comte, auguste - the positive philosophy vol III

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combination of the aristocratic league with the industrial classes, by means of the valuable intermediary class of the Saxon nobles; an intervention which existed nowhere else. As it does not accord with the abstract character of my inquiry to go further into detail, I must content myself with referring the reader to the case of Scotland, in proof that the double conquest had more influence than insular position in determining the peculiarity of the English case; and to those of Venice first, and afterwards of Sweden, as instances of the political development of which England is the most striking example.

Thus, towards the end of the fifteenth century, we see that the spiritual power was absorbed by the temporal; and one of the elements of the temporal power thoroughly subordinated to the other: so that the whole of the vast organism was dependent on one active central power,—gen- erally royalty,—when the disintegration of the whole system was about to become systematic. I have already said that the process occupied two periods, the protestant, properly so called, and the deistical.

After what we have seen, we shall easily understand that the Reformation simply put the seal on the state of modern society, such as it was after the changes. particularly of the spiritual power, of the two precede centuries. The revolutionary condition, I must observe, was as marked among the nations who remained Catholic, as among, those who professed Protestantism; though the characteristics of the change were different. The subordination of the spiritual power affected all the West of Europe, and all orders of persons who inhabited it.—priests and popes, as well as kings, nobles, and people. When Henry VIII separated from Rome, Charles V and Francis I were almost as fully emancipated as he. The two points of change which alone have remained common to all sects were the breaking up the centralization of the papal power, and the national subjection of the spiritual to the temporal authority: and the achievement of Luther, with all its stormy grandeur still investing it, was in fact a simple realization of this first stage of Catholic decline; for its dogma was at first a collateral affair; and it essentially respected the hierarchy, and seriously attacked only the discipline. If we look more closely at the nature of the changes, we shall find them such as not only propitiated the human passions which exist in clergy as in other men, but confirmed the destruction of sacerdotal independence,—namely, the abolition of clerical celibacy, and of general confession. Such being the earliest character of Protestantism, it is easy to see why it made its first appearance among nations remote from the centre of Catholicism, and

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to whom the Italian tendencies of the papacy during the last two centuries were especially vexatious. At the same time (the time of Luther), the kings of Catholic countries,—of France, Spain, Austria, etc.,—were

as completely the masters of their clergy, and as completely independent of the papal power, as the Protestant princes, though they did not openly arrogate to themselves a useless and absurd spiritual supremacy. But the Lutheran movement, especially when it had reached the Calvinistic phase, wrought powerfully in converting the clerk to such a political subjection, which had been repugnant to them before, but in which they now saw the only security for their social existence amidst the universal passion for religious emancipation. It was then that the coalition of social interests began, between Catholic influence and royal power, which has been erroneously attributed to, the best days of Catholicism, when that system was in fact glorious for its antagonistic to all temporal power. It is another mistake to suppose that the opposition to human procuress is more attributable to modern Catholicism shall to Lutheranism, which, in its English or Swedish or any other form, is yet more hostile to progress, having never proposed to be independent, but been instituted from the beginning for perpetual subjection. From whatever cause, the Catholic church, finding itself powerless in regard to its highest choices, and restricted to the control of the individual life, with some little remaining influence over the domestic, has applied itself more and more exclusively to the preservation of its own existence by makings itself a necessary auxiliary to royalty, in which alone the remains of the life of the monotheistic age were concentrated. It needs no showing that this was a vicious circle, out of whirls nothing could issue but ruin both to Catholicism and to royalty. Catholicism offered itself as a support precisely because it was itself in need of support; and it lost its popular credit by thus renouncing its ancient and most prominent political office, retaining only the empty power of preachment, which, however sublime in eloquence, was essentially declamatory and very inoffensive to the now superior power. At the same time, royalty had connected its political fate with a system of doctrines and institutions certain to excite in time universal repugnance. intellectual and moral, and gloomed to universal and speedy dissolution.

The dissolution was systematized, from the beginning, chiefly by the institution of the society of the Jesuits, which, eminently retrograde in its nature, was founded to serve as a central organ of Catholic resistance to the destruction which threatened on every side. The papacy, of

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late chiefly engrossed by the interests and cares of its temporal sovereignty, was no longer fit for the necessary opposition to spiritual emancipation; and the Jesuit leaders, who were usually eminent men, assumed, under all modest appearances, the function of the popes, in order to bring into convergence the partial efforts were more and more scattered by the tendencies of the time. Without them Catholicism could not, it appears to me, have offered any substantial resistance for the last three centuries; but not the less must the Jesuit influence, from its hostility to human progress, be eminently corrupting and contradictory in its character. It engaged all the social influence it could lay hold of in the service of Catholicism, by persuading the enlightened that their own power depended on their support of a system of sacerdotal authority over the vulgar, while they themselves might enjoy a secret emancipa- tion;—a procedure which was possible only as long as such emancipation was exceptional and sure to become ridiculous when religious liberty should be more widely spread, when, of necessity, Jesuitism must be reduced to an organized mystification, in which every person concerned must be at the same time and for the same purpose deceiver and deceived. Again, by striving for the direction of education, Jesuitism helped to propagate the intellectual movement; for, however imperfect its teachings, they were an apparatus directed against the end of its own institution. Its famous foreign missions offer the same contradiction between the means; for they offered homage to the intellectual, and especially the scientific, development of modern society, which it was their object to contravene; and derived their own spiritual power from that intellectual teaching which they made the means of introducing articles of faith that they at first were compelled to disown or conceal. I need not point out the perils to which such an institution must have been exposed, holding so exceptional a position amidst the Catholic organism, and by the superiority of its special destination provoking the jealousy of all other religious bodies, whose attributes it absorbed, one by one, and whose antipathy became so intense as to neutralize, in the heart of the Catholic clergy themselves, all regret for the final fall of the only possible support of their Church.

Jesuitism was indeed the only barrier set up, with any chance of success, against the incursions of religious liberty; and the Spanish monarchy, as secluded from heresy, was the only effectual support of Jesuitism. Nothing better than a negative result was given forth by the Council of Trent, as the popes seem to have foreseen, judging by their

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reluctance to summon and prolong the Assembly, which could only reproduce, after a long and conscientious revision, the Catholic system, with a fruitless admiration of the consistency of all its parts, and the conclusion that, with every conciliatory desire, they could consent to none of the concessions proposed for the salve of peace. I pointed out before that the Franciscans and Dominicans had offered, three centuries earlier, the only real promise of Catholic reformation, and, as they failed, there was no hope. The universal care of the Catholic world for the regeneration of the Church had for some time shown that the critical spirit was predominant even there. Thus far advanced towards dissolution, no ground was left to Catholicism but that of resistance to human development; and thus reduced to be a mere party in Europe, it lost not only the power but the desire to fulfil its old destination. Absorbed in the care of its own preservation, degraded by the perpetration of foul and suicidal acts, through its partnership with royalty, and resorting to material repression, its activity of resistance only disclosed its intellectual and moral impotence, and indirectly hastened the decay which it strove to arrest. From the first days of decline to the present.—from the time of Philip II to that of Bonaparte,—there has been the same struggle between the retrograde instinct of the ancient organization and the spirit of negative progression proper to new social forces: only the situation was at first inevitable; whereas now it is protracted for want of a philosophy appropriate to the actual phase of human development. It does not follow that Catholicism was not illustrated in its decline by main men of eminence, intellectual and moral; but the number rapidly decreased, and the social decay of Catholicism was made manifest in the very men who most adorned it. The finest logic was employed in defending inconsistencies and humiliations, as in the instance of Bossuet; and the virtues of such men as St. Carlo Borromeo and St. Vincent de Paul had no characteristics which attached them to Catholicism as must have been the case in earlier times. Their natures must have received an equivalent development, though under a different expression, under any religious sect, or outside of all.

We must beware of attributing the vices of hypocrisy and hostility to progress to Catholicism alone. From the moment that Protestantism changed its natural attitude of simple opposition, it shared those vices to the full. Catholicism became retrograde against its nature, in consequence of its subjection to temporal power; and Protestantism, erecting that subjection into a principle, could not but be retrograde in at least an

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equal degree. For instance, Anglican orthodoxy, rigorously required from the vulgar for the political needs of the co-existing system, could not generate very deep convictions and a very high respect among those same lords of Parliament whose decisions had so often arbitrarily changed various articles of faith, and who must officially claim the regulation of their own belief as one of the essential prerogatives of their order. The forcible repression of religious liberty was, in Catholicism, simply a consequence of its modern disorganization; whereas, it is inherent in the very nature of Protestantism, from its confounding the two kinds of discipline; and it could not but manifest itself as soon as it had the power, as long experience has only too well proved. And this has been the case, not only with primitive Protestantism, through the despotic spirit of Lutheranism towards all that goes beyond it: it has been the case in all the more advanced sects from the moment that power passed into their hands, for however short a time. The deist Rousseau proposed the juridical extermination of all atheists, and he is only a fair exemplification of the doctrines which pretend to tolerance while subjecting the spiritual to the temporal order of affairs.

Before quitting the study of modern Catholic resistance, I must remark that, so far from being merely hurtful to soggy improvement, as we are apt to suppose, it has aided political progress for three centuries past. Besides its office in preserving public order, of which I have already said enough, we must consider the social benefit that has accrued from its active opposition to the spread of the Protestant movement. The imperfect operation of the spirit of free inquiry must have retarded the emancipation of the intellect, especially among, the multitude, by humouring the indolence of proud human reason: and in political matters, Protestantism proposes modifications which, in spite of their insufficiency, keep up a delusive notion of the tendency of society to true regeneration. Thus Protestant nations, after first outstripping their Catholic neighbours, have stood still, in a position further removed than the Catholic nations from any real issue of the revolutionary movement: and such would have been the disastrous state of suspension of the whole civilized world, if it had been all pervaded by Protestantism. Instead of the final organic state being made to depend on the indefinite duration of the old organism in that state of half-decay sanctioned by Protestantism, it is aided by the action of Catholicism in retarding the revolutionary movement, intellectual and political, till it could become decisive in both relations.

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As for the effect of the critical spirit on the temporal changes of the last three centuries,—we find it at world among the social powers which gathered round the preponderant temporal element whether it were the royal power, as in France, or the aristocratic power, as in England and some other countries. The only active element in either case was naturally invested with a sort of permanent dictatorship, the establishment of which was so far retarded by religious troubles as not to have been fully characterized till the second half of the seventeenth century, and which remains to this day, notwithstanding its exceptional nature, together with the corresponding social situation. because of the incapacity of the special agents of the transition to conduct it to its issue. This long dictatorship, royal or aristocratic, was at once the consequence and the corrective of the spiritual disorganization, which would otherwise have destroyed society altogether. We shall hereafter see what its influence has been in hastening the development of new social elements, and even aiding their political advent. The operation of the dictatorship, in the one case in England, and in the other in France, is full of interest and instruction. Both have equally broken up the feudal equilibrium, but France, from the predominance of the rectal element, nearer to a permanent settlement than England, with its aristocratic system: and the royal element being more indispensable to the issue than the aristocratic, France has been better able to dispense with a peerage than England with a sovereign; so that the aristocratic power has been more subordinated in France than the regal in England. Royalty in France, isolated in the midst of a people bells on emancipation, has opposed less obstruction to progress than the English aristocracy, who, equally disposed to the stationary or retrograde policy, have more power to sustain it, by their closer connection with the people at large. Again, the principle of caste, which in France has long been confined to royalty, is sustained in England by a great number of distinct families, whose continual renewal maintains its vigour, though its character is certainly not ameliorated by the new additions. However proud the English oligarchy may be of their old historical prerogative of making and unmaking kings, the rare exercise of such a privilege could not affect the spirit of the temporal organization so much as the daring permanent power of making nobles which the sovereigns of France appropriated as long ago, and which they have used so recklessly as to make their noblesse almost ridiculous, since the revolutionary phase began. I must observe in this connection that Protestantism has nowhere, and least of all in England, shown itself averse

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to the spirit of caste, which it has even tended to restore, by re-establish- ing, as far as possible, the sacerdotal character, of which the Catholic philosophy had deprived it. For one instance, the spirit of Catholicism supposed to the principle of caste, and favourable to that of capacity, has always opposed the succession of women to the throne or to feudal authority, whereas official Protestantism, in England, Sweden, etc., has sanctioned the political existence of queens and even of peeresses: a contrast which is the more remarkable from Protestantism having made royalty a genuine national papacy.

In both the eases of temporal dictatorship, Protestantism has done something to retard the disorganization which in other respects it accelerated. by reinforcing the element which was to succumb. In England, and in cues analogous to the English, this was done by means of the national papacy instituted by Protestantism,—a spiritual authority which, without being able to inspire very serious convictions, did for a time partially compensate to the multitude for the loss of the real papal guidance, and hence grew to an excess which occasioned great political convulsion. An equivalent, but opposite result of Protestantism took place on the continent, and even in Scotland, but especially in France, by the noblesse being supplied with fresh means of resistance to the growing ascendancy of royalty: and in this second case it took the Presbyterian or Calvinistic form, as best suited to opposition, instead of the Episcopalian or Lutheran form, which is best Atlanta d for government. Hence, violent repression or convulsive agitation, as the two powers alternately struggled to repair their former decline; the mass of the people still, as before, interfering no otherwise than as a natural auxiliary, though certain to obtain a personal interest ere long in the controversy, by means of their cooperation. This appears to me to be the true account of the memorable social troubles of England, France, and all the west of Europe, from about the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century; and thus is explained the thorough unpopularity generally speaking, of French Calvinism, which was welcomed by the noblesse as a means of recovery their ancient feudal independence, in opposition to royalty, and which was therefore repugnant to the old antiaristocratic instinct of the mass of the population.

If we look to the general social effect of the dictatorship of the temporal power, in either of its aspects, we shall find it to be that, when its authority was fully consolidated, it raised up its old antagonist, which, on the other hand. accepted, more or less explicitly, a final political

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subordination. It was quite natural that it should be so, considering how much alike royalty and aristocracy were in origin, caste, and education, and how congenial they must therefore be, when once their rivalship was brought to an end. From that moment the explanation of any democratic tendencies shown by either was clear enough; for each invariably employed its ascendancy in favour of its old rival, and against its steady ally. Such was the attitude of the English aristocracy in regard to royalty, on which it lavished a more and more affectionate guardianship; and such was in France, from Louis XIV onwards, the growing predilection of royalty for its humbled noblesse. It is not to be supposed that these transactions took place for calculated reasons. On the contrary, they were the inevitable results of natural affinities, though the consideration might, and no doubt did, afterwards occur, of the utility of such unions as a means of resistance to the revolutionary movement, which was about to become systematic. We observe here a repetition of the error of the preceding period,—that of mistaking a charge for a support: and here we also recognize the natural term of the spontaneous disorganization which characterized the preceding period, and which was extended into this till the remains of the ancient system were gathered round the element which was to prevail. The dissolution being complete, we shall see the critical action assume a new direction towards a decisive revolution, for which the way was now open. From this juncture, the dictatorship of both kinds assumed the retrograde character which was impossible till the respective positions of royalty and aristocracy inhere settled and now was that system of retrograde resistance matured which had been begun by Philip II under Jesuit inspiration, and against which the whole revolutionary spirit, now also matured, was to be brought to bear.

When the kings ceased to be mere warrior chiefs, and engrossed prerogatives and offices too vast to be wielded by themselves alone, the ministerial function arose,—a new symptom of the times, and a new political power. Louis XI seems to me to have been (with the exception of the anomalous case of Frederick the Great) the last European sovereign who really directed all his affairs himself. Richelieu’s elevation was not attributable solely to his personal qualities: for both before and after him men of a far inferior genius acquired an authority quite as real, and perhaps more extended. Now, such an institution is an involuntary confession of weakness on the part of a power which, having engrossed all political functions, is compelled to abdicate the practical direction of

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them, to the great injury of its own social dignity and independence. The most striking feature of this new position is the surrender of that military command which was once the primary attribute of sovereignty: and this surrender took place in the seventeenth century, behind some official disguises. In the same way, the aristocratic dictatorship resigned its actual political power and military leadership. The English oligarchy confided its chief prerogatives to ministers derived from the nobility, and chose out of a lower rank the real leaders of military operations both by land and sea: but in the English case, the change was less marked than in the converse, because the peerage could incorporate its ministers with itself, and thus disguise its own weakness. The Venetian aristocracy had already gone through the same process, though with less remark, because the situation was less conspicuous. It is evident that not only is the decay of the military regime signalized by the substitution of standing armies for a feudal militia, but the profession of arms was completely degraded when the ministerial power arose, and was usually exercised by men entirely unversed in war, at the very time that kings were retiring from military command. If any superficial thinker should object that we have had great wars up to very recent times, I need only refer him, for a proof that these recent wars do not indicate a military regime, to the difference in position and power between the greatest of modern generals, who are merely the agents of a jealous and distrustful civil authority, and the ancient generals, especially the Roman, who enjoyed an almost absolute and indefinite empire during the whole course of their operations. The best proof that the modern position of military commanders is no accident, but accordant with the natural course of affairs, is the acquiescently of the generals themselves, who have never yet been deterred by the most irksome conditions from eagerly soliciting the command of modern armies. Nothing can verify more strikingly than such a change, natural and universal as it is, the anti-military character of modern society, to which war is more and more an exceptional state, the very crises of which yield only an accessory social interest, out of the military profession

This view is confirmed by an unprejudiced study of the great modern wars, which are hastily cited in contradiction to it. Generally speaking. these wars in no degree proceeded from any feudal exuberance of military activity after the abasement of the European authority of the popes. The last wars that can be referred to such an origin are, I think, those belonging to the first half of the sixteenth century, during the

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rivalship of Francis I and Charles V, consequent on the French invasion of Italy. That very struggle presently became defensive on the part of France, for the maintenance of her nationality against the dangerous pretensions of Charles V to a kind of universal monarchy. From that time, Protestantism checked the spirit of conquest by the preoccupation of intestinal troubles, and by assigning a new end and course to military activity, thenceforth connected with the great social struggle between the system of resistance and the instinct of progression,—to say nothing at this time of what I shall have to speak of hereafter,—the anti-military tendency of Protestant ways,—encouraging habits of discussion and free inquiry evidently hostile to the commonest conditions of military discipline. To this time then we must refer the origin of the revolutionary wars, properly so called, in which foreign war was complicated with civil conflict, for the solemn sake of an important social principle, by which pacific men were brought into the struggle by the force of their convictions, so that military energy might be very intense and sustained without being more than a mere means, and without indicating any general predilection for military life. Such was, in my view, the new character, not only of the long wars which agitated Europe, from about the middle of the sixteenth to that of the seventeenth century, not even excepting the Thirty Years’ war, but of the yet more extended warfare which lasted from the above period to the peace of Utrecht. No doubt there was ambition of conquest in each case, and the more as the first religious and political favour declined; but it was an accessory and not a primary influence. These wars, like the further, bear the revolutionary impress, inasmuch as they related to the prolongation of the universal straggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. There was a further change in the character of the wars of the eighteenth century. in consequence of the humbler aim of the European states,—to maintain the hostile systems in their existing positions, in order to leave scope for the industrial development whose social importance was becoming more and more conspicuous. From that time. military activity was mainly subordinated to commercial interests, till the advent of the French Revolution; during which, with the exception of a great natural outbreak of war, the military spirit began to undergo to final transformation, which, as we shall see hereafter, marks more clearly than any other its doom of inevitable extinction.

The chief agency in accomplishing the changes that we have just seen to be connected with the decline of the military system was that