Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their effects on the civilization of Europe

by Jaime Luciano Balmes

[CHAPTER LXV.]
POLITICAL DOCTRINES BEFORE THE APPEARANCE OF PROTESTANTISM.

In matters appertaining to representative government, modern political science boasts of its great progress: we hear it continually asserting that the school in which the deputies of the Constituent Assembly imbibed their lessons was totally ignorant of political constitutions. Now when we compare the doctrines of the predominating school of the present day with those of the preceding school, what difference do we discover between them? On what points do they differ? Where is this boasted progress?

The school of the eighteenth century said: "The king is the natural enemy of the people; his power must either be totally destroyed, or at least so far restrained and limited, that he may only appear with his hands tied on the summit of the social edifice, merely invested with the faculty of approving the measures of the representatives of the people." And what says the modern school, which boasts of its progress, of the advantage it has derived from experience, and of having hit the exact point marked out by reason and good sense? "Monarchy," says this school, "is essential to the great European nations; the attempts at republicanism made in America, whatever may be their results, require, as yet, the test of time; besides, they were made under circumstances very different from those in which we are placed, and consequently, are not to be imitated by us. The king should not be regarded as the enemy of the people, but as their father; instead of presenting him to public view with his hands tied, he should be represented surrounded with power, grandeur, and even with majesty and pomp; without which it is impossible for the throne to fulfil the high functions with which it is invested. The king should be inviolable—not nominally, but really and effectually, so that his power cannot, under any pretext, be attacked. He should be placed in a sphere beyond the whirlwind of passion and party, like a tutelar divinity, a stranger to mean views and base passions; he ought to be, as it were, the representative of reason and justice." "Fools," exclaims this school to its adversaries, "can you not see that it would be better to have no king at all than such a one as you would have? Your king would always be an enemy to the constitution, for he would find this constitution always attacking, embarrassing, restricting, and humiliating him."

We will now compare this progress with the doctrines predominating in Europe long before the appearance of Protestantism. This comparison will enable us to show clearly that every thing reasonable, just, and useful, contained in these doctrines, was already known and generally propagated in Europe when society was under the exclusive influence of the Catholic Church.

A king is essential, says the modern school; and, thanks to the influence of the Catholic religion, all the great nations of Europe had a king: the king must not be regarded as the enemy, but as the father of the people; and he was already called the father of the people: the power of the king should be great; that power was great: the king should be inviolable, his person sacred; his person was sacred, and his prerogative insured to him by the Church from the earliest ages, in an august and solemn ceremony, that of his coronation. "The people are supreme," said the school of the last century; "the law is the expression of the general will, the representatives of the people are alone, therefore, invested with legislative faculties; the monarch cannot resist this will. The laws are submitted to his sanction through mere formality; if the king refuses this sanction, the laws are to undergo another examination; but if the will of the representatives of the people still remains the same, it shall be raised to the dignity of law; and the monarch who, by the refusal of his sanction, shall show that he regards this general will as detrimental to the public good, shall be compelled, at the expense of his dignity and independence, to give effect to it."

In reply to this, the modern school says: "The supremacy of the people is either unmeaning, or has a dangerous sense; the law should not be the expression of will, but of reason; mere will does not constitute a law; for this purpose, reason, justice, and public expediency are required." These ideas were general long before the sixteenth century, not only amongst educated men, but even among the most simple and ignorant classes. A doctor of the thirteenth century admirably expressed it in his habitual laconic language: "It is a rule dictated by reason, and having the common weal for its aim." "Would you," continued the modern school, "have royal power a truth, you must assign it the first place among legislative powers; you must entrust it with an absolute veto. In the ancient cortes, in the ancient states-general and parliaments, the king did occupy this place among the legislative powers; nothing was done without his consent; he possessed an absolute veto."

"Away with classes!" exclaims the Constituent Assembly; "away with distinctions! The king face to face with the people, directly and immediately; the rest is an attempt against imprescriptible rights." "You are rash," replies the modern school; "if there are no distinctions, they must be created. If there are not in society classes forming in themselves a second legislative body a mediator between the king and the people, there must be artificial ones; through the medium of the law must be created what does not exist in society; if reality is wanting, recourse must be had to fiction." Now these classes existed in ancient society, they took part in public affairs, they were organized as active instruments, they formed the first legislative bodies. I ask now, whether this parallel does not show, as clear as the light of day, that what is now termed progress in matters of government, is, in fact, a true return towards what was every where taught and practised under the influence of the Catholic religion before the appearance of Protestantism? In addressing myself to men endowed with the least intelligence upon social and political questions, I may assuredly dispense with the differences which must necessarily result from the two epochs. I grant that the course of events would of itself have caused important modifications; political institutions were to be accommodated to the fresh wants to be satisfied. But I maintain, at the same time, that, so far as circumstances permitted, European civilization was advancing on the right road to a better state, containing within itself the means necessary for reforming without destroying. But for this purpose a spontaneous development of events was necessary to bear in mind that the mere action of man is of little avail, that sudden attempts are dangerous; that the great productions of society are like those of nature, both requiring an indispensable element, time.

There is one fact which appears to me to have been too little reflected upon, although including the explanation of some strange phenomena of the last three centuries. This fact is, that Protestantism has prevented civilization from becoming homogeneous, in spite of a strong tendency urging all the nations of Europe to homogeneity. The civilization of the nations without doubt receives its nature and its characteristics from the principles that have given it life and movement; now these principles being the same, or very nearly so, in all the nations of Europe, these nations must have borne a close resemblance to each other. History and philosophy agree on this point; therefore, so long as the European nations did not receive the inculcation of any germ of division, their civil and political institutions were developed with a very remarkable similarity. True, certain differences were observable in them, which were the inevitable consequences of a variety of circumstances; but we see that they were becoming more and more alike and forming Europe into one vast whole, of which we can scarcely form a correct idea, accustomed as we are to ideas of disunion. This homogeneity would have arrived at its perfection through the effect of the rapidity which the increase and prosperity of commerce and the arts gave to intellectual and material communications; the art of printing would have contributed to it more than anything else, for the ebb and flow of ideas would have dispersed the inequalities separating the nations one from another.

But unfortunately, Protestantism appeared and separated the European people into two great families, which, since their division, have professed a mortal hatred towards each other. This hatred has been the cause of furious wars, in which torrents of blood have been shed. One thing yet more fatal than these catastrophies was the germ of civil, political, and literary schism, introduced into the bosom of Europe by the absence of religious unity. Civil and political institutions, and all the branches of learning, had appeared and prospered in Europe under the influence of religion; the schism was religious; it affected even the root, and extended to the branches. Thus arose among the various nations those brazen walls which kept them separate; the spirit of suspicion and mistrust was everywhere spread; things which before would have been deemed innocent or without importance, from that time were looked upon as eminently dangerous.

What uneasiness, disquietude, and agitation must have been the result of these fatal complications! We may say that in this detestable germ is contained the history of the calamities with which Europe was afflicted during the last three centuries. To what may we attribute the Anabaptist wars in Germany, those of the empire, and the Thirty-years war; those of the Huguenots in France, and the bloody scenes of the League; and that profound source of division, that uninterrupted series of discord, which beginning with the Huguenots, was continued by the Jansenists, and then by philosophers, terminating in the Convention? Had England not contained in her bosom that nest of sects engendered by Protestantism, would she have had to suffer the disasters of a revolution which lasted so many years? Had Henry VIII. not seceded from the Catholic Church, Great Britain would not have passed two-thirds of the sixteenth century in the most atrocious religious persecutions, and under the most brutal despotism; she would not have been drowned during the greater part of the seventeenth in torrents of blood, shed by sectarian fanaticism. Had it not been for Protestantism, would England have been in the fatal position in which she is placed by the Irish question, scarcely leaving her a choice between a dismemberment of the empire and a terrible revolution? Would not nations of brethren have found the means of coming to an amicable understanding, if, during the last three centuries, religious discords had not separated them by a lake of blood? Those offensive and defensive confederations between nation and nation, which divided Europe into two parties, as inimical to each other as the Christians to the Mussulmans, that traditional hatred between the North and the South, that profound separation between Protestant and Catholic Germany, between Spain and England, between that country and France, were sure to have an extraordinary effect in retarding communications between European nations; and what would have been obtained much sooner by moral means, could only be obtained by material ones. Steam tends to convert Europe into one vast city; if men who were one day to live under the same roof hated one another for three centuries, what was the cause of it? If people's hearts had been united long before in mutual affection, would not the happy moment in which they were to join hands have been hastened?