I. Biological concepts which support the idea of unity; their origin.
II. Ancient unity and its exceptions. Christian mysticism. The rights of man; their consequences and their criticism. Utility of the historic conception of man.
III. The ecclesiastical monarchy. Harmony of powers. Abandonment of the theory of harmony; idea of absoluteness better understood today.
IV. Current preference of Catholics for accommodation. Indifference of the state. Current conflicts.
V. Contemporary experiments provided by the church: parliamentarism; selection of fighting groups; multiplicity of forms.
THIS NEW edition of the Réflexions sur la violence is a reprint of the one which appeared in 1908; I have thought it necessary to add this chapter to it in order to show how mistaken people are who believe they raise an irrefutable argument against the doctrines based on the class struggle by saying that, according to the evidence of common sense, the conception of society is permeated throughout with the idea of unity.
That in many circumstances the unity of society must be taken into very serious consideration, especially those circumstances which are most related to acting on the every day constructions of the mind which we attribute to common sense, is something no reasonable person will dream of challenging. One may say, in effect, that social unity presses upon us from all sides, so to speak, in the ordinary course of life; because we feel, almost always, the operation of the effects of hierarchical authority which imposes uniform rules on citizens of the same country. It must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that if common sense is perfectly adapted to the requirements of ordinary relations, it almost always omits the most serious events in life, those in which the value of profound intentions makes itself evident; it must not, therefore, be regarded as certain that the idea of unity thrusts itself into every social philosophy.
Certain widely current language habits of today have contributed more than all the arguments to popularizing the prejudices in favor of unity. It has been found convenient very often to employ formulas in which human organizations are likened to the higher order of organisms; the sociologists took considerable advantage of these ways of speaking, which permitted them to give the impression that they possessed a very substantial science based on biology; since the naturalists made many resounding discoveries during the nineteenth century, sociology profited from the prestige which natural history acquired. Such socio-biological analogies present the idea of unity with singular insistence; one cannot, indeed, study the higher animals without being struck by the extreme state of dependence of the parts in relation to the whole living body. This connection is so much closer than many scholars believed for a long time, that it would be impossible to apply to physiology the methods which were so successful in physics; the natural unity, they thought, would be impaired by the mechanism of experimentation, so that one would only see a sick person like those destroyed by neoplasms.393
It is not necessary to be a very profound philosopher to perceive that language deceives us constantly as to the true nature of the relationships which exist between things. Quite often before venturing upon a dogmatic criticism of a system, there would be a very real advantage in finding out the origin of the images which are frequently encountered in it. In the present case, it is evident that the socio-biological analogies indicate the reverse of reality. Just read, for example, the famous book of Edmond Perrier on the Colonies animales: This scholar manages to render rather intelligible the mysterious phenomena that he wishes to describe, by employing concepts borrowed from the so varied relationships that men form among themselves; he, therefore, follows a very good method, for he employs the relatively clearer areas of knowledge to make the organization of the extremely obscure areas intelligible;394 but he does not suspect for an instant the nature of the task he sets for himself. Taken in by the doctrine of the sociologists who pretend to teach something more advanced than biology, he thinks that investigation of the animal colonies are capable of providing the basis for a social science destined, “to permit us to foresee the future of our societies, to regulate their organization, and to justify the contracts on which they are based.”395
After having utilized in order to obtain sound biological description, the abundant evidence that human groups provide us, does one have the right to transfer into social philosophy, as do the sociologists, formulas which had been constructed by means of observations made on men, but which, in the course of their adaptation to the requirements of natural history, evidently have not escaped undergoing some modifications? In order to be suitably applied to organisms, they have singularly distorted the notion of human activity by disregarding what everyone regards as being the most noble prerogatives of our nature.
When one compares the animal colonies, one may arrange them on a ladder of evolution culminating in that perfect unity of all the partial activities which is revealed in the normal psychology of man; one may say of those which are least controlled by a directing center, that they already possess potential unity; the different levels are distinguishable, one from the other, only by the greater or less concentration which they present; for there is, nowhere, any element irreducible to unification. On the other hand, it has often been said that our Western societies, thanks to their Christian culture, offer the spectacle of consciences which achieve a full moral life only on condition that they understand the infinity of their value;396 such societies are, therefore, irreconcilable with the unity which the animal colonies reveal to us. By resetting in sociology the social concepts that biology has devised for its own needs, one exposes oneself, therefore, to committing grave contradictions.
Historians have often pointed out that the societies of antiquity were much more unitary than ours.397 In reading in the second book of the Politics the arguments that Aristotle opposes to the Platonic theories, one becomes readily aware that the spirit of the Greek philosophers had been generally dominated by the idea that the most absolute unity is the greatest good that one may wish for a community;398 one is even led to doubt if Aristotle would have dared present his anti-unitary conceptions with so much assurance if, in his time, the communities had not been struck with an irremediable decadence, so that the restoration of the old discipline must have appeared singularly Utopian to his readers.
There have certainly existed, in all periods probably, anarchical elements in the world: but these elements were confined to the frontiers of society, which did not protect them the people came to understand their existence only by assuming the existence of mysterious protectors who defended these isolated groups against the dangers which threatened them; such anomalies could not influence the minds of men who wanted to found the science of politics in Greece by the observation of things which most commonly occurred.
The mendicants, certain itinerant artists, and especially the singers, the bandits, have provided the most significant isolated types; their adventures were able to give birth to the legends which charmed the masses; this charm arose especially from what these adventures contained of the unusual; the unusual could not enter into the classical philosophy of the Greeks.
I really believe, however, that despite this rule Aristotle recalled the Greek hero, who had occupied so eminent a place in the national traditions, when he spoke of the destiny reserved for the man of genius. The latter may not be subjected to the common laws; he could not be suppressed by death or by exile; the Community has, therefore, no other recourse than that of submitting to his authority. One must observe that these celebrated reflections occupy only a few lines in the Politics and, especially that Aristotle seems to regard the hypothesis of the reappearance of such demigods as extremely unlikely.399
The ascetics were called upon to have far more significance than the other isolated individuals. The men who submit themselves to bodily ordeals, sufficient to strike the imagination of the people with amazement, are regarded throughout the Orient as being placed above the conditions which limit human powers; as a consequence, they pass for being capable of achieving in nature things as extraordinary as the tortures which they impose on their flesh; the more extravagant their acts, therefore, the more powerful the miracles. In India they easily become divine incarnations, when the Brahmins find it advantageous to deify them, because of numerous marvels being accomplished around their tombs.400
The Greeks had no taste for this kind of life; but they had been influenced somewhat by Stoic literature which had modeled its most peculiar paradoxes on pain in the practices of Oriental asceticism. Saint Nilus, who in the Fifth century adapted the maxims of Epictetus to the teachings of the spiritual life, did no more than recognize the true nature of this doctrine.
Western Christianity profoundly transformed asceticism in its monasteries; it brought forth this multitude of mystical persons, who, instead of fleeing from the world, were devoured by the desire to spread their reforming activities all around them and to whom the religious experience gave superhuman strength. To universalize these gifts of grace, until then almost exclusively reserved to monks, was the principal objective of the Reformation: instead of saying, as one does ordinarily, that Luther wanted to make a priest of every Christian, it would be more exact to say that he ascribes to each of the convinced faithful some of the mystical faculties which the spiritual life develops in the monasteries. The disciple of Luther who reads the Bible in the frame of mind that his master calls faith, believes he enters into regular relations with the Holy Spirit, very much like the monks well on the road to mysticism believe they receive revelations from Christ, from the Virgin, or from the saints.
This postulate of the Reformation is manifestly false; it is not easy for men drawn along by all the currents of everyday life to undergo this experience of the Holy Spirit which Luther, as an ecstatic monk, found very simple. For the majority of present day Protestants, the reading of the Bible is only an edifying study; ascertaining, therefore, that they do not receive, in the presence of the sacred texts, the supernatural light that had been promised them, they question the teaching of their pastors: some go as far as complete unbelief, while others are converted to Catholicism, because they wish, at any price, to remain Christians. By not relating the mystical faculties to the conditions of an exceptional life which could sustain them, the theoreticians of the Reformation committed a very gross error which must, at length, lead to the bankruptcy of their churches; we shall here only concern ourselves with the consequences which this error has had for philosophy.
It has often been observed that there have, almost always, existed two divergent tendencies in the work of human reflection; one may distinguish them, for want of better terms, by names borrowed from the history of the Middle Ages and say that thinkers may be divided into scholastics and into mystics.
The writers of the first group believe that our intelligence, taking the evidence of the senses as the point of departure, may discover how things really are, express the relations which exist between essences, in a language which is evident to every reasonable man, and thus arrive at a knowledge of the external world. The others are preoccupied with personal convictions; they have an absolute confidence in the decisions of their conscience; they wish to have their way of conceiving the world shared by those who will listen to them; but they have no scientific proof to support them. The most important objective one might recommend to philosophy would be to distinguish between these two tendencies; it does not seem that this undertaking would be too difficult; the frequently enormous obscurities which the doctrine of Kant presents arise from the fact that these two tendencies are confounded in it in a particularly complicated manner. Catholic writers reproach Kant unceasingly for having taught a subjectivism which may easily lead to skepticism; he did not think he deserved such criticism, accustomed as he was to admitting that religious experience provides us with all the expression of truth compatible with our human frailty.401
The errors of Kant must make us lenient with men who did not have his philosophical genius, and who derived such highly defective political theories from mysticism debased and vulgarized by Protestantism. Protestantism was to lead people ignorant of every historical consideration to a strange hypothesis: they supposed that, in order to arrive at the prime social principles, it was necessary for them to imagine that they had consciences like that of the monk who lives constantly in the presence of God. Such a hypothesis which severs all connection between the citizen and the economic, familial, or political bases of life, has been introduced into juridical constructions whose importance has been enormous.
It is easily understood why the earliest American societies regulated their public law in accordance with the paradoxical principles of the mystical; their constitutions were to embody something of the monastic, since the Puritans very markedly resembled monks intoxicated with the spiritual life; their formulas were maintained in the United States, by virtue of the continuing religious respect attached to the memory of these illustrious ancestors. This literature came to be mixed in our country with that of Rousseau; he had dreamed of a community inhabited by Swiss artisans and based on an ahistoric man, in accordance with his impressions as a nomad. The legislators of the Revolution, great admirers of Americans and of Jean Jacques, believed they had devised a masterpiece by proclaiming the rights of absolute man.
The jests made by Joseph de Maistre in 1796 à propos of the work of our constituent assemblies have often been cited; they wanted to make laws, “for man. But,” said he, “there is no man in the world. I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc., but as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, it is without my knowledge. . . . A constitution which is made for all nations, is made for none: it is a pure abstraction, a work of scholasticism devised to exercise the mind according to an ideal hypothesis and which must be addressed to man, in the imaginary spaces where he lives. What is a constitution? Is it not the solution of the following problem? Given the population, the religion, the geographical situation, the political relations, the wealth, the good and bad qualities of each nation, is it not to find the laws which are most suitable? ”402
The formulations of this excessively clever writer go on to say that legislators must be of their country and of their time; it does not seem, moerover, that the men of the Revolution had forgotten this verity as much as Joseph de Maistre said; it has often been remarked that while they proclaimed their intention to reason about an ahistoric man, they had, most often, worked to satisfy the needs, the aspirations, or the rancor of the contemporary middle classes; so many of the rules relating to civil law or administration would not have survived the Revolution if their authors had always navigated in imaginary space, in pursuit of absolute man.
What is especially worthy of being closely examined in the heritage which they have left us, is the co-existence of a law formulated for real people of that time and the ahistoric arguments. The history of modern France permits us to determine with precision what disadvantages result from the introduction in a juridical system of arguments of this type. The principles of ’89 were regarded as forming the philosophical foundation of our codes; professors believe themselves obliged to prove that these principles may serve to substantiate the general rules of juridical science, which they taught: they succeeded in this because by means of subtility the mind may triumph over the most difficult undertakings; but some clever writers placed, in opposition to these conservative sophisms, other sophisms, either to establish the necessity for furthering the progress of law, or even to establish the absurdity of the present social order.
At Rome something very similar took place when the jurists of the Antonian period wanted to utilize Stoic philosophy in order to elucidate their doctrines. This philosophy, derived from Oriental asceticism, could only reason about a man alien to the conditions of actual life; there came about, therefore, a dissolution of the ancient juridical order. Historians have generally been so dazzled by the prestige possessed, in the tradition of the schools, by the texts which the Pandects have preserved for us,403 that they have not seen, ordinarily, the social consequences of this great work of renovation. They have extolled the fine progress achieved by jurisprudence, but they have not recognized that at the same time the respect that the ancient Romans had had for law were disappearing.404 Similarly with us, juridical progress405 engendered by the introduction of the principles of ’89 in our legislation, has certainly contributed to the debasement of the idea of law.
In the course of the Nineteenth century, many dogmatic criticisms were directed at the doctrine of the ahistoric man; it was demonstrated many times that it was impossible, starting from laws suitable to this scholastic being, to construct a society which resembles those we know. If the theoreticians of democracy have believed that this undertaking was possible, it is because they had,—without always being aware of the deceit which they employed,—greatly limited the field to which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will.
A philosophy based on postulates taken from the mystical life can pertain only to isolated persons, or people who have left their isolation by joining a group where exactly the same convictions as theirs prevail. In order to find a true and normal application of the principles proclaimed by modern democracy, one will, therefore, be led to study what happens in monasteries; that is what Taine said in an excellent manner: “At the base of this [religious] republic may be found the cornerstone devised by Rousseau . . . a social contract, a pact proposed by the legislators and accepted by the citizens; only, in the monastic pact the will of the acceptants is unanimous, sincere, serious, deliberate, and permanent, and, in the political pact, it is not so; thus, while the second contract is a theoretical fiction, the first contract is an actual fact.”406
One would be tempted to conclude from this criticism that it is necessary to abandon every consideration of the ahistoric man to the professors of rhetoric; but such a conclusion would arouse protestations from the greatest number of moralists; the latter are accustomed, for more than a century already, to proposing a conception of absolute duty,407 which supposes, evidently, that man may free himself from the ties which bind him to historic conditions. On the other hand, many of the great things of history were accomplished by the human masses who, during a more or less lengthy period, were dominated by convictions similar to religious forces in that they are sufficiently absolute to make them forget many of the material circumstances which are habitually taken into consideration in choosing the direction to be taken. If one wishes to express this fact in a language appropriate to the procedures which are called scientific, juridical, or logical, it is necessary to formulate principles which will be considered as having been those of ahistoric men, more or less thrust on the road of the absolute. The abstract man is not, therefore, as Joseph de Maistre thought, a useless person for philosophy; he constitutes an artifice of our understanding,—many artifices are necessary in the effort whereby we adapt reality in our intelligence.
The fundamental difference which exists between the methods of social philosophy and those of physiology, now appears to us more clearly. The latter can never consider the function of an organ without relating it to the whole living being; one could say that this whole determines the type of activity into which this element enters. Social philosophy is obliged, in order to study the most significant phenomena of history, to proceed to a diremption,408 to examine certain parts without taking into account all of the ties which connect them to the whole, to determine in some manner the character of their activity by isolating them. When it has thus arrived at the most perfect understanding, it can no longer attempt to reconstitute the broken unity.
We are going to apply these principles to the history of the Church and their value can then be better appreciated.
It cannot be doubted that at the beginning of our era and, very probably, immediately after the death of Jesus, the Christian communities, by taking Oriental monarchies for models, organized themselves very firmly: their heads were not, consequently, popular magistrates, as the Protestants have written, but kings acting by virtue of a divine delegation.409 Thanks to this theocratic administration, the Church was able to render the greatest services to the faithful while the Roman state was beginning to disintegrate;410 it assured them a more uniform justice than that of the official tribunals; it bought the good will of the imperial police in order to avoid bother;411 it supported bands of poor who might be of great help in defending the peaceful bourgeoisie against the agitators of the cities.
The Empire, after the conversion of Constantine, ended by giving to episcopal authority a prestige which permitted it to impose itself on the German conquerors. For several centuries the Church protected in a very effective manner some privileged groups in which was maintained a very large part of the Roman tradition; our Western civilization owes Catholicism much more than the conserving of classical literature; it owes it what [our civilization] has retained of the Roman spirit; and we can realize the immense value of this inheritance by comparing the peoples who have shared it to the Orientals who have so much difficulty in understanding our institutions.412
Ecclesiastical theoreticians have constructed their doctrines by idealizing this glorious past of the Church; she is, according to them, the only monarchy which can pretend to derive its authority directly from God; as distinguished from the Protestant legists who defended the divine right of kings, the Catholic theologians think that there is something popular in the origins of temporal powers,413 which places him in an inferior position in relation to the papacy. The Church could not, therefore, be controlled by any sovereign; but, in practice, it is not in as independent circumstances as a kingdom, because it does not have a territory distinct from that of the States; it is inserted into civil societies; its adherents are citizens at the same time. Two crowns may readily remain absolutely without relations, while the Church cannot perform all that it considers to be necessary in order to accomplish its mission, without encountering, at every instant, some of the social relations on which secular law has, rather generally, formulated regulations; it is, therefore, necessary that the State come to an understanding with the Church or that it abstain from legislating on certain matters.
Christianity has a tradition which prevents it from becoming a military power, similar to the Moslem caliphate; that derives not only from the doctrines of the very earliest Fathers,414 but also from a system of government created by Theodosius which remained, “the eternal dream of the Christian conscience, at least in the Roman countries”; Renan is correct in saying that the Christian empire has been, “the thing which the Church, in its long life, has loved the most.”415 During the Middle Ages the papacy attempted to carry out great undertakings which would have been easy with the collaboration of a Theodosius and which presented unheard-of difficulties by the use of forces accidentally grouped under its patronage; the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Italian wars show very mediocre results obtained by means of desperate efforts; this experience presented the best evidence one could wish in favor of the Theodosian system.
The theologians arrive, consequently, neither at a unity nor a perfect independence of the two powers; they dream of a harmony which does not seem to them very difficult to obtain, because they put much greater trust in reasonings which permits them to say what ought to exist than in the observation of facts. Men would have some right, in the judgment of these doctors, to accuse Providence of lacking wisdom if it did not normally assure them the means of enjoying all the advantages which the Church and State must procure; these advantages could only be obtained if perfect harmony reigns between the two powers; one concludes from these premises that harmony will exist whenever the true order of things, as discovered by reasoning, is not troubled by abuses.
During the time which followed the Counter-Reformation and the consolidation of the monarchies, this happy harmony had been regarded as deriving naturally from the institutions. Monarchy was then the usual form of government of civilised societies;416 harmony could not help producing its benefits if the kings had, to the same degree as the heads of the Christian hierarchy, a clear knowledge of the heavy responsibility which would weigh on them in case of conflict. It was enough, they thought, that the men called to educate the princes should apply themselves to instilling in them feelings for the episcopacy similar to those which Theodosius had felt for Saint Ambrose.
The history of the Church in the course of the Nineteenth century has not been propitious to the doctrine of harmony; there have been, almost constantly, many grave difficulties between the ecclesiastical authorities and the governments which have taken office in France; the problems of the present time have led to an examination of the past from a quite different point of view from that taken by former theoreticians; it is now seen that in all periods the conflicts occurred too frequently for them to be regarded as abuses; it was more fitting to compare them with wars which broke out so frequently between interdependent powers which disputed the hegemony of a part of Europe.
The ecclesiastical authors, attributing capital importance to the education of the princely consciences to secure the harmony, formerly ascribed the conflicts to moral origins: the pride of the sovereigns, the cupidity of the great, the mean, wicked, and at times impious jealousy of the legists. The scholars of the Nineteenth century introduced the rule of explaining great things only by great causes; they have, consequently, found the old controversies of the casuist-historians ridiculous; the politico-ecclesiastical struggles have been regarded as having been motivated by the same type of reasons as those which permit an understanding of the great European wars.
The work done on the Middle Ages by the apologists of the papacy has contributed a great deal to the confirmation of this interpretation. Wishing to defend the popes against the people who had so frequently denounced their insatiable ambition, many Catholics began to write the history of the quarrels of the Priesthood and the Empire in a Guelf spirit. They maintained that the sovereign pontifs had rendered immense services to civilization by defending Italian liberties against German despotism. This entirely political manner of presenting the greatest conflicts which have ever existed between Church and State, leads to a comparison of the normal relations which exist between the two powers, to those which exist between two independent crowns.
The ancient doctrine of harmony has, then, become as chimerical in the eyes of modern historians, as, perhaps, that of the United States of Europe; these two conceptions are of the same type, having as an objective the replacement of the fact of accidental peace by the theory of normal union. After the drinks in the congresses of comedians, discourses are offered from time to time on the United States of Europe; but no serious person occupies himself with these games.
For quite some time lay authors have examined the assertions of papal power formulated during the quarrels of the Priesthood and the Empire from a juridical rather than from a historical point of view. French legists had found absurd the arguments which would have rendered impossible the royal order of which they were the principle representatives; they had posed Gallican principles with the purpose of confining ultramontane pretensions within limits compatible with the principles of civil administration; historians were disposed to treat as extravagant paradoxes the things which legists condemned with so much severity. But today they no longer concern themselves with knowing to what extent the popes were legally right and how they might have applied their theories in practice; they wish to know what relations exist between these assertions of ecclesiastical authority and the development of the conflicts; it cannot be doubted that they constitute a very acceptable ideological translation of the struggle in which the Church was engaged.
When one has really understood the implications of these old documents, one becomes more aware of the claims which produced such a great shock among liberals when the Syllabus of Pius IX was published in 1864. The Church has almost always had a clear perception that to fill the role which was assigned to it by its founder, it is obliged to assert an absolute right, although in practice, in order to facilitate the advance of the civil societies into which it is inserted, it is disposed to accept many limitations on its authority. Diremption alone makes possible the recognition of the internal law of the Church; in the periods in which the struggle is seriously conducted, Catholics claim an independence for the Church conformable with this internal law and incompatible with the general order established by the State; most frequently, ecclesiastical diplomacy arranges agreements which, for the superficial observer, dissimulate the absoluteness of its principles. Harmony is only a dream of theoreticians, which corresponds neither to the internal law of the Church, nor to practical arrangements, and which serves to explain nothing in history.
With each renaissance of the Church, history has been convulsed by manifestations of the absolute independence demanded by Catholics; it is these periods of renaissance which reveal what constitutes the essential nature of the Church; thus is the method of diremption, indicated at the end of section II, fully justified.
In the eyes of a very great number of French Catholics, the Church should leave its old absolute theses to the pastime of college pedants. The latter, who know the world only by what old books say about it, will never be able to understand how modern society functions; it is, then, necessary that men devoid of scholastic prejudices apply themselves to observing with care the phenomena of contemporary life; the Church would profit considerably by listening to the advice of persons who have a feeling for the suitable and for the possible. It should resolve to replace thesis by hypothesis, by making all the concessions necessary in order to suffer least from the detestable conditions in which Catholicism must henceforth live.
We are assured that this policy of extreme prudence is based on the highest considerations of scientific philosophy. The Catholic public is almost always way behind the secular public; 417 it adopts as very important novelties the fashions which are beginning to disappear; the clergy, consequently, has already for some years been amazingly impassioned for Science, to the point where it could remonstrate with M. Homais himself. The clerical party, which prides itself on being equal to present day difficulties, has discovered transformism and loves to intoxicate itself with discussion on the notion of development; but there are many ways of understanding these words; it cannot be doubted that for modern priests more or less tinged with modernism, evolution, adaptation, and relativity correspond to a single current of ideas. By proclaiming themselves transformists, Catholics wish to combat the former fanaticism for truth, to content themselves with the most convenient theories, and to have on all matters only those opinions likely to win the favor of those indifferent to religious matters: these are pragmatists of a rather low type.
There exists a considerable difference between the doctrine of harmony and the transformist blabbering which pleases present day Catholics so much. The first was suited to an active and powerful Church imbued with the idea of the absolute, which frequently condescended to limit its demands, in order that it not interfere too much with the operation of the State, but which imposed on it, as often as it could, the obligation of recognizing the infinite rights which it held from God. The second system is proper to those people whose weakness has been tested by numerous defeats, who live constantly in the fear of receiving new blows, and who are overjoyed when they obtain a delay sufficient for them to develop the habits of a new servility, conformable with the demands of their masters.
This so scholarly tactic has not been too successful for the Church; Leo XIII was frequently celebrated by the republicans and treated by them as a great pope because he counselled Catholics to submit to the necessities of the time; the climax of his policy was the dissolution of the religious orders;418 Drumont was able, several times, to make him answerable for the disasters which overwhelmed the Church in France (for example, Libre Parole, March 30, 1903); but one might also say that the Catholics gathered the bitter fruits of their cowardice and that never were misfortunes more deserved than theirs. Such an experience must not be lost to the Syndicalists, who are advised so frequently to abandon the absolute in order to confine themselves to a policy which is prudent, skilful, and entirely concerned with immediate results; the Syndicalists do not want to accommodate themselves and they are certainly right, as they have the courage to bear the inconveniences of struggle.
There is no lack of Catholics who think that peace might be obtained in contemporary society without submitting to an accommodation and without attempting to achieve the impossible harmony of the earlier theologians. The difficulties which the co-existence of the two powers present might be reduced, in effect, to almost nothing, whenever the number of mixed matters over which the competition of the two sovereigns were formerly exercised, should have diminished a bit more.
In barbaric times, the inordinate extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction could be benevolent, when there did not yet exist any really organized tribunals; this regime had to disappear as the State began to perform its functions more completely; secular institutions were preferred, and justly, because they were better adapted to the economy: no one dreams any more, for example, of treating wills as religious acts; for many centuries we have stopped completing contracts by promissory oaths the fulfilment of which were examined by ecclesiastical courts; the clerics have ended by being judged like the other citizens. Although the theologians continue to assert, with the same force as formerly, that the Church alone may bring into being true marriages, the making of the family is slipping away from it completely; the clergy is no longer even able to limit, even slightly, the respectability enjoyed in society by people who are civilly married after divorce. The wealth which had been accumulated by former generations to provide for works of Catholic charity have been confiscated and these works have been, in a great part, secularized.
The fundamental prescriptions on which the religious monarchy was based could, in the opinion of many persons, be faithfully executed if the Church were satisfied with governing the public worship, the schools of theological instruction, and the monastic institutions. In case the common law were sufficiently permeated with liberty, it might suffice to allow Catholicism to accomplish this mission. An understanding would no longer be necessary between the heads of the spiritual and the temporal power; instead of the harmony which was only a dream of theoreticians, there would reign the most complete indifference. One could not say that the State would ignore the Church completely, for the first duty of the legislator is to really understand the conditions in which each of the juridical persons develops his activity; it would then be necessary for the laws to be fashioned in a manner as not to impede the free expansion of the Church.
This regime of indifference would not be without analogy to that experienced by Judaism after the destruction of the kingdom of Judea.419 The Jews wanted to restore Jerusalem, but solely to make of it a sort of great monastery consecrated to the rites of the Temple; on the administration of Nehemiah, Renan writes: “It is a Church which is being founded at Jerusalem and not a state. A mob that is amused by festivities, and a nobility whose vanity is flattered by the honors of processions are not the elements of a fatherland: a military aristocracy is necessary. The Jew will not be a citizen; he will live in the cities of others. But, we hasten to say, there are in the world other things than the fatherland.”420 It was precisely when they no longer had any fatherland that the Jews came to give to their religion a definitive existence; during the time of national independence they were very disposed toward a syncretism odious to the prophets; they became fanatic worshippers of Jehovah when they were subjected to the pagans. The development of the priestly code, the Psalms, whose theological importance came to be so great, and the second Isaiah421 are of this period. Thus, the most intense religious life may exist in a Church which lives under a regime of indifference.422
The Catholicism which exists in Protestant countries is very happy with this system: its hierarchy, its professors, and its monasteries are hardly embarrassing; it is something as politically trivial as Judaism was in the Persian world. It is rather different with French Catholicism, whose heads have been, until recently, involved in too many matters to be able to easily accept a transformation of their activity in accordance with the plan which I indicated above. The right to operate educational establishments appears to them especially important to maintain; they are persuaded, in effect, that primary and secondary schools must be directed with the object of implanting in all instruction of the faithful the theological formulations which they judge necessary to assure the guidance of souls by the clergy; from that comes the ardent competition between the Church and the State.
For some thirty years now, the republican government has been impelled by a sort of Anti-Church, which pursues an ordinarily underhanded policy,423 at times brutal and always fanatic, with the object of destroying Christian belief in France. This Anti-Church, today triumphant, wishes to take advantage of the unhoped-for success which it has obtained since the Dreyfus revolution; it believes that a regime of indifference would be a fraud as long as the Church still has considerable influence; its great preoccupation is to suppress completely the whole regular clergy, its heads believing, with reason, that the secular clergy would not be sufficient to maintain Catholicism.
The present situation of Catholicism in France suggests sufficiently remarkable similarities to that of the proletariat engaged in the class struggle, for the Syndicalists to have a real interest in following attentively contemporary ecclesiastical history. Just as in the workers’ world we find many reformists who regard themselves as being great scholars of social science, the Catholic world abounds in men of considerable stature, very up-to-date on modern knowledge, knowing the needs of their time, who dream of religious peace, moral unity of the nation, and compromise with the enemy. The Church does not have the same facilities as the syndicates for getting rid of these bad counsellors.
Renan points out that the renewal of the Roman persecutions provoked a renewal of the ideas of the advent of the AntiChrist, 424 and as a consequence, of all the apocalyptic hopes relative to the reign of Christ; one may then compare these persecutions with the great violent strikes which give such extraordinary importance to catastrophic conceptions. We shall no longer see in our time the atrocities which were committed during the first centuries of our era; but Renan has regarded the monasteries, again very justly, as able to replace the martyrdom. 425 There can be no doubt that certain religious orders have been very effective educators for heroism; unfortunately, for a number of years monastic institutions seem to have made serious efforts to take on the secular spirit, with the object of getting along better with people of the world. From the new situation it results that the Church today lacks the conditions which have in the past brought about the advent, sustained the energy, and popularized the guidance of heroic leaders; the compromisers no longer have much to fear from these nuisances.
The wise men of Catholicism, like the wise men of working-men’s world, imagine that, in order to ameliorate a difficult situation, the best method to follow consists in winning the support of political interests; the ecclesiastical colleges have contributed a great deal to the development of this spirit of intrigue in their students. The Church was greatly surprised when it tested at its own expense the value of this wisdom; parliament voted against the Church many laws which were obviously dictated to it by Freemasonry; decrees based on whimsical considerations were multiplied against the congregations; the public accepted the most arbitrary measures with an extreme indifference; all recourse against the activity of the Anti-Church was thus closed. Catholics were happy to hear some eloquent voices condemn these unjust laws; but their indignation flowed out in the form of literature; the sole heroic resolution which they were capable of taking was that of crimping some votes in favor of the Sganarelles who represent the Church in parliament in such a comic fashion.426
The practice of strikes has led the workers to more virile thought: they hardly respect all the sheets of paper on which imbecilic legislators inscribe marvelous formulas, designed to assure social peace; for the discussions of law,427 they substitute acts of war; they no longer permit the Socialist deputies to advise them; the reformists are, almost always, obliged to burrow underground while the energetic work to impose their victorious will on the employers.
Many people imagine that if the syndicates were rich enough to occupy themselves largely with mutual-aid work, their spirit would change; the majority of the syndicates would be afraid to see their treasuries threatened by the fines following illegal acts by revolutionaries; the tactics of trickery would thus become necessary and leadership would pass into the hands of those cunning fellows with whom the republican statesmen can always come to an understanding. The clergy is governed by other economic preoccupations; it has been able, without too great injury to itself, to give up the property of the factories, because the generosity of the faithful will permit it to live from day to day, but it is afraid of not being able to continue to celebrate the ritual with the elaborate material which it habitually uses; not having a very clear right to the churches, it could not guarantee the pious that their gifts would always be assigned to increase the splendor of the ritual. It is for this reason that intriguing Catholics never cease proposing schemes of conciliation to the papacy.
The meetings of the bishops held after the voting of the law of Separation showed that the moderate party would have prevailed in the Church of France if the parliamentary system had been able to function. The prelates were not sparing in solemn declarations asserting the absolute rights of the religious monarchy, 428 but they greatly desired not to create embarrassment for Aristide Briand; many facts permit us to believe that episcopal parliamentarism would even have resulted in giving to ministers of the Republic under the regime of the Separation, more influence over the Church than the ministers of Napoleon III ever had. The papacy ended by adopting the only reasonable decision that it could take; it suppressed the general assemblies so that the energetic might not be hindered by the clever; some day French Catholics will bless Pius X who saved the honor of their Church.
This experience with parliamentarism is worth studying; the syndicates, they also, ought to dread great solemn assizes, in which it is so easy for the government to prevent every virile resolution from materializing; war is not made under the direction of talking assemblies.429
Catholicism has always reserved the function of combat to rather small bodies whose members had been rigidly selected, by means of tests designed to confirm their vocation; the regular clergy, thus, practices this rule, so often forgotten by revolutionary writers, that a trade union head once stated before P. de Rousiers: “One weakens oneself by assimilating weak elements.” 430 It is with elite troops, perfectly trained by monastic life, ready to brave all obstacles, and filled with an absolute confidence in victory, that Catholicism has been able, until now, to triumph over its enemies. Each time that a formidable peril has arisen for the Church, men, particularly adept, like the great captains, at discerning the weak points of an opposing army, created new religious orders, appropriate to the tactics demanded by the new struggle. If today the religious tradition appears so threatened, it is because institutions suited to lead the struggle against the Anti-Church have not been organized; the faithful, perhaps, still preserve a great deal of piety; but they form an inert mass.
It would be extremely dangerous for the proletariat not to practice a division of functions which has succeded so well for Catholicism during its long history; it would be no more than an inert mass destined to fall, as democracy,431 under the direction of politicians who live on the subordination of their electors; the syndicates must search less for the greatest number of adherents than for the organization of the vigorous elements; revolutionary strikes are excellent for effecting a selection by weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the elite troops.
This division of functions has permitted Catholicism to present all the nuances: from the groups whose life is swamped in the general unity to the orders which are dedicated to the absolute. Catholicism finds itself, by reason of its religious specialization, in a much better condition than Protestantism: a true Christian, following the principles of the Reformation, would have to be able to pass, at will, from economic standards to monastic standards; this shift is considerably more difficult to obtain from an individual than the exact discipline of a monastic order. Renan has compared the small Anglo-Saxon congregations to monasteries;432 these groups show us that the principle of the Reformation is applicable to those of exceptional natures; but the action of these societies is generally less fecund than that of the regular clergy, because it is less supported by the greater Christian public. It has frequently been observed that the Church adopted, with an extreme facility, the new systems which were put into practice by the founders of orders, with the object of strengthening the spiritual life; by contrast, the Protestant pastors have been, almost always, strongly hostile to sects; in this way Anglicanism has much to repent for having allowed the Methodists to escape from its control.433
The majority of Catholics has thus been able to remain alien to the pursuit of the absolute, and yet collaborate very effectively in the work of those who, by conflict, were maintaining or perfecting the doctrines; the elite which bore the assault to the enemy positions, received material and moral assistance from the masses which saw in it the reality of Christianity. According to the points of view which one takes, one has the right to consider society as a unity or as a multiplicity of antagonistic forces: there is an approximation of economic-juridicial uniformity generally sufficiently developed for one to be able, in a very great number of cases, not to worry about the religious absolute represented by monks; on the other hand, there are many important questions that one could not hope to comprehend without picturing the activity of fighting institutions as preponderant.
Rather similar observations may be made with regard to workers’ organizations, they ought to vary to infinity as the proletariat feels itself more capable of cutting a figure in the world; the Socialist parties believe themselves charged with furnishing ideas to these organizations,434 with counselling them, and with grouping them into a class unity, at the same time that their parliamentary action would establish a connection between the workers’ movement and the bourgeoisie; and we know that the Socialist parties have borrowed from democracy its great love for unity. In order to really understand the reality of the revolutionary movement, it is necessary to take a point of view diametrically opposed to the one taken by politicians. A great number of organizations are mingled, more or less intimately in the economic-juridical life of the whole of society, in a way that whatever is required of unity in society is produced automatically; others, less numerous and well selected, lead the class struggle; they are the ones who train proletarian thought by creating the ideological unity which the proletariat requires in order to accomplish its revolutionary work;—and the leaders demand no recompense, quite different in this respect, as in so many others, from the Intellectuals, who insist upon being maintained in a joyous way of life by the poor devils whom they consent to harangue.