The work shows no great familiarity with the writings of the later theologians, and no fondness for the style and method of the schools, but it shows a profound study of the Fathers, and a perfect mastery of contemporary theories and speculations. The author is a man of the nineteenth century, with the profound thought of an Augustine, the eloquence of a Chrysostom, and the tender piety of a Francis of Assissium. He has studied the epistles of St. Paul, and been touched with the inspiration of that great apostle's burning zeal and consuming charity. He observes not always the technical exactness of modern theological professors, and some French abbés thought they detected in his Ensayo some grave theological errors, but only because they missed the signs which they were accustomed to identify with the things signified, and met with terms and illustrations with which they were unfamiliar. But he seizes with rare sagacity and firmness the living truth, and presents us theology as a thing of life and love.
The principles of the essay are catholic, are the real principles of Christianity and society, set fourth with a clearness, a depth, a logical force, a truthfulness, a richness of illustration and an eloquence which have seldom, if ever, been surpassed. But some of the inferences be draws from them, and some of the applications he makes of them to social and political science are not such as every Catholic even is prepared to accept. The author was drawn to religion by domestic afflictions, which saddened while they softened his heart, and he writes, as he felt, amid the ruins of a falling world. All things seemed to him gone or going, and he looked out upon a universal wreck. His spirit is not soured, but his feelings are tinged with the gloom of the prospect, and while he hopes in God he well-nigh despairs of the world, of man, of society, of civilization, above all, of liberty, and sees no means of saving European society but in the dictatorship or pure despotism acting under the inspiration and direction of the church. He was evidently more deeply impressed by what was lost in the primitive fall or original sin than by what in our nature has survived that catastrophe. He adored the justice of God displayed in the punishment of the wicked, justified him in all his dealings with men, but he saw in his providence no mercy for fallen nations, or a derelict society. This life he regarded as a trial, the earth as a scene of suffering, a vale of tears, and found in religion a support, indeed, but hardly a consolation. The Christian has hope in God, but is a man of sorrows, and his life an expiation. Much of this is true and scriptural, and this world certainly is not our abiding place, and can afford us no abiding joy. But this is not saying that there are no consolations, no abiding joys for us even in this life. Consolations and joys a Christian has in this world, though they proceed not from it. It can neither give them nor take them away; yet we taste them even while in it. This world is not the contradictory of the world to come; it is not heaven, indeed, and cannot be heaven, yet it is related to heaven as a medium, and the medium must partake, in some measure, of both the principle and the end.
The great merit of the essay is in deducing political and social from theological principles. This is undoubtedly not only the teaching of the church, but of all sound philosophy; and what I regard as the principal error of the book is the desire to transfer to the state the immobility and unchangeableness which belong to the church, an institution existing by the direct and immediate appointment of God. The author seems to be as unwilling to recognize the intervention of man and man's nature in government and society as in the direct and immediate works of the Creator. He is no pantheist or Jansenist, and yet be seems to me to make too little account of the part of second causes, or the activity of creatures; and sometimes to forget, or almost forget, that grace does not supersede nature, but supports it, strengthens it, elevates it, and completes it. He sees only the Divine action in events; or in plain words, he does not make enough of nature, and does not sufficiently bring out the fact that natural and supernatural, nature and grace, reason and faith, earth and heaven, are not antagonistic forces, to be reconciled only by the suppression of the one or the other, but really parts of one dialectic whole, which, to the eye that can take in the whole in all its parts, and all the parts in the whole, in which they are integrated, would appear perfectly consistent with each other, living the same life in God, and directed by him to one and the same end. He, therefore, unconsciously and unintentionally, favors or appears to favor a dualism as un-christian as it is unphilosophical. God being in his essence dialectical, nothing proceeding from him can be sophistical, or wanting in logical unity, and one part of his works can never be opposed to another, or demand its suppression. The one must always be the complement of the other. Christianity was given to fulfil nature, not to destroy it. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." (St. Matt. v. 17.)
The misapprehension on this subject arises from the ambiguity of the word world. This word is generally used by ascetic writers not to designate the natural order, but the principles, spirit, and conduct of those who live for this world alone; who look not beyond this life; who take the earth not as a medium, but as the end, and seek only the goods this world offers. These are called worldly, sensual, or carnal-minded people, and as such contrast with the spiritually minded, or those who look above and beyond merely sensible goods—to heaven beyond the earth, to a life beyond the grave, a life of spiritual bliss in indissoluble union with God, the end of their existence, and their supreme good as well as the supreme good in itself. In this sense there is a real antagonism between this world and the next; but when the world is taken in its proper place, and for what it really is, in the plan of the Creator, there is no antagonism in the case; and to despise it would be to despise the work of God, and to neglect it would be not a virtue, but even a sin. This world has its temptations and its snares, and as long as we remain in the flesh we are in danger of mistaking it for the end of our existence, and therefore it is necessary that we be on our guard against its seductions. But the chief motive that leads souls hungering and bursting for perfection to retire to the desert or to the monastery is not that they may fly its temptations, or the enemies to their virtue, for they find greater temptations to struggle against and fiercer enemies to combat in solitude than in the thronged city; it is the love of sacrifice, and the longing to take part with our Lord in his great work of expiation that moves them. Simply to get rid of the world, to turn the back on society, or to get away from the duties and cares of the world, is no proper motive for retirement from the world, and the church permits not her children to do it and enter a religious order so long as they have duties to their family or their country to perform. Nothing could better prove that the church does not suffer us to contemn or neglect the natural or temporal order, or regard as of slight importance the proper discharge of our duties to our families, our country, or natural society. The same thing is proved by the fact that the process for canonization cannot go on in a case where the individual has not fulfilled all his natural duties, growing out of his state or relations in society. Gratia supponit naturam.
In consequence of his tendency to an exclusive asceticism, a tendency which he owed to the unsettled times in which he lived, and the reaction in his own mind against the liberalism be had at one time favored, Donoso Cortes countenanced, to some extent, political absolutism; and had great influence in leading even eminent Catholics to denounce constitutionalism, legislative assemblies, publicity, and free political discussion, as if these things were un-catholic, and inseparable from the political atheism of the age. There was a moment when the writer of this article himself, under the charm of his eloquence, and the force of the arguments he drew from the individual and social crimes committed in the name of liberty and progress, was almost converted to his side of the question, and supported popular institutions only because cause they were the law in his own country. But without pretending that the church enjoins any particular form of civil polity, or maintaining the infallibility or impeccability of the people, either collectively or individually, a calmer study of history, and the recent experience of our own country, have restored me to my early faith in popular forms of government, or democracy as organized under our American system, which, though it has its dangers and attendant evils, is, wherever practicable, the form of government that, upon the whole, best conforms to those great Catholic principles on which the church herself is founded.
But the people cannot govern well, any more than kings or kaisers, unless trained to the exercise of power, and subjected to moral and religious discipline. It is precisely here that the work of Donoso Cortes has its value. The reaction which has for a century or two been going on against that mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government which grew up after the downfall of the Roman empire in the west, and which was not only natural but necessary, since the clergy had nearly all the learning, science, and cultivation of the times, and to which modern society is so deeply indebted for its civilization, has carried modern statesmen to an opposite extreme, and resulted in almost universal political atheism. The separation of church and state in our age means not merely the separation of the church and the state as corporations or governments, which the popes have always insisted on, but the separation of political principles from theological principles, and the subjection of the church and ecclesiastical affairs to the state. Where monarchy, in its proper sense, obtains, the king or emperor, and where democracy, save in its American sense, is asserted, the people, takes the place of God, at least in the political order. Statolatry is almost as prevalent in our days as idolatry was with the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Even in our own country, it may be remarked that the general sympathy is with anti-Christian—especially anti-papal insurrections and revolutions. We should witness little sympathy with the Cretans and Christians of the Turkish empire, if they were not understood to be schismatics, who reject the authority of the pope in spirituals as well as in temporals. Yet, prior to the treaty of Paris in 1856, the Greek prelates were, under the Turkish sovereignty, the temporal lords of their people, and the design of that treaty, so far as relates to the Eastern Christians, was to deprive them of the last remains of temporal independence, and to complete the conquest of Mahomet II. The complete subjection of religion to the state is called religious liberty, the emancipation of conscience. Our American press applauds the Italian ministry for laying down the law for the Italian bishops, restored their sees, from which the state exiled them, and prescribing them their bounds, beyond which they must not pass. The Italian State does not, as with us, recognize the freedom and independence of the Spiritual order, but at best only tolerates it. It asserts not only the freedom and independence of the state in face of the church, but its supremacy, its right to govern the church, or at least to define the limits within which it may exist and operate.
This is what our age understands by the separation of church and state. If it foregoes, at any time or place, the authority to govern the church, it still holds that it has the right to govern churchmen the same as any other class of persons; that the civil law is the supreme law of the land; and that religion, when it happens to conflict with it, must give way to it. The law of the state is the supreme law. This is everywhere the doctrine of European liberals, and the doctrine they reduce to practice wherever they have the power, and hence the reason why the church visits them with her censures. Many devout believers think the separation of church and state must mean this, and can mean nothing else, and therefore that the union of church and state must mean a return to the old mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government of the middle ages. Hence a Donoso Cortes and a Baron Ricasoli are on this point in singular accord. Our American press, which takes its cue principally from European liberals, takes the same view, and understands both the separation and the union of church and state in the same sense.
Yet the American solution of the mutual relations of church and state is a living proof, a practical demonstration that they are wrong. Here the state does not tolerate the church, nor the church either enslave or tolerate the state, because the state recognizes the freedom or conscience, and its independence of all secular control. My church is my conscience, and my conscience being free here, my church is free, and for me and all Catholics, in the free exercise of her full spiritual authority. Here it is not the state that bounds conscience, but conscience that bounds the state. The state here is bound by its own constitution to respect and protect the rights of the citizen. Among these rights, the most precious is the right of conscience—the right to the free exercise of my religion. This right does not decide what the civil law shall be, but it does decide what it shall not be. Any law abridging my right of conscience—that is, the freedom of my church—is unconstitutional, and, so far, null and void. This, which is my right, is equally the right of every other citizen, whether his conscience—that is, his church—agrees with mine or not. The Catholic and the Protestant stand on the same footing before the law, and the conscience of each is free before the state, and a limit beyond which the civil law cannot extend its jurisdiction. Here, then, is a separation of church and state that does not enslave the church, and a union of church and state that does not enslave the state, or interfere with its free and independent action in its own proper sphere. The church maintains her independence and her superiority as representing the spiritual order, for she governs those who are within, not those who are without, and the state acts in harmony, not in conflict with her, because it confines its action— where it has power—to things temporal.