Finding all right in Scotland, we visited Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the ancient Scandinavia, the land of Odin, and home of the most strongly-marked devil-worship to be found in history. With all my study and experiments, I was far below many mesmerizers I found among the natives of these countries. I found operative the spirit of the old Vikings, the Berserkirs, and the Sagas, which had made the Norsemen the nobility of Europe, and the plunderers of every maritime district, which had precipitated Gustavus Adolphus upon the Empire to perish at Lützen, and Charles the Twelfth upon Russian Peter, to meet his fate at Pultowa. It still survives, hardly restrained by the Christian profession, and capable of being kindled up anew, and set to work in all its pristine vigor. Of these northern countries I felt sure, and that I might safely leave them to themselves.
We passed on to St. Petersburg, and had an interview with the Czar of all the Russias. We found him one of the noblest-looking men in Europe, simple, affable, intellectual, and well-informed. He treated us with distinction on account of our country, with which he said he and his predecessors had always been on friendly terms, and whose unexampled prosperity he saw with pleasure. He could understand our politics, and respected them, for they were based on a principle—a wrong principle he believed—nevertheless a principle, consistently carried out. He believed the Russian system, under which one man governs, is far preferable to ours, under which all govern. However, we might honestly disagree with him. Apparently he was the most bitter as well as the most powerful enemy of our revolutionary plans; but we did not despair of him. He seemed wedded to the status quo; but we felt that when once we had destroyed that, we could make him and his legions do our work, for we found him a sort of Pope in his own dominions, and not indisposed to supplant the Pope of Rome. He was, if a friend to Papacy, the enemy of the real Pope, and that was enough for us.
The Czar, foreseeing the revolutionary movements which would be attempted in Western Europe, had for the moment ceased to favor the Panslavic movement which he previously set on foot; but we saw that the impulse had been given, and that ultimately he must return to it, go on with it, or be swept away by it. This Panslavic movement to unite the whole Slavic race, numbering upwards of seventy millions, and holding a territory capable of supporting twice, if not three times that number of inhabitants, under one Slavic government, imperial or republican, would operate, we thought, altogether in our favor; for it would ruin Austria, the chief support of the Papacy, and give a decided predominance to the anti-Catholic powers throughout all Europe. We therefore favored it, and took care to form various circles in support of it, as we traversed the Empire from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Ninjï Novogorod, Little Russia, to the Black Sea; and also, among the Serbs of Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, in European Turkey; Transylvania, the Banat, Croatia, Slavonia, and Bohemia, in the Austrian Empire.
We visited, on leaving Russia and Slavic Turkey, the kingdom of Hungary. There we found Kossuth, and he answered our purpose. Priscilla formed a circle among the Magyar ladies, but it was quite unnecessary. I initiated Kossuth into my plan, and laid my hand on his head, and breathed into his mouth, and left him to take care of the Magyar race. Highly delighted, we passed from Presburg to Vienna, where we stayed some weeks. The Imperial family and high aristocracy were proof against our arts, but we found the burghers, the employés of the government, and especially the students of the University, quite impressible, and we charged them for a revolution.
From Vienna we passed through Cracow to Warsaw, and from Warsaw we went to Berlin. In all these places we found every thing favorable. We passed through the capitals of several of the smaller German States and principalities, stopped a few days in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and then hastened to take up our residence at Geneva, in Switzerland. We did not visit Munich, but sent Lola Montes there, whom Priscilla, at my order, had prepared. She did very well, but not so well as I expected. She used her extraordinary powers too much for her own aggrandizement. She should never have suffered King Louis to have made her a countess. She was too vain and ostentatious.
We arrived in Geneva, late in the autumn of 1844, and made it our principal residence till the spring of 1846. We had made no prolonged stay in Poland, for we found the Poles already mesmerized. Cold and callous as I had become, I yet had a tear for poor Poland, and, let my conservative brethren say what they will, I still weep her fate. I am not affected by the prevailing Russo-phobia, and in the contest now raging between Russia and the Western powers, I believe that she has the advantage on the score of justice, though now that they have been mad and foolish enough to wage war against her, the interests of Europe perhaps demand their success; for if they fail, she becomes quite too powerful. There are traits in the Russian character I like, but I can never forgive the murder of Poland. Catherine, Frederic, and Maria Theresa, in that crime opened the way to modern revolutions, and deprived crowned heads, to a powerful extent, of the sympathy of the friends of justice and order. The Poles had their faults, great and grievous, but the partition of their kingdom by the three powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, was a crime that no faults could justify, and, what some would say is worse, a political blunder. Since then, the Polish nobles have been, and will long continue to be, their evil genius.
We did not remain long in Germany, for we found most of the German states already prepared, and already in close communication, after the German fashion, with the powers of the air. The German genius is mystic, and plunges either into the profoundest depths of Christian mysticism, which unites the soul with God, or into the demoniacal mysticism, which unites it in strictest union with Satan. The German, whatever his efforts, can never make himself a pure rationalist. He has too much religiosity for that. He must worship, and when he worships not God, he worships the devil, and either through the elevating power of the Holy Ghost rises to heaven, or, through the depressing power of Satan, sinks to hell. You never find him standing on the simple plane of human nature, and he is always either superhumanly good or superhumanly wicked. For an Englishman, an American, an Irishman, there is a medium, a possibility of compromise, a sort of split-the-difference character—now saying, good Lord, and now saying, “good devil,”—a via media genius, which offends both extremes, and satisfies nobody. I like the German genius better. If the Lord be God, then serve him, if Baal be God, then in Satan’s name serve Baal. Be either cold or hot, not lukewarm. Ernst ist das Leben is the German’s motto, and whatever he proposes to do, whether good or evil, he sets about it in downright earnest. There is more to hope, and more to fear from the German or Teutonic race than any other in Europe, for it has very little of the Italian and French, or the English and American frivolezza, that curse of modern society.
At Geneva we met Mazzini, a remarkable man, in his way, the very genius of intrigue, and wholly sold to the devil. We also met there the Abbate Gioberti, a Piedmontese, who had been exiled as a liberal by the government of Carlo Alberto, the cidevant Carbonaro. He was a Catholic priest, and though under the censure of the government, and distrusted by the Jesuits, nay, violently opposed by them, he had not at that time, so far as I could learn, fallen under the censure of his church. He was one of the ablest men we met in our European travels, and a fine specimen of the higher order of Italian genius. Though comparatively young, not much over forty, he was deeply and solidly learned, and as a writer on political and philosophical subjects, had, saying nothing of his peculiar views, no superior, and hardly an equal in all Italy, if indeed in all Europe.
Gioberti affected to be an Ultramontane, a rigid Catholic, a thoroughgoing Papist; yet his sympathies were with the liberal or revolutionary party. He was, first of all, an Italian, and held that the moral, civil, and political primacy of the world belonged to Italy, and it was because God had, from remote ages, given to her this primacy, that the Papal chair was established at Rome. The primacy belonged to the successors of St. Peter in their quality of Roman pontiffs, who, as such, were heritors of the Italian primato. The Papal authority was founded in divine right, but mediately through the divine right of the Italians as heritors of the old Roman sacerdocy, and Italo-Greek civilization. According to him, the Papacy did not so much continue the synagogue, as the old Roman priesthood, or rather, the Jewish and Pagan priesthoods both meet and become one in the Papacy—the summit and representative of the Christian priesthood.
His plan, therefore, was, first of all, Italian unity, not the republican or democratic unity of Mazzini and Young Italy, nor yet a monarchical unity, under a purely secular prince; but a federative union under the moderatorship of the Pope, made one in the Papacy. The Romans, he held, at least from the time of Numa, had been an armed priesthood, and should now resume, under the Pope, their old character and mission. Italy thus united, thus organized, under the moderatorship of the Pope, could reassert her primacy, and carry on the work of civilization. With her twenty-five millions of inhabitants, the natural superiority of her genius, the moral weight of the Papacy, her peculiar geographical position, and the productiveness of her soil, she would be impregnable to attack, and more than able to cope single-handed with any one of the great European powers. In other words, he sought for the Pope and the Italians what Nicholas is supposed to seek for the Czar and the Russians.
The rock on which he split, and I told him so at the time, was in assuming the intrinsic compatibility of Gentilism and Christianity. He wished to combine the antique pagan and the modern Christian spirit, and to train youth to be devout Catholics, and yet, at the same time, proud, daring, and energetic Gentiles. He did not agree at all with the Abbé Gaume and the party laboring to exclude the Greek and Roman classics from our colleges and universities; he had no very high opinion of the fathers of the Church, with the exception of St. Augustine, and no patience with the mediæval knights and doctors. He waged unrelenting war on the philosophy taught by the Jesuits, and, indeed, upon the whole system of education pursued by those renowned religious religions, which, he contended, had practically emasculated the European mind, deprived it of all depth and originality, and of all free and vigorous activity. Its effect had been to produce, in nearly all Europe, a universal frivolezza, or frivolity of thought and action.
But he forgot to note, that Gentilism and Christianity are directly opposed one to the other. Christianity educates for heaven, Gentilism for earth; the former is based on pride, the latter on humility; the one exalts God, the other exalts man. The Gospel teaches us to despise what Gentilism honors, and to honor what Gentilism despises, and to possess the world by rising above it, and trampling it under our feet. A Christian discipline has for its end, to mortify the flesh, and to make men live as if dead to the world, and to overcome the world by dying, not by slaying, by relying on the wisdom and power of God, not on their own. Gentile discipline trains men primarily for the world, develops the nobility of pride, not the higher nobility of humility—trains men to act, by their own wisdom and sagacity, on men, to be artful and overreaching statesmen, intrepid soldiers, able and invincible commanders. It is obvious to every one that these two systems can never be combined, and made to work harmoniously together. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.
Taking the Gentile standard, taking a Fabricius, a Scipio, a Cato, a Cæsar, instead of a St. Bruno or a St. Francis, of Assisium, as a model man; or a Cornelia instead of Santa Clara or a Santa Theresa, for a model woman, there can be no doubt of the vast superiority of ancient Gentilism over modern Catholicity, or even Christianity itself, and, in this sense, the devout Irishman was right when he said, “Religion has been the ruin of us,” and more especially as it regards Catholics. Non-Catholics, as to the empire of this world, display a wisdom, an energy, and a decision, which you seldom find in strictly Catholic states, and the only cases in which so-called Catholic states approach them, is when they put their religion in their pocket, war on the Pope, or for purely secular ends, on purely earthly principles. The French Republic, in putting an end to the Mazzinian Reign of Terror, and restoring Pius the Ninth to his temporal estates, professed no religious motives, and would have failed if it had. It acted from worldly policy, and avowedly for the purpose of watching Austria and maintaining French influence in the Peninsula.
The question is not as Gioberti conceives it; it is not a question of the fusion of Christian and Gentile virtues, but a question between Gentilism and Christianity itself. It is not how to train our youth to be great, noble, energetic, according to the Italo-Greek standard, but whether we are or are not to be Christians. If Christianity be true, there can be no question that our youth should be trained for heaven and not for the world, and taught to be meek, humble, self-denying, unworldly—to die to the world, and live only to God—to prepare themselves for dying and living eternally hereafter in heaven. If so trained, they will not exhibit those traits of character which you so much admire in the great men of pagan antiquity; they will meditate when you will think they should act, pray when you would have them fight, and run to the church when you would have them run against the enemy. But, at the same time, if Christianity be true, there can be no question that the management of earthly affairs on Christian principles and for a Christian end, would be decidedly for the interests of society as well as for the salvation of the soul. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
There is an innate and irreconcilable antagonism between Italo-Greek Gentilism and Christianity. According to Christianity, the world by wisdom knows not God; and the whole economy of the Gospel is undeniably to discard the wisdom of this world, and to rely solely on the wisdom from above, to trust not ourselves, but God alone. The Gospel reverses all the maxims of Gentile wisdom, and blesses what it curses, and curses what it blesses. Gentilism had said, Blessed are the proud, the distinguished, they who are honored and abound in this world’s goods; the Gospel says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, that is, they who are humble, lowly-minded, and despise riches and honors. Gentilism had said, Blessed are they who are quick to resent and avenge their real or imaginary wrongs; the Gospel says, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land. The former had said, Blessed are they that rejoice; the latter says, Blessed are they that mourn. Gentilism had said, Blessed are they who thirst for fame, for honor, power, and who live in luxury, who eat, drink, and are merry; the Gospel says, Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice, Blessed are the merciful, and Blessed are the clean of heart. Gentilism had said, Blessed is the man who delights in arms, whom no one dares attack, whom none slander, revile, or persecute, and who, by his force, craft, or wisdom, has triumphed over all his enemies, and subjugated them to his will; the Gospel says, Blessed are the peacemakers, Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake, Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake: rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.
The principle of Christianity is humility, meekness, gentleness, forgiveness of injuries, love of enemies, self-denial, detachment from the world, and a delight in living, suffering, and dying for the glory of the cross. In every respect, the principle of Gentilism is the direct contradictory. Look at the Gospel as you will, and its direct denial of heathenism everywhere strikes you. Its Author came into the world not in the pride, pomp, and power of an earthborn majesty. He came in the form of a servant, a slave, the reputed son of a poor carpenter, at whose craft he worked with his own hands. The foxes of the earth have holes, and the fowls of the air have nests, but poorer than they, he had not where to lay his head. Of the rich, the proud, the great, and honored, none were with him. His disciples were poor fishermen and publicans. He sought and accepted no earthly honors; and when the people, in a fit of momentary enthusiasm, would make him perforce their king, he withdrew, retired into the mountains, concealed himself, and prayed to his Father. When betrayed by one of his followers, and delivered into the hands of his enemies, he made no resistance, and permitted none to be made. He patiently endures insults, mockeries, and revilings, and opens not his mouth in his defence, when confronted with his accusers before the bar of Pilate, but meekly submits to the unjust sentence pronounced against him, suffers himself to be led unresistingly, bearing his cross, to the place of execution, and to be crucified between two thieves.
Here is the whole spirit, the whole economy of Christianity. If Christianity be from God, this means something, and proves that if Christians are sincere and in earnest, they cannot adopt or even value the wisdom of the world; and it must always be true, that the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Concede the Gospel to be true, and you must own that Christian asceticism is the highest wisdom, and Gentile wisdom, or the wisdom of this world, the sublimest foolishness. This St. Paul well understood, and hence he says, “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; but to them that are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. The foolish things of the world hath God chosen to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that he may confound the strong; and base things of the world, and things contemptible hath God chosen, and the things that are not, that he might bring to nought the things which are.”
There is no denying this, and hence the error of Gioberti. He would be both a Christian priest and a Gentile philosopher, at once a disciple of the Gospel and of the Portico, and he labored with an ability and a subtlety to demonstrate by means of a philosophy, considered apart from the use he made of it, worthy of profound esteem, that this was not only possible, but demanded by the deepest and truest principles of ontological science. I do not think that he was at that time an unbeliever, or that he entertained any doubts of the religion he professed. But he had little of the sacerdotal character or the Christian spirit, and I think he was disgusted with what he considered the weakness, tameness, abjectness, the frivolezza of the Catholic populations of France and Italy, and out of patience with seeing them crouching before the haughty infidel, and the domineering heretic or schismatic. He wished to see them men, men of lofty and daring souls, scorning to be trampled on, and indignantly hurling back the invading hosts of barbarians, and boldly and triumphantly asserting the proud prerogatives which belong to them as possessors and guardians of the truth of God. He was right after the wisdom of men, but wrong after the wisdom of God, if Christianity is our standard, and was animated by the spirit of Gentilism, not by the spirit of the Gospel. He failed, for he was too pagan for a Christian, and too Christian for a pagan.
The remedy, if remedy is needed, is the return of modern society to real, earnest, living faith in the Gospel. The age is frivolous, because it is educated to be Christian, and is at heart unbelieving. It is not heresy or schism that needs now to be attacked, but unbelief—a moral and intellectual scepticism, which books and schools do not teach us to attack successfully. Here schoolmen, men of routine, with their probos, respondeos, and objectiones solvunturs, stand us in poor stead. Exquisite polish, gracefully-turned periods, charming pleasantries, pretty conceits, and soft, sweet sentimentality for boys and girls in their teens, will stand us in just as little. It is necessary to abandon routine, the easy habit of speaking memoriter, and learn to think, to master, not merely repeat, what others have said, but to master for ourselves the principles involved, and to speak out in a tone of strong, impassioned reasoning, in free, bold, and energetic language, in defence of the Gospel itself.
