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
I did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—Civiltà inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crypt of the underground cathedral of Brescia, illuminating the two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius? Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set Orvieto the wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold an electric lamp? And have I not seen that ancient marble shrine between Carrara and Avenza supporting the telegraph wires, or the crumbling tower of Lucca the telephones? And did I not watch the thousand-year-old cathedral of Genoa—with St. Lorenzo’s martyrdom on its façade—preparing to celebrate the fourth centenary of St. Caterina—“whose mortal remains in their urn have not felt the injury of time”—by a thorough cleansing with a vacuum cleaner? Ceaselessly throbbed the engine, like the purr of a pious congregation, and the hose extended to the uttermost ledges of the roof, sucking in dust immemorially undisturbed. And the cathedral clock of Verona that looks down on Charlemagne’s paladins, Roland and Oliver, in rude stone—did it not tell me the correct time? Yes, ’tis the hour of Science.
And the contribution of Italy to Science is almost as great as her contribution to Art or Religion. A country that can produce St. Francis, Michelangelo, and Galileo, that founded at Verona the first geological museum and at Pisa the first botanical garden, has indeed all winds of the spirit blowing through her. But except in Da Vinci, Art and Science have not been able to lodge together. Him the sketches for his flying-machines in the Ambrosian library make a boon-fellow of Wright, Voisin, and Santos, as Luca Beltrami enthusiastically proclaims. Galileo had some pretensions to letters, writing essays and verses, and is even suspected of a comedy. But the life of Galileo practically divides Italy’s art period from her scientific, so far at least as the material arts are concerned. His amanuensis, Torricelli, preluded the barometer, and the creation of electrical science by Galvani and Volta was a main factor in the evolution of our modern world of machinery. Venice and Florence founded statistical science, and if Sicily and South Italy have relapsed from the Arabic-Aristotelian stimulus administered by Frederick II—perhaps for fear of sharing the imperial Epicurean’s furnace in the Sixth Circle of the Inferno—North Italy has remained a pioneer of the modern. It is not by accident that Marconi was born in Bologna, or Lombroso in Verona—which is to hold his statue—or that the most learned exponent of the dismal science of our day has been Luigi Cossa, Professor of Political Economy in the Universities of Pavia and Milan. But even Naples and Palermo have remained faithful to astronomy and the mathematics.
Far be it from me to say a word against Science as a magnified magical maid-of-all-work! But in so far as she pretends to set up in the parlour, ousting her old mistresses, Theology and Poetry, let me point out to her swains, the electro-plated youth of Lombardy, that the facts of Science, existing as they do outside autocosms, are as substantial to lean upon as the shadows of reeds. Of the need of a Scientia Scientiarum to put all these facts in their place, the average scientific specialist is as unconscious as a ploughboy of the calculus.
For it follows from the doctrine of autocosms that a fact cannot exist as such till it has settled to which autocosm it belongs. It must be born into the world of meaning. The same raw material may go to form part of autocosms innumerable, as the same man may be the butler at a duke’s, the guest of honour at a grocer’s, and the chief dish at a cannibal banquet. The same fire that beacons a ship from destruction sucks a moth to its doom, and the same election figures scatter at once delight and despair. The “fact,” outside an autocosm, can only be regarded as a potentiality of entering into ratios; in other words, it is a “rational” possibility. But since there is a definite limit to its possibilities, and an election result cannot glut the cannibal appetite, nor a butler operate as a beacon-fire—except in the way of Ridley and Latimer—we are compelled to recognise an obstinate objective element fatal to the Pragmatic Philosophy. Potential facts are stubborn things. Pragmatism was a healthy reaction against the obsession of a world wholly gaugeable by Reason, like the reaction of Duns Scotus against Aquinas, but when it replaced Reason by Will, it fell into the other extreme of error. Both Reason and Will must enter into the Science of Sciences, and they must even be supplemented by Emotion.
For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three antennæ—Reason, Will, Emotion—wherewith to grope out into our environment, were it not that those antennæ are triune, and no knowledge of the outer world ever comes to us save with all the three factors intertwined in varying proportions. Why then should we throw away all that Will and Emotion tell us, putting asunder what God has put together? To represent the Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of the whole Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion have too meekly contented themselves with a Minority Report. It is time they insisted on their views colouring and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having reached spiritual bankruptcy by his “Critique of Pure Reason,” apologetically called in the Practical Reason to save the situation, thereby importing into his system an absurd dualism. Kant’s Practical Reason is simply Will and Emotion restored to their proper rank as conjoint antennæ of apprehension. The effort to probe the universe with an isolated antenna was foredoomed to failure. The Practical Reason should have been called in, not after the bankruptcy as a sort of receiver to make the best of a bad estate, but before starting operations, as a partner with additional capital.
A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm, must be caught up not only into intellectual perception, but into emotional and volitional relations. The so-called scientific fact is thus two-thirds unborn. It is not a fact, but a facet of a fact. ’Tis only by a shorthand convention, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive in the dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the sap and greenness of a living sentence to restore it to life. This is best seen in words with more than one meaning, like “bark,” which needs to be in a sentence to show whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the same ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its relations with life. The molecule or structural unit of reality being thus triune, it is obvious that the isolated presentation of the material aspect of things in the shape of words under the name of Science can never be a presentation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trinitarian wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three dimensions, Art in two, and Science in one, like a solid, a superficies, and a line, and the line as little reproduces the plenitude of being as the coast-line of a map the beetling cliffs and thundering seas.