that first plunged men into the worship of success, then made them slaves of triumphant violence and the accomplished fact." It killed enthusiasm in the individual; it killed true greatness in a nation. Bare ethics had been tried, "but no morality can endure or bring forth life, without a heaven and a dogma to support it." "No, man needs more than simple ethics; he craves to solve his doubts, to slake his thirsting for a future; he wants to know whence he comes and whither he goes." Men had tried philosophy, and indeed philosophy, that took humanity and not the individual for its study, was "the science of the law of life"; but by itself it was a barren rock, where life could find no resting-place. "Heresy is sacred," but only as the transient stage between a lower and a higher faith. Philosophy can "analyse and anatomise and dissect," but it has no breath of life to "decree duty or push men to deeds by giving ethics a new strength and grandeur." The needs of the age are less intellectual than spiritual. "What we want, what the people want, what the age is crying for, that it may find an issue from this slough of selfishness and doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our souls may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one goal." And such a faith, and only such a faith, will give the solid, strong convictions and the energy and unity, by which alone society can be healed. "Any strong faith, that rises on the wreck of the old, exhausted creeds, will transform the existing social order, since every strong belief must needs apply itself to every branch of human activity; because always, in every age, earth has sought conformity with the heaven in which it believed; because all Humanity repeats under different formulas and in different degrees the words of the Lord's Prayer of Christendom: Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."

Where shall this faith be found,—this living, vitalising faith, for which the age is groping, for want of which its aspiration and its efforts are in vain? Does Christianity supply it? Mazzini asked the question reverently and tenderly. Religion, he says, is above and independent of creeds, but every creed is sacred, for each has added to man's knowledge of God and of himself. However incomplete a faith, so it be a faith indeed, it helps to hallow life. He felt his a spiritual kinship more with Catholic priest and Protestant pastor, who lighted earth with broken rays of the divine, than with the sceptic, who would shut out God and immortality, enthusiasm and love. Reverently, then, he tested Christianity. For the superstructures, indeed, that Catholics and Protestants had built upon the Christianity of Christ, he felt respect and sympathy, but little love. He had his special grievances against the Papacy for the evil work it had done in his own country, and he hated it, as only an Italian of his day could hate it. He held it to be irrevocably doomed: doomed, since the Reformation took the North from it;—doomed, "because it has betrayed its mission to protect the weak, because for three centuries and a half it has committed fornication with the princes of this world, because at the bidding of every evil and unbelieving government it has crucified Jesus afresh in the name of egoism,"—doomed, because it stood apart from the great humanitarian movements of the century, the freeing of Greece and Italy, the emancipation of the blacks;—doomed for the root sin, of which these were but consequences, that it had become "a phantasm of religion," "without faith or power or mission." It had missed the meaning of Christ's teaching; it had sinned against the Holy Spirit, and there was no forgiveness for it. "God will provide for the abominated idolatry, God, who breaks all idols that were and are and shall be." Sometimes he was confident, that, before the century was out, the Papacy would be extinct. And yet, in spite of all, he respected what had been a great fact in the history of religion. Like every strong belief, it had in its time done high service for humanity, it had had its share of the noble and sublime and potent. "I remember it all and bow myself before your past." And die though it must, he would it should die nobly, "like the sun in the great ocean," rejoicing that God's great design bade it make place for a more perfect faith.

For Protestantism his feeling was colder both in its sympathies and antipathies. His Catholic training, his craving for formal unity, made it difficult for him to read it sympathetically; and he saw it chiefly in its defects,—its exaggeration of the individual, its rejection of tradition, its sectarianism, its "indefinite dismembering of the common thought." He recognised somewhat, though imperfectly, the political and social work, which was indissolubly bound up with Puritanism; "'God and the People,'" he said in one of his letters to English working men, "were the inspirers of your Cromwell." As Catholicism had one side of the truth in its respect for tradition, so Protestantism had the other in its assertion of individual interpretation, and in this it had apprehended the essence of Christianity more truly than Catholicism had done. But though Protestants were slowly learning the value of tradition, the preeminence of Humanity over man, they still magnified the individual, till their creed had become a doctrine of material and spiritual selfishness, which must logically develop into pure materialism. He charged it with inspiring the inhumanity and anarchy of the laissez-faire economy. It had made the salvation of the individual soul the end of life; and thus it had sundered religion from society, and dwarfed the all-embracing plan of God to the puny borders of a loveless pietism.

But when Mazzini passes from Catholicism and Protestantism to Christ, his attitude is one of infinite reverence and love. His close knowledge of the Gospels, his native kinship with their spirit, had brought him very near the mind of Christ, and he spoke of Him in beautiful and tender words. Christ's "was the soul most full of love, of holiest virtue, most inspired by God and by the Future, that men have ever hailed upon this earth." He "came for all; he spoke to all and for all. He lifted up the People and died for it." "I love Jesus," he once wrote in a private letter, "as the man who has loved the most all mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins and Helots or Parias." "In Jesus," so he wrote to the Oecumenical Council, "we worship the Founder of an age that freed the individual, the Apostle of the unity of law,—that law which he understood more fully than did any of the generations before him,—the Prophet of the equality of souls: and we bow ourselves before him, as the man who among all we know of loved the most, whose life, an unexampled harmony between thought and practice, proclaimed the holy doctrine of sacrifice, henceforth to be the everlasting foundation of all religion and all virtue; but we do not cancel the woman-born in God, we do not raise him where we cannot hope to join him; we would love him as the brother who was better than us all, not worship him and fear him as pitiless judge and intolerant tyrant of the future." In Christ's teaching he found many of the moral and social truths that were dearest to him. "Does not every word of the Gospel breathe the spirit of liberty and equality, of that war with evil and injustice and falsehood, that inspires our work?" The cross was the symbol of "the one true immortal virtue, the sacrifice of self for others." "Unity of faith, love for one another, human brotherhood, activity in well-doing, the doctrine of sacrifice, the doctrine of equality, the abolition of aristocracy, the perfecting of the individual, liberty,—all are summed up in Christ's words, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as thyself,' and 'Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.'" Christ's teaching had inspired each struggle for truth from the Crusades to Lepanto, had destroyed feudalism, was destroying now the aristocracy of blood; Poles and Greeks had marched to freedom's battles under the flag of Jesus and His mother. And, above all, Christ gave the promise of indefinite religious progress,—a promise, which closed the mouths of those who would arbitrarily pin men to a fixed doctrine. 'The Spirit of truth shall abide with you for ever, ... and shall teach you all things.' "On the eve of his accepted sacrifice, when his mighty love for his brethren lit up the darkness of the future, he had sight of the continuous revelation of the Spirit through humanity." This was the 'eternal gospel' of the mystics of the middle ages; and Christ's promise stood true to-day. "God forgive you," he wrote to a Catholic friend, "you do not understand Christ,—Christ who died that humanity may some day free itself to rise to God by its own strength."

He paused anxiously before he declared himself no Christian. His temperament and outlook on life were essentially Christian; he tried to read new meanings into Christian doctrines; words of Christian prayer came naturally to his lips; Christmas Day was "sacred" to him. Several times in early life he cherished schemes of reform within the church; for some years he doubted how far religious development could be built on Christian foundations, whether the new church would be "an application of Christianity" or "a religion to succeed" it. At all events Christian ethics would remain. "The morality of Christ is eternal; humanity will add to it, but will not take from it one word." And for long yet Christianity would abide, the greatest of the creeds. "This will reach you on Christmas Day," he wrote to an English friend. "I am not a Christian, I belong to what I believe to be a still purer and higher Faith; but its time has not yet come; and until that day the Christian manifestation remains the most sacred revelation of the ever-onward progressing spirit of mankind."

But that its doctrine and its cult must some day pass, that its ethics needed supplementing, he had convinced himself, at all events as early as his Swiss days. He wasted little time in attacking particular articles of the Christian faith, for analytical criticism was always hateful to him. But he thought it had certain essential imperfections, because of which it failed, and was bound to fail to content the present reach of human knowledge or inspire men's activities. He charged it, firstly, with not sanctifying the things of earth. The church taught that the world was evil, life here an expiation, heaven the soul's true home. At one time he appealed against the church to Christ's own teaching, to texts that spoke of God's will being done on earth, of power given to Christ in earth, of the promise that the meek should inherit the earth. In later life he qualified this reading of the gospel. Jesus, "a soul blessed with such mighty love and perfect harmony between thought and action," could not fail to realise the harmony of earth and heaven. But "while he stood and stands alone, supreme over all other great religious reformers in everything that concerns the heart and affections, his intellectual grasp did not extend beyond the requirements of a single epoch." At the time in which he lived, he "saw no possible mission for the sake of the brethren whom he loved, save by moral regeneration, by creating a country of freemen and equals in heaven. He wished to show mankind how it could find salvation and redemption in spite of and in opposition to the world." Great Christian statesmen and thinkers of a later time,—Gregory VII. and Thomas Aquinas,—had tried to bring the temporal under the spiritual law. But they had failed, and the normal Christianity of the day was fatally divorced from religion and politics and art and science. It left the bigger part of life without God's law to guide it. It told men to renounce the world, when their duty was to live in it and battle in it and better it.

Christianity again came short, because it left out of ken the collective life of the race. The conception was an impossible one at the time in which Christ lived; and its absence maimed men's knowledge of God, and shortened their power to attain to the Divine Ideal. Christianity pointed, indeed, to "salvation, that is perfection"; but it recognised no instrument beyond "the weak, unequal, isolated, ineffective strength of the individual." Mazzini's criticism came to this: Christianity tells each man to perfect himself by his own strength and God's; but his spiritual growth is conditioned by the growth of the men around him, and therefore his own perfecting depends on the progress of the race, the common search for good, that links all men together and the generations to one another. Mazzini always regarded the French Revolution as the political expression, the "daughter" of Christianity, and there the depreciation of the race, the exaggeration of the individual had borne their necessary fruit of moral selfishness and social anarchy. Yet again, though Christ had promised the continuous teaching of his Spirit, ever leading to new truth, the doctrine of redemption was inconsistent with any theory of progress. There was no Fall; man had begun at the bottom and had been tending upwards ever since. Salvation was for men, not from a single, isolated act, but from the slow, unceasing, inevitable working of the providential scheme. The individual came nearer the divine, not by faith in Christ's sacrifice, but by his own works, by sacrifice of self, by faith in the "ideal that every man is called to incarnate in himself." And because of these imperfections in its theory of life, Christianity had ceased to be a vitalising force. For some it had become an ethical system, for others a philosophy, while men needed a religion. Politics and art and science had gone their own ways. Christian morality knew not patriotism. Charity was its only remedy for social wrongs, and charity was impotent to stop the springs of poverty. Men gave lip-service to Christ's teaching, but it had no binding influence on their lives. It offered no solution for their perplexities; it was no longer a faith that could move mountains or remould the modern world. Its day had gone, and all the efforts of neo-Christians or Christian Socialists or Old Catholics to make it answer to modern needs were bound to fail, as the neo-Platonists had failed in their day to galvanise paganism. "Jesus warned you, when on earth," he said to "the Anglo-Saxon Christian Socialists," "that you cannot put new wine into old bottles."

Such was Mazzini's criticism of Christianity, not always consistent with itself, sometimes confounding Christ's thought with others' perversions of it, sometimes failing to recognise how many-sided a phenomenon is Christianity, sometimes inaccurately tracing its actual results in history and modern life. His attitude towards it may be summed up thus. He retained its belief in the omnipotence of the spiritual; its faith in God and in His providential working; its supreme veneration for the character and moral teaching of Jesus; its insistence on moral perfection and not material interest as the end of life; its call to love and sacrifice of self; its belief in immortality; its aspiration to the Church Universal. He rejected the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of a mediator, the antagonism between matter and spirit and the consequent neglect of the things of earth; its inability to grasp God's law of progress; its non-acceptance (though the Church had partially recognised it) of Humanity as the interpreter of that law.