Liberty or Equality

CHAPTER V THE POLITICAL TEMPER OF CATHOLIC NATIONS

It is surprising to observe how constantly we find theology at the bottom of our political questions.

—P. J. PROUDHON, Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire

(Paris, 1849, p. 61)

1. THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF CATHOLICISM

In this chapter the searchlight of our investigation will be focused on the political behaviour pattern, rather than on the ideologies, of Catholic nations. Forced, under these circumstances, to generalize on this matter, but at the same time endeavouring to avoid the grossest over-simplifications, we will try to compare the attitude of Catholic (and Greek Orthodox) nations and ethnic groups with those of their Protestant equivalents. Comparison, and not the setting of absolute standards, is our aim.

Still, the fact remains that Protestantism is essentially medieval, or, if we prefer, post-medieval. This is documented by the fact that Protestantism clung to the Gothic style long after it had become obsolete in the Catholic world. Even today the Gothic style is prevalent among American churches and colleges with the Catholic minority “joining in.” Of course, it cannot be denied that Protestant “Medievalism” has been emptied of its soul through a relativizing and liberalizing process. Anybody visiting that Gothic sky-scraper, the “Cathedral of Learning” of Pittsburgh University, will be struck by the sight of professors in medieval gowns and mortar boards teaching pragmatist and instrumentalist philosophy. Yet the façade remains and also many thought patterns. Thus the real year of the Reformation is not 1517, but 1511, when Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar on his mission in Rome, for the first time in his life was face to face with the Renaissance. Here was a man from the backwoods of Christendom aghast at the grandiose effort toward a synthesis between Christendom and the immortal and lasting values of antiquity. The annexationist character of Catholicism had been hidden to him and the fact that the synthesis became only perfect in the Baroque he could not guess. Yet what he disapproved of was the cultural aspect of the Renaissance which said “God and Man.” From a “circle” Catholic culture had turned to an elliptic form with two foci. After all, man was created in the image of God and his destiny was to become more god-like after death. There is a real process of theosis envisaged—as we find it, in a different form, also in Eastern theology. Hence the veneration of saints. But the Reformers replied to these efforts “Soli Deo Gloria!” and tried desperately to go back, back to the Middle Ages, back to some sort of imaginary catacomb Church, back to the Old Testament. Unless we are able to picture Luther wandering around in Rome as a hill-billy preacher from the Alleghanies on Broadway in New York, we do not understand the initial spark which started the 16th-century wave of Reformers.

Thus, with the exception of Melanchthon and Zwingli, there are only very minor figures among the Reformers who tried to ride the crest of the wave of Humanism. The most outstanding Humanists everywhere rallied sooner or later to the cause of the Church Universal. So did St. Thomas More, so did Erasmus, so did Reuchlin, the great anti-clerical who had fought monkish narrowness all through his life. And while Catholic culture centred around the dual focus of the Glory of God and the Glory of Man, while Catholic painters directed their interest towards the objects of this world, towards man and woman in the nude (“as God made them”), Protestantism was engaged in a new rigorism. It is a grave mistake to see in Luther a confirmed libertine, who “overvalued sex and marriage.” His concept of marriage is one of “carnality to end all carnality.” Protestantism is very profoundly anti-erotic.* Thus the key to the real understanding of the Catholic cultures of the European Continent and of South and Central America is, for the Protestant as well as for the Catholic of the British Isles and North America, an understanding and appreciation of the cultural, artistic and intellectual values of Humanism, the Renaissance and the Baroque. (The fact that Irish Catholicism has only very peripherically been through this evolution is of paramount importance.) Especially the inner understanding of the Baroque is by no means easy to those belonging to the English-speaking nations and E. I. Watkin is one of the few who came to see the true greatness of the “Jesuit style.” Yet it took him years to disentangle himself from the notions imparted to him by Ruskin.

In order to come to symbolic comprehension of the Catholic-Protestant antithesis one must compare two paintings: the Birth of Venus by Botticelli and American Gothic by Grant Wood. The Birth of Venus follows a pagan pattern, but every sensitive person will perceive that this is a Christian Venus, surrounded by a hardly perceptible glow of sensuality, yet expressing a real synthesis of Eros and Agape, earthly and divine love. She is a “baptized” Venus. The painting of Grant Wood shows us a very Protestant American farmer and his wife with a white, Gothic wooden church in the background. The man holds in his hand a pitchfork with painfully pointed prongs. His balding pate, his thin lips, his clean spectacles no less than his prim and severe wife at his side frightened no less a man than Albert Jay Nock. The outcry of bigots which could be heard at the end of the 19th century that the Democratic Party in New York stood for “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” was somehow not without substance when we translate this accusation with “Joie de vivre, Catholicism and Individualism.” To our ears, at least, the reverse—“Prohibition, Protestantism and Prostration”—hardly sounds more attractive.

This is by no means an “original theory,” but a thesis alluded to by D. H. Lawrence and Everett Dean Martin, who emphasized the fact that Americans have tried to flee the Middle Ages, but never “thought themselves out of them.”

This secular order by no means contradicted the other, metaphysical hierarchy of souls. Even the medieval serf knew that simple fishermen were among the saints, and he could see in numerous churches murals representing Hell peopled by tortured popes, kings and bishops. This, however, was by no means egalitarianism. Egalitarianism in the modern sense existed nowhere: what appears to be egalitarianism is merely the strong consciousness of the mystery of the human soul which, though equal with all others at its inception, has to face struggles and temptations, experiences, defeats and victories which rapidly destroy the initial pattern of spiritual equality. “Human equality” in the Catholic orbit is thus nothing but the acute feeling of man’s inability to scrutinize and evaluate the status of souls.

Tener un hijo
Plantar un arbol
Escribir un libro

(“To have a son, to plant a tree, to write a book”). Here we find the synthesis of patriarchalism, agriculture and artistry—a perfectly “reactionary” pattern. (Compare with Mussolini’s Un libro e un moschetto—fascista perfetto—“a book and a musket make a perfect Fascist”: intellect and the old Petrine curse—brute force.)

It is also obvious that the ideological substance of the French Revolution is almost in its entirety the product of Protestant dialectics. Although there are some minor Cartesian and Jansenistic elements in the political philosophy of ’89 and ’92, the main impulses came from America, Britain, Holland and Switzerland.

It is thus very doubtful whether any stability in the Catholic world could be regained short of either the total destruction of the Catholic religion or the restitution of a Catholic way of life in conformity with a homogeneous Catholic view of the world. Neither event seems probable in the near future. In the meantime we have seen repeated perversions of traditional Catholic socio-political trends. To illustrate this we have shown in the preceding chapter how the drives fostering personal dictatorship of the mass-party pattern (the plebiscitarian tyranny) came from residues of patriarchalism—notwithstanding the fact that this perversion of patriarchal sentiments was deeply egalitarian and democratic, illiberal and “populistic.”

2. THE CATHOLIC CHARACTER

Still, the emphasis on reason in Catholic theology, which works for an intellectual discipline, produces also an exclusiveness characteristic of all systems adhering to logic. The typical Catholic thinker would always insist that only one or none of two contradictory statements can be right—but not both. The modern “liberal” attitude that both can be right “in their own ways” springs from the supposition that either objective truth does not exist or is humanly unattainable. Such a position automatically engenders a latitudinarianism which, among Protestants for instance, encourages interfaith movements; and, in the political scene, greatly reduces the antagonisms between political parties. If the latter have a broad common denominator, the indulgent voter will see in them mere “ins” and “outs.” The notion that an adversary may be right without impinging on one’s own “subjective-objective” correctness of view is, indeed, an indispensable quality for every nation governed by parliamentary institutions. At the same time it is obvious that there are (often fairly narrowly-set) limits to the “agreed dissent”; prompted by a subconscious fear of total atomization, Protestant societies will frequently watch the “common denominator” with jealous zeal. And thus a social totalitarianism soon ensues. Everett Dean Martin, a Congregationalist minister, went even further and insisted that “private interpretation” led directly to intolerance and, among the multitudes, “fortified ignorance with the delusion of infallibility, circumscribed the outlook of many men with an unimaginative liberalism and rationalized the crowd’s will to power.” (Liberty, p. 124.)

“Don Carlos is still not going to rule in Spain.”

“He will in Navarre, and in Álava and in Biscaya.”

The nun joined her hands with a gesture which was at the same time graceful and determined.

“But, uncle, in order to make justice triumph in this way, half of Spain will have to be depopulated.”

The voice of the guardian sounded with a muffled echo in the vastness of the hall:

3. CATHOLICISM AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR

The legal ideal of the Spaniard would lie in the possession of a document on which is written in clear and simple words: “This man is entitled to do whatever may enter his mind.”

—GANIVET, Idearium Español

The division of the political parties between mere “ins” and “outs” is the logical result of this ideological uniformity. Thus a “working democracy” becomes possible; yet the price which has to be paid for it in terms of social control is one which the Catholic nations (in the long run at least) are not willing to pay. Sir Norman Angell very accurately described human existence in a totalitarian state when he wrote:

From these and similar observations it is quite obvious that the political temper of Catholic nations is singularly unfit for parliamentary government, save in the small Catholic Swiss cantons where, due to their size and predominantly agrarian character, the dreaded mass democracy could not develop, and some sort of familial colour in the political system can be preserved. Catholic personalism and individualism found its most concrete expression in the strong federalistic (i.e., anti-centralistic) tradition of the Catholic cantons. The War of Confederacy (Sonderbundskrieg) of 1847 saw the Catholic cantons (save one) lined up in defence of “federalism” against the Protestant cantons eager to enforce centralization. This war, in a sense, paralleled those of 1861–65 (the American War between the States) and 1866 (the so-called Austro-Prussian War).

Yet if there must be extremism, then a wild individualism takes precedence over its opposite form. As a result anarchism rather than communism or socialism is the classic form of “radicalism” in the Catholic orbit. Even in the Protestant mind the anarchist will always be an individual from a Catholic or a Greek Orthodox country, and never a member of a Protestant nation. The assassin with a black beard and a smoking bomb is neither an Englishman nor a Swede nor a Prussian, but possibly an Irishman or—even more likely—a Spaniard, an Italian or a Russian. Incidentally, what in European conversations is often glibly called a “bolshevik” is in reality frequently an anarchist. The superior propaganda of the Third International has unfortunately attracted millions in western Europe who are anarchists at heart but, lacking something better, vote the Communist ticket. We are faced here by a tragic misunderstanding, without parallel in Catholic Germany or Austria, because these regions had the privilege of “visual education.” In France and Italy the comedy of errors continue with millions expecting from Communism the end of all controls and total liberty—not total control and a planned economy. In Continental parlance the Catholics are often referred to as “the black ones”; but black is also the colour of the anarchist flag.

4. CATHOLICISM AND THE FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

Since only 13 per cent, of the population of the European continent are followers of Protestant creeds, and since the efforts to “make the world safe for democracy” were largely directed against the Catholic and the “mixed” zone, the results of all these endeavours have been disastrous. Civil liberties in Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, and Albania are today considerably less than in 1900; the future of constitutional democratic government is promising neither in Germany and Austria nor in France and Italy. The revolutionary ferment has destroyed all Catholic monarchic institutions (save in Belgium), and the outlook in the Greek Orthodox world is not much brighter.

Protestantism, on the other hand, with its flexibility, was able to effect a synthesis between “progress,” democracy, liberalism, tradition and religion. As a result—quite paradoxical at the first glance—monarchy has become the Protestant form of government. Conversely, republicanism in Europe becomes more and more synonymous with tyranny.

It would, nevertheless, be a great error to think that Continental Europeans do not have a genuine desire for liberty and a healthy framework for the free development of their personalities. The only possible hope they have is a monarchical restoration; but this hope is extremely dim. Curiously enough, the recognition that the “good old times” are those of monarchical “tyranny” prior to 1914 is quite general. The masses, in the quest for bread and security, are no less conscious of this commonplace than the intellectuals eager for liberty. And yet there is at the same time a far-reaching disbelief in the possibility of a return to this one and only form of government that harmonizes with the Catholic temper and promises a minimum of sanity, balance and peace. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. do not favour restoration, and are historically and psychologically bound to oppose it. The United Kingdom is in a very similar situation. In 1945 Austrian monarchist leaders, just released from Nazi concentration camps, were temporarily jailed by the Western Allies.

 

 

* The sex act within the marriage bond thus receives sacramental character—hence the insolubility of a genuine matrimonium consummatum. And it would be very naïve to believe that the stand of the Church against artificial contraception is essentially “demographic”; it is defending primarily the very dignity and significance of the sex act.