ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
Erected by the Senate in his honour a.d. 312. Eighteen years later he retired to Byzantium, leaving the Roman Bishops in virtual possession of the eternal city. See pages [32], [42], [237].
CHAPTER XII
THE ROMAN QUESTION
I. Before 1870
The "Roman Question" represents the only "religious" question in Italy. The problems which agitate other lands leave the Italian unaffected, uninterested. He has no genius for reforming, and no genius for sect-making, he is as tolerant of abuses as of diversities. So it comes about that the one and only "religious" question in Italy is a political question—the rights and wrongs of the situation created for the papacy when it was despoiled of its temporalities.
It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great future for Italy were not confined in the "forties" to the Italian unità men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's "Speranze d'Italia" and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by Gioberti's "Primato morale e civile degli Italiani" in which "the majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy" were set forth as mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil. There he read that "Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world," and there he gained his notion of an Italian federation under the civil headship of the Pope. That this idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist. He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of the Syllabus. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the "forties" and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the civil headship of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and has not been undertaken since.
Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of God on earth—self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception does not correspond to facts. We all know that the "Donation" of Rome to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the great European states with the absorption of the small principalities and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their rights—efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the "pre-eminent domain" which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed between the final destruction of all "home rule" in the papal states and the loss of the temporal power.