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.